The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus

A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus is a biographical account of Christopher Columbus. It is one of the first examples of American historical fiction and one of several attempts at national myth-making undertaken by American writers and poets of the 19th century. A History was written by Washington Irving in 1828, published in four volumes in Britain and in three volumes in the United States. The work was the most popular biographical account of Columbus in the English-speaking world until the publication of Samuel Eliot Morison's biography Admiral of the Ocean Sea in 1942