The Final Race: Washington Irving’s Heroic Journey to Complete "The Life of George Washington"

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One of the most famous authors of the nineteenth century, the great Washington Irving, was born on April 3, 1783 in New York City. The son of Scottish-English immigrants, Irving’s parents, like many of their fellow Americans, admired the greatest hero of the age, George Washington, and named their youngest child after him.

At the tender age of six, Irving got to meet his namesake in New York City, the first capital of the United States and home to President George Washington and the American government. As the first American president, Washington believed in the importance of making himself visible and accessible to his fellow citizens. Part of the way Washington did that was by sometimes walking through the streets of the city. It was during one of these strolls when young Irving and his Scottish maid encountered the president in a shop. “Please your honor,” said the maid as she pushed the small boy forward, “here’s a bairn [child] was named after you.”1 In a touching moment, Washington patted the head of the little boy who would go on to become one the greatest chroniclers of his legacy.

Like his namesake, Irving possessed perseverance and spirit, traits that enabled him to become the first American to make his living solely by writing, the first internationally prominent American author, and an immortal place in history as the “Founding Father of American Literature.” Writing in both the fiction and non-fiction realms, Irving produced everything from comic literature to biographies of Christopher Columbus and other famous figures, classic short stories such as “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” and much more. In the final act of his prolific writing career, Irving set out to write a biography of George Washington. As he told his brother Peter about the project, “It must be my great and crowning labor.”2

Because of his declining health, Irving knew that it was a race against time for him to finish his biography of Washington. As he wrote, “All I fear is to fail in health, and fail in completing this work at the same time. If I can only live to finish it, I would be willing to die the next moment."3 Irving did not allow his fragile health or his anxieties to stop him from conducing rigorous research for his project. He gathered valuable documents from Washington’s life, traveling to Washington D.C. to examine the archives in the U.S. State Department, visiting Washington’s home of Mount Vernon and other places connected with his life, and also spending time with Washington’s descendants, including his step-grandson and adopted son, George Washington Parke Custis. Fighting every step of the way, Irving took up his pen, battled through his pain and nerves, and ultimately finished the race. His Life of George Washington was published in multiple volumes between 1855 and 1859. He completed the fifth and final volume shortly before his death in November 1859. As Irving wrote in the preface to the last installment of his biography, “The present volume completes a work to which the author had long looked forward as the crowning effort of his literary career.”4

My set of the beautiful Easton Press edition of Washington Irving's Life of George Washington.

Washington Irving’s contemporaries agreed that he had produced something incredibly special in the final act of his journey as a writer. As the historian William H. Prescott wrote to Irving about his biography of Washington, “You have done with Washington just as I thought you would, and, instead of a cold, marble statue of a demigod, you have made him a being of flesh and blood, like ourselves - one with whom we can have sympathy. The general sentiment of the country has been too excitedly expressed for you to doubt for a moment that this is the portrait of him which is to hold a permanent place in the national gallery.”5

Graced by his interaction with George Washington as a little boy, Irving had done right by his namesake, drawing upon his remaining strength in the twilight of his life to chronicle the story of America’s greatest hero and to preserve his legacy for generations to come. To this day, we remain the beneficiaries of Irving’s contributions to Washington’s legacy and to American life.

Notes:

1. Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life (Penguin Books, 2011), 584.

2. Washington Irving and Charles Neider, George Washington: A Biography (Da Capo Press, 1994), xxx.

3. Irving and Neider, xxxi.

4. Irving and Neider, xxxviii.

5. Irving and Neider, xxxiv.

Bibliography:

Chernow, Ron. Washington: A Life. Penguin Books, 2011.

Ferraro, William M. “Remembering Washington Irving’s Life of George Washington.” Remembering Washington Irving’s Life of George Washington, The Washington Papers at the University of Virginia, washingtonpapers.org/remembering-washington-irvings-life-of-george-washington/.

Irving, Washington, and Charles Neider. George Washington: A Biography. Da Capo Press, 1994.

Washington Irving | George Washington’s Mount Vernon, www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/washington-irving.