Washington Irving proved all the people in Europe and England who felt that America would never develop a literary voice of its own wrong. He was the youngest and not-too-well-educated son of a hardware importer and his amiable wife. Irving was from New York City and had a special talent for inventing comic fictional nararators. In fact, it was not until the age of fifty that he signed his actual name to one of his works. His first was Jonathan Oldstyle Gent who represented a caricature of those British writers who could not accept the simple values of the new nation. Next, he invented a narrator named named Diedrich Knickerbocker who authored a book called A History of New York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty. This fake and comical history, in which American past is ridiculed, established Washington Irving as...