Part 1 of Essay
Washington Irving was born on April 3, 1783 in Tarrytown, New York. His father was a merchant and owned an import business. Irving had literary influences early in his life. He was friends with Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Charles Dickens. Washington Irving had no formal schooling. Instead, he taught himse ....

Part 2 of Essay
.... and Tom Walker is that nature proves to be a problem to the characters. In The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, the hollow is the setting for fear in Icabod's tall tales. Irving reflected on the dark setting many times in this story. "The swamp was thickly grown with great gloomy pines and hemlocks." (Washington Irving. p. 57) In The Devil and Tom Walker, the setting is portrayed in the same dark manner. It is the forest where Tom Walker meets the Devil. Another similarity in both of the "short stories" is that a s ....