Washington Irving writes the Prophet's biography

One of America's first literary celebrities completes Mahomet and His Successors, a two-volume life of the Prophet Muhammad, written for a general American readership a decade before the Civil War.

Irving had lived in the Alhambra itself while writing Tales of the Alhambra (1832), which romanticized Muslim Spain for generations of American readers. He began his notes on Muhammad's life in 1827 while researching his biography of Columbus.