Life of Washington by Washington Irving - May 01, 2015

The author of Rip van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow should need no introduction. FOX TV is in the 3rd season of a TV version of Sleepy Hollow and Irving's other books still sell well. Still, few admirers of the founding fathers are aware the Irving's crowning literary achievement was the 5 volume biography of his namesake George Washington. Irving approached his project after putting it off for nearly 30 years while traveling and writing internationally.

In 1841 when he arrived back to his beloved home of Sunnyside NY, Irving set to work gathering materials for the task and was not content to write of Washington's amazing, 1776 retreats across nearby Long Island, Manhattan, White Plains and New Jersey's Palisades until he had surveyed the sites, personally. He spent month after month at the State Department building in Washington D.C., pouring over all the available correspondence of his subject. This after he had made a pilgrimage to Washington's ancestral home of Sulgrave Manor, England. This is the kind of detail and inspiration a storyteller seeks in biographies while a historian would be content with the literary and rhetorical record of his subject.

The results of this effort and Irving's skill in crafting the story were immediate. The famous 19th century historian George Bancroft could not contain his praise for Irving's Life. "[Y]ou have the peculiarity of writing from the heart, enchaining sympathy as well as commanding confidence; the happy magic that makes scenes, events, and personal anecdotes present themselves to you at your bidding."

Modern readers are going to become acquainted with a thrilling portrait of George Washington that has been largely lost to the mists of time. Now, for the first time, this magnificent work has been fully digitized, corrected and reformatted for modern readers by Mike Church and Founding Father Films Publishing.

How Washington Irving's Life of Washington was restored

Church's team used a combination of existing scans of the 1870 edition, performed some scans on their own, then converted the scans to text. From there, the tedious, 9 month long editing process began. Over 15,000 characters no longer used in publishing had to be manually converted to their modern versions. The illustrations used in 1870, that could be found in digital form today, were nearly all not fit for printing and had to be touched and re-touched up. Lastly, Church's team meticulously poured over dozens of abridged chapters, restoring some to their original long form while clarifying others.