Washington Irving was once adored by Dickens, Byron, and Mary Shelley (who pursued him by letter), and his biographies of Columbus and Washington were bestsellers. Today he survives on two stories — “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Philip Lopate’s new book, A Washington Irving Sketch Book (Princeton, 2026), is the tribute of one self-described minor writer to another: Irving, Lopate says, “was always preparing himself to be forgotten.”
Robert Minto’s review draws the line between the two writers:
- Irving the professional: pseudonymous personae (Diedrich Knickerbocker, Geoffrey Crayon), a workhorse who “learned to work without stint,” and hackwork — a corporate hagiography for John Jacob Astor, a sentimental biography of a dead child poet
- The generosity: in 1839 Irving stepped aside from his years-in-preparation history of the Spanish conquest of Mexico so the lesser-known William H. Prescott could write it — and donated his notes
- Lopate the reverse: a lifelong champion of the personal essay who wrote his most impersonal book about the most personable of American writers, studding it with page-long block quotes
- The contrast with Notes on Sontag (2009): writing against his philosophical enemy, Lopate crackles; writing about his model, he goes bland
Minto’s diagnosis: what Lopate admires in Irving is the “special brazenness” of the professional hack — a vocation his own temperament refused. The book’s one personal aside tells the story: invited to write for the Stock Exchange’s annual report, Lopate wrote about the young “runners,” the workers behind the scenes, and was rejected.
At eighty-two, this may be Lopate’s final book. Minto leaves it with “sneaking disappointment” — and a sharp argument that writers are most alive writing against their enemies, not their idols.