Washington Irving (1783-1859) was an American writer best known for his short stories "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle". This is a biography of Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774), an Anglo-Irish writer, poet, and physician known for his novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), his pastoral poem The Deserted Village (1770), and his plays The Good-Natur'd Man (1768) and She Stoops to Conquer (1771).