Best known for his short stories, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip van Winkle, Washington Irving was a prolific essayist, biographer, and historian, as well as a member of the American diplomatic staff. The three volumes of his Journals provide detailed accounts of Irving's travels, experiences, and observations, creating an enlightening backdrop to both his literary and historical works. Noteworthy for his descriptions of his travels in Europe, of particular interest is Irving's perspective on 19th century American culture and politics, including his beloved New York, as well as his commentary on the treatment of Native Americans and their culture. vol. 3 of 3

The first English edition was issued simultaneously with the American. John Jacob Astor persuaded Irving to undertake this story of his ill-fated enterprise at the mouth of the Columbia River in 1834. Irving had the use of all of Astor's notes and manuscripts, as well as the original journals of such key participants as Robert Stuart, Wilson Price Hunt, and Ramsey Crooks. The resulting work is a classic - an indispensable resource for students of the American West. It is considered to be the "classic account of the first American attempt at settlement on the Pacific coast,1811--initial action towards substantiating our claim to Oregon--including the earliest extended relation of Wilson P. Hunt's overland expedition from St. Louis to that settlement." Howes.

Brian Jay Jones crafts a deft biography of the author of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip van Winkle”: quintessential New Yorker, presidential confidant, diplomat, lawyer, and fascinating charmer. The first American writer to make his pen his primary means of support, Washington Irving rocketed to fame at the age of twenty-six. In 1809 he published A History of New York under the pseudonym Diedrich Knickerbocker, to great acclaim. The public’s appetite for all things Irving was insatiable; his name alone guaranteed sales. At the time, he was one of the most famous men in the world, a friend of Dickens, Hawthorne, and Longfellow, as well as Astor, van Buren, and Madison. But his sparkling public persona was only one side of this gentleman author. In brilliant, meticulous strokes, Brian Jay Jones renders Washington Irving in all his flawed splendor—someone who fretted about money and employment, suffered from writer’s block, and doggedly cultivated his reputation. Jones offers a very human portrait of the often contrasting public and private lives of this true American original.

In the Fall of 1832 Washington Irving took part in what he called "a month foray beyond the outposts of human habitation, into the wilderness of the Far West." As was his habit, Irving kept a memorandum book, which he later expanded into A Tour on the Prairies, a real-life Western adventure in the third decade of the nineteenth century. His account is fresh and clear. He saw and makes his readers see the frontiersmen, the trappers, the Indians, and the troopers as they actually were in the 1830s.

In this graphic retelling, the new schoolmaster of Tarrytown, Ichabod Crane, chooses to ignore the stories of a headless ghost, and cross Sleepy Hollow to visit the beautiful Katrina.