About Washington Irving
Washington Irving was an American writer born in New York in 1783. He liked to bring humour into strange stories, setting some of them in the Hudson River valley in New York State.
His collection The Sketch Book, published in 1819 and 1820, brought him fame in the United States and Europe. Irving played with the way stories are told: he invented narrators and sometimes presented a story as an old account passed from one person to another.
He spent many years in Europe and also represented the United States as a diplomat in Spain. Later, he returned to the Hudson, continuing his writing at his home, Sunnyside.