America, observers often note, is a young nation. This year, after all, marks only the two-hundred and fiftieth anniversary of our independence—a blink of the eye in the life of Europe’s ancient civilizations. And yet American culture is just as haunted by ghosts as that of the Old World. Tales of spectral horror, piercing the thin veil between this world and the next, remain a popular genre among Americans to this day, from the grim stories of Edgar Allan Poe and the ornate nightmares of Southern Gothic to the supernatural thrillers still dominating the box office.
We owe this predilection for the gothic, at least in part, to the man who deserves to be remembered as the founder of American literature: Washington Irving. Inspired by the Romantic movement he encountered in his travels abroad, especially the work of Sir Walter Scott, he sought out the features of American histories and landscapes that mark our place in the eternal contract of the “dead, living, and unborn.” Irving’s most enduring success on this front is 1820’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” one of the greatest American ghost stories ever written.
There is a reason “Sleepy Hollow” remains so thoroughly anthologized and adapted over 200 years since its publication. It has both delightful spooks and humor aplenty, but it is also an early expression of American identity. Set in 1790, it is haunted by the bloody legacy of the American Revolution. The Hudson River Valley environs where it takes place were the site of some of the bloodiest battles in the war, including bitter backwoods fighting between Tory and Patriot neighbors divided over the cause. Ichabod Crane’s flight from the Headless Horseman on Halloween night is more than a thrill ride; the story was Irving’s way of exploring how the ghosts of history shape how we see the world around us.
Before Irving, many questioned whether America would ever have a great literature. The funereal Federalist Fisher Ames, for example, held that the infant republic would never achieve the necessary maturity. “Shall we match Joel Barlow against Homer or Hesiod?” he asked in an 1804 essay, “Can Thomas Paine contend against Plato?” Ames believed that democratic decadence would discourage the literary arts and limit the nation’s imagination. He feared that a progressive passion for newness and innovation would lend culture a sense of impermanence.
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