Irving, Washington - Alice Hiller (essay date 1997)

Alice Hiller (essay date 1997)

SOURCE: “‘An Avenue to Some Degree of Profit and Reputation’: The Sketch Book as Washington Irving's entrée and Undoing,” Journal of American Studies, Vol. 31, No. 2, August, 1997, pp. 275-93.

[In the following essay, Hiller traces the events which influenced The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Grayon, Gent., arguing that with this work, Irving lost his distinctive voice.]

“I have,” confided Washington Irving to his friend and effective literary agent Henry Brevoort, “by patient & persevering labour of my most uncertain pen, & by catching the gleams of sunshine in my cloudy mind, managed to open to myself an avenue to 1 The “avenue” in question was The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.—America's first internationally acclaimed work of literature—which, by March 1821, had become a direct route to respectability...

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