Washington Irving

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With quick eye, ready tongue, and alert recognition of absurdities, Washington Irving sits quietly at both ends of the American literary spectrum -- an expatriate seeking reverently in Europe for sources of culture, but most effective in realizing American characters enmeshed in American ideals; and at the same time a native myth-maker who wove indigenous lore into comic tales which became fables. His country's first, but not her best, romantic historian; an early, but unsatisfying, impressionistic biographer; an exotic local colorist; a mildly boisterous, thigh-slapping, sidesplitting rural humorist;, a comic realist, a caricaturist. - p. 44.