Washington Irving, America's first successful professional man of letters, was an essayist, humorist, historian, literary critic, antiquarian scholar, magazine journalist, and short-story writer. In addition, he wrote charming, observant travel pieces. The variety of Irving's accomplishments as a writer stem from his wide reading, for he often chose to try his hand at what he read. Like most travelers, Irving wrote about the places and people he experienced, but his responses were extraordinarily literary. He often reflected on places associated with famous writers, parading his extensive reading in "learned" quotations from and allusions to the reactions of his models,

Because of his penchant for imitation, Irving in his travel writing often loses freshness and becomes clichéd. British author William Hazlitt criticized him in The Spirit of the Age (1825) for producing "literary anachronisms": "He comes to England for the first time, and being on the spot, fancies...