| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to JAH online. About 208 words from this article are provided below; about 371 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the Organization of American Historians, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a member of the Organization of American Historians, you can:: • Join the OAH and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the Journal of American History.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two-hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the Journal of American History (86.1-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the Journal of American History.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving. By Andrew Burstein. (New York: Basic, 2007. x, 420 pp. $27.50, ISBN 978-0-465-00853-7.)

As a biographer of one of the first great American biographers, Andrew Burstein knows better than most the difficulty of the art. His biography of Washington Irving, The Original Knickerbocker, not only must conquer that complexity but also the particular challenges Irving poses as subject: Irving presents such a strange amalgam of the extraordinary and the banal in his life. While his associates were prominent and his travels wide and various, he was first and foremost a man of letters, someone who occupied himself with the prosaic business of reading and writing. Thus, although Burstein's biography locates Irving within his exciting historical moment and his romantic habitations, what he often reveals is Irving's relative isolation from them. Consequentially, while we might imagine that tracking Washington Irving's paths through the notable persons and landscapes of the United States and Europe would be a tour as fascinating as the ones that Irving himself provides, instead we feel, much the way an early critic of Irving's own Tales of Traveller does, as if Irving had not "stirr[ed] out of a garret in London" (p. 178).

. . .

There are about 371 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.