Washington Irving, who was born in New York City and is regarded as the United States' first successful professional man of letters,[51] spent many years in Birmingham after his first visit to the town in 1815, living with his sister and her husband in Ladywood, the Jewellery Quarter and Edgbaston.[52] His best-known works – the short stories "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle" – were both written in Birmingham,[53] as was his first and best-known novel Bracebridge Hall of 1821, whose setting was loosely based on Birmingham's Aston Hall.[54] Many of his later works, including Tales of the Alhambra and Mahomet and His Successors, were completed in Birmingham after being drafted on his wider European travels.[52] Thomas Adolphus Trollope worked as a schoolteacher in Birmingham before establishing himself as a successful novelist, journalist and travel writer and moving to Florence in Italy, where his house became a magnet for British literary figures such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.[55] Isabella Varley Banks was born in Manchester and is best known for her 1876 novel The Manchester Man, but her career as a novelist started only after she moved to Birmingham in 1846 after marrying local journalist, poet and playwright George Linnaeus Banks.[56] Her twelve novels were set in a variety of locations including Birmingham, Yorkshire, Wiltshire, Durham, Chester, and Manchester; each book being particularly notable for its faithful reproduction of local dialect and pronunciation.[57] West Bromwich-born David Christie Murray received his training as a writer as a journalist under George Dawson on the Birmingham Daily Post.[58] Several of his novels were set in Birmingham including A Rising Star of 1894 – the story of a Birmingham reporter with literary aspirations[59] – with many more set in surrounding areas such as the Black Country and Cannock Chase.[60]