David Stephens

Washington Irving is often referred to as the Father of American literature due to the success that he achieved with his writings. He is the first American writer to primarily make his living through is creative works, which would be crucial in urging on future greats like Poe. 

He is best known for his stories of  Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. He brings a dark and mysterious style of writing that wasn’t really prevalent before in America, but would eventually inspire some of the best pieces of Gothic and Mystery literature. I think that his writing style was very important because of how drastic of a change it was from the norm, which was a lot of religious poetry, and journals about peoples travels. There were not a lot of actual fleshed out stories during that time and Irving managed to break the mold with something great. 

“The Father of American Literature” is an odd fit for Irving, being that he was not really into the normal American Life. Some of his early works were comical and satirical jabs at New Your society.  In “Rip Van Winkle” we see the idea that the Revolution was a change from a kind of small and organized freedom “minus the English sticking their noses into everything) to a political Babel. So in retrospect, his works were not just the beginning of a great new style of storytelling and a spark for creative writers to pursue their passion as a job, but also a look at how the American culture and society changed after the Revolution and the different effects that it had on different people.