University of Tulsa's Burstein, best known for his studies of Thomas Jefferson (Jefferson's Secrets
), offers a serviceable biography of another early American celebrity: Washington Irving, whom Burstein credits with creating a national literature and with helping persuade Europeans that America wasn't full of simpletons and savages. Burstein speculates about Irving's inner life: was he gay? Possibly, but Burstein thinks it more likely the writer was simply a bachelor, a respectable role in his time and place. Burstein also helpfully recreates early 19th-century New York, a port city with a population in the tens of thousands. He offers judicious literary analysis, teasing out the roles history and memory play in Irving's work. But Burstein's most significant contribution comes in situating Irving's literary work in its larger social and political context. For example, he argues that Irving's satirical and immensely popular A History of New York
(1809)—better known as Knickerbocker's History
—established the city as a place with a literary future, and he reads Rip Van Winkle
as a symbol of early 19th-century America's energetic, pioneering, adolescent charm. Overall, this is an insightful if not inspiring addition to the cultural history of pre–Civil War America. 16 pages of b&w photos. (Mar.)
