The Sketch Book

WASHINGTON IRVING (1783-1859), was born in New York, the son of a wealthy British merchant who had sided with the rebels in the Revolution. After training as a lawyer, he turned into a literary career, writing for various newspapers. He was a diplomatic attaché in Spain (1826-1829) and a secretary to the US legation in London (1829-1832). Washington Irving arrived in New York, after seventeen years abroad, on May 21, 1832. That September, he accompanied the U.S. Commissioner on Indian Affairs, Henry Leavitt Ellsworth, along with companions Charles La Trobe and Count Albert-Alexandre de Pourtales, on a surveying mission deep in Indian Territory. In 1842, after an endorsement from Secretary of State Daniel Webster, President John Tyler appointed Irving as Minister to Spain. . His official duties as Spanish Minister also involved negotiating American trade interests with Cuba and following the Spanish parliament's debates over slave trade.
William Makepeace Thackeray was the first to refer to Irving as the "ambassador whom the New World of Letters sent to the Old".
“The Sketch Book” (1820). Essays and tales under the pseudonym “Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.” Published serially in the US and in book form in England. This work contains sketches of English life, on American subjects, and adaptations of German folk-tales.