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Literary Giant: Washington Irving
Introduction
In spite of Irving's seventeen years in Europe, his search for native themes led him to contribute importantly to portraiture of the American Indian. Although his firsthand observation of Indians was limited, he was liberated ohm the pioneer's need to justify Indian displacement. He was able to view Indians sympathetically, bringing the perspective of a worldly man to questions of civilization and savagery.
In his first book, A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Dietrich Knickerbockers (1809), he satirizes pretentious historians and wittily deflates some shibboleths of American history. In Chapter Five Dietrich Knickerbockers pretends to justify the rights of European colonists to the land they "discovered." He succeeds, of course, in revealing the falsity and injustice of their claims. At the end of the chapter, Irving offers a Swift Ian summary of colonization; this passage is reprinted below.
In a more straightforward way, but not more devastatingly, Irving takes up the topic of displaced Indians again in two sketches added to The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. in 1820. In "Traits of Indian Character," Irving expresses succinctly that sympathy for wronged Indians implied in Knickerbockers History:
It has been the lot of the unfortunate aborigines of America, in the early periods of colonization, to be doubly wronged by the white men. They have been dispossessed of their hereditary possessions by mercenary and frequently wanton warfare,
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