"When the pirates swarmed aboard the Matilda their countenances displayed the strongest lines of villainy and rapacity. They carried rusty cutlasses in their hands, and pistols and stilettos were stuck in their belts and waistbands."
Such is the description Washington Irving gives of his capture by Mediterranean pirates on his first trip to Europe in 1804. Fortunately his life was spared. Otherwise America would have been deprived of a great writer and diplomat—the biographer of Columbus and Washington, and the author of such beloved tales as Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
Few writers have lived more colorful lives than Washington Irving (1783-1859). Son of a New York City merchant, Irving was later "intimate with almost every famous person of the time...Sir Walter Scott, Dickens, Longfellow, Poe and Thackeray...six United States presidents, and a dozen kings and queens."
He moved freely in the court circles of England, Germany, and Spain, and during his three extended sojourns learned to know Europe as few Americans of his era did. Our minister to Spain in the 1840's, he was a brilliant diplomat, forwarding the peaceful aims of his own country while befriending little Queen Isabella, the constantly endangered twelve-year-old monarch.
Anya Seton as cosmopolitan as Washington Irving himself, has followed Irving's travels throughout Europe and America. In this distinguished and exciting biography of our first great man of letters, she captures the geniality and the genius of a fascinating American citizen.
—from the dust jacket
Most readers who open this book will know the name and something of the fame of Washington Irving. Perhaps they will have visited "Sunnyside," his charming retreat on the Hudson. At the very least they will have tasted the delights of his two most famous stories—Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
But how many young readers also know that Irving was once captured by pirates in the Mediterranean? That he was intimately acquainted with kings, queens, and presidents? Or that, besides being an excellent writer, he was one of the most accomplished American diplomats of his century?
In doing her extensive research for this perceptive life of Washington Irving, Anya Seton revisited many of Irving's European haunts, including the Alhambra in southern Spain, where for an enchanted interval Irving lived amid the magnificent ruins, bathed in the marble fountains, and collected some of the facts and fancies for his stories of The Alhambra and The Conquest of Granada.
This study of Irving brings back to life America's first internationally famous author—biographer of Mahomet, Columbus, Oliver Goldsmith, and George Washington, humorist and teller of unforgettable tales.
Like Irving's own volumes, this book concerning his life has the magic to re-create the flavor and excitement, the romance and the reality of another era.
Sterling North
General Editor
—from the book
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