time, he was unfairly labeled as a mere imitator of Goldsmith and Addison, two
writers whose graceful style certainly infl uenced him, or criticized for lifting his plots
from German folk stories. Such criticism, however, fails to recognize the amount of
inventiveness demonstrated in the masterpieces, “ Rip Van Winkle ” and “ The Legend
of Sleepy Hollow. ” Although European folk stories may have provided him with some
elements of plot, Irving was the fi rst to bring the American landscape to life in works
of fi ction, giving the short story a specifi city and defi niteness of locale and ultimately
making it the dominant form for expressions of literary regionalism in the United
States. Since Irving, the short story has been the primary mode by which American
authors defi ne and express the values of a particular culture in a specifi c time and
place. In their fi delity to the qualities of a certain place and their expressions of nos-
talgia for a simpler and easier past, these two great Knickerbocker tales created the
literary mode that came to be called “ local color ” and dominated American short
fi ction for most of the nineteenth century.
Irving ’ s achievement in giving a fi ctional reality to the American landscape is all
the more remarkable considering that the bulk of The Sketch Book consists of travel
writing about England, not the United States. The idea of representing place with
meticulous care and sometimes even loving devotion marks both Irving
’ s travel
writing and his best short fi ction. In his time, travel writers often explicitly expressed
their belief in the theory of association, which proclaimed that natural scenes were
inherently without meaning, and that only associations with historical or literary
connections could provide real signifi cance to the landscape. Irving ’ s emphasis on
setting was thus part of a conscious and largely successful effort to endow a portion
of his native terrain, the Catskill Mountains, with the kind of value that association
with powerful works of literature can provide (Bendixen 108 – 9). In the process, Irving
certainly did a service to the tourist industry, which would use his fi ction to market
the region, but his placement of these vivid American stories in a book about England
served other, less commercial purposes. The vitality of these American scenes provides
an important counterpoint to the quieter, duller, more peaceful scenes of rural England
that Irving likes to emphasize. Although he is often accused of being an anglophile,
his Knickerbocker stories both claim a space for American scenes on the map of serious
Emergence and Development
5
literature and also emphasize the exceptional vigor and energy that mark democratic
life. Indeed, his best fi ction relies on a discovery and exploration of the special quali-
ties that distinguish American life, demonstrating the capacity of the short story to
move beyond the narrow moralizing that had characterized earlier attempts at prose
fi ction into a new kind of national myth making.
Irving freed American prose fi ction from the didactic, from the need to preach a
pointed moral, and endowed it with a rich playfulness that suggested new ways of
achieving the kind of literary nationalism that Americans had been calling for since
their revolution. Rip Van Winkle, Ichabod Crane, and Brom Bones are the fi rst
memorable characters in American fi ction, and their adventures engage them directly,
if comically, in a confrontation with fundamental questions about the meaning of
identity in this new world. In the act of fl eeing his nagging wife, Rip retreats into
the countryside, into the bounties of nature where he can avoid the demands of
women, work, and civilization, thus establishing the pattern that marks many impor-
tant male characters in American fi ction, and foreshadowing a range of fi gures that
includes Huck Finn ’ s lighting out for the territory and Hemingway ’ s Nick Adams ’ s
complex engagement with the Big Two - Hearted River. During his famous nap of
twenty years, Rip winds up sleeping through the entire American Revolution, and
returns home to a town that has been transformed from a sleepy Dutch village into
a busier, more active community engaged in arguments about a local election. Feeling
out of place in this new democracy, Rip momentarily loses his sense of identity, but
ultimately recovers it, or perhaps more accurately, recreates it by fi nding a role in this
strange new world as a storyteller. Thus, Irving demonstrates how a new kind of
highly developed short fi ction can probe the complexities, both comic and tragic,
entailed in citizenship in a new democratic society.
His engagement with issues of national identity, with the changing demands of a
democratic society, with the possibilities entailed in a society marked by multiplicity
and fl uidity, and with the confl icting demands of agrarian versus commercial values
also forms the foundation of “ The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. ” As the sturdy Brom
Bones competes with the ambitious schoolteacher, Ichabod Crane, for the love of
Katrina Van Tassel, Irving emphasizes two underlying sets of values that are inher-
ently in confl ict. Brom Bones and the Van Tassels stand for an easy contentment based
on a settled agricultural existence rooted in general prosperity and life in nature. Crane
represents a set of values that are more abstract, more commercial, more ambitious,
and ultimately more unnatural. Just as the virtues of the Van Tassels ’ agrarian way
of life are summed up in the lengthy and lush description of their farm, the limita-
tions of Crane are defi ned for us initially by the depiction of his small and shabby
schoolhouse, which is shown clearly as a place to imprison young spirits rather than
develop the intellect. The contrast between easy Dutch contentment and bustling
New England ambition seems to refl ect regional differences, but Irving ’ s depiction of
Crane ’ s gluttonous lust for Katrina and the family land reveal broader concerns. Crane
may be a schoolteacher from New England, but he fantasizes about becoming a land
speculator who will convert the Van Tassel estate into cash to buy up the western
6
Alfred Bendixen
wilderness, which he then plans to transform through endless real estate schemes, and
he will end up becoming the most dreaded of American creatures, a politician. In
tracing the career of Ichabod Crane, Irving shows us a fl uid society in which identity
may be based more on aspiration and ambition (for good or bad) than on accidents of
birth, and in which the development of a meaningful national identity will be based
on the ways in which competing values are resolved. What is at stake in “ The Legend
of Sleepy Hollow ” and the best of Irving ’ s stories is the future of America.
Irving employed a graceful style that seemed to refuse to take itself or anything
too seriously while raising fundamental questions about the meaning of American
democracy. His artistry rests on his understanding of the importance of narrative point
of view and the value of adopting a specifi c narrative persona , whether that be Geoffrey
Crayon, Gentleman, or Dietrich Knickerbocker, the sly chronicler of Dutch New
York. He is almost certainly the fi rst writer of short fi ction to understand and to
articulate the degree to which the manner of telling would always have to be at least
as important as the subject matter of the story. In fact, one of his letters indicates
that he was clearly a conscious artist who was able to articulate his achievement with
rare precision:
I fancy much of what I value myself upon in writing escapes the observation of the great
mass of my readers, who are intent more upon the story than the way it is told. For my
part, I consider a story merely as a frame on which to stretch my materials. It is the
play of thought, and sentiment, and language; the weaving in character, lightly, yet
expressively delineated; the familiar and faithful exhibition of scenes of common life;
and the half - concealed vein of humour that is often playing through the whole – these
are among what I aim at, and upon which I felicitate myself in proportion as I think I
succeed. ( Letters to Brevoort II. 185 – 6)
In the same letter, he goes on to argue that the long tale can get away with much
dull writing because the author can count on plot and character to keep the reader
turning the pages, but short fi ction requires a continued commitment to artistry:
The author must be continually piquant; woe to him if he makes an awkward sentence
or writes a stupid page; the critics are sure to pounce upon it. Yet if he succeed, the
very variety and piquancy of his writings – nay, their very brevity, make them frequently
recurred to, and when the mere interest of the story is exhausted, he begins to get credit
for his touches of pathos or humor; his points of wit or turns of language. ” ( Letters to
Brevoort . II. 187)
The short story as Irving fashioned it was clearly a work of conscious literary artistry
with vivid characters, a carefully delineated setting, and a mastery of stylistic nuance,
and it was also a form ideally suited for the exploration of the meaning of democratic
life in the newly formed United States. Nevertheless, Irving ’ s short stories certainly
did not represent the fi nal word in this new genre. In what remains one of the most
perceptive studies of his contribution to the development of American writing, Fred
Emergence and Development
7
Lewis Pattee chastises Irving for a lack of masculine vigor and notes that the American
short story would come to rely less on the detailed descriptive writing that Irving
relished and more on dialogue and the dramatic presentation of incident.
The development of the short story was limited by one major fact: there really was
almost no market for it that would enable a writer to win both a critical reputation
and a signifi cant livelihood, a fact that clearly struck the writers who tried to follow
the path that Irving had opened. Irving ’ s short stories were really not designed to
stand alone as separate literary artifacts with an audience and market of their own;
they were meant to be appreciated aesthetically and marketed fi nancially as compo-
nents of a larger work. Irving ’ s strategy for The Sketch Book involved issuing a series
of parts, each of which would offer a blend of fi ction and familiar essays, balancing
sentiment and comedy. The comedy of the two Knickerbocker tales serves to balance
and play off the sentiment of the other selections, sometimes in intriguing ways. Thus,
the comic story of a man fl eeing his nagging wife, “ Rip Van Winkle, ” is placed
directly next to a sentimental piece, “ The Wife, ” which assures the reader that a loyal
and loving wife is the most precious thing any man can possess. These stories were
meant to exist within a larger context established by other works, not as stand - alone
pieces, and to be marketed as contributions to a work that relied on a variety of forms
and moods. Irving attempted to bring out a collection of short stories without any of
the supporting apparatus provided by familiar essays and travel writing with Tales of
a Traveler (1824), which contains two of his most important stories, “ The Adventure
of the German Student ” and “ The Devil and Tom Walker, ” but critics responded
harshly. After the critical failure of that book, most of Irving
’
s literary energy
went to the production of works of creative non - fi ction, including travel books, his-
tories, and immensely popular biographies of Christopher Columbus and George
Washington. Although almost completely neglected by critics and scholars,
The
Alhambra (1832), which is generally described as a Spanish Sketch Book, contains
some of his fi nest writing.
Irving ’ s success certainly encouraged other Americans to explore the possibilities
of short fi ction, and some of these works from the 1820s and 1830s probably merit
more consideration from scholars. Perhaps the most notable attempt to build on
Irving ’ s skillful use of the supernatural for national myth making may be found in
the three stories William Austin wrote about “ Peter Rugg, the Missing Man ” (1824 –
6). Austin places the old Flying Dutchman story into a new American context
which vividly portrays the American landscape as a place in which one can become
irretrievably lost. James Kirke Paulding, with whom Irving had collaborated on the
Salmagundi papers (1807 – 8), attempted to work in virtually every genre available and
managed to produce some signifi cant pieces of short fi ction, particularly his attempt
to create a specifi cally American mythology in The Book of St. Nicholas (1836) and his
remarkable collection of democratic fairy tales for children, A Gift from Fairy Land
(1837). Many of his most interesting stories remained uncollected during his lifetime
and were not brought together into book form until his son, William I. Paulding,
edited A Book of Vagaries (1867). Some of William Cullen Bryant ’ s short stories also
8
Alfred Bendixen
deserve attention, especially his comic treatment of an encounter with the wilderness
and Native Americans in “ The Indian Spring ” (1828). Several women writers also
produced intriguing short stories that deal specifi cally with the position of women in
a democratic society, perhaps most notably Catherine Sedgwick ’ s “ Cacoethes Scribendi ”
(1830), Eliza Leslie ’ s “ Mrs. Washington Potts ” (1832), and the tales Lydia Maria
Child eventually collected in her volume, Fact and Fiction (1846). Other important
fi ction by both men and women may still remain buried in the pages of early American
periodicals.
These writers might have had more success with the short story if there had been
a market that made such writing profi table. The lack of an international copyright
agreement made it more profi table for American printers to pirate best - selling British
writers than to take a chance on an unknown American author who expected to be
paid for his or her work. The short story as a marketable commodity has always
depended on the availability of both periodical and book publication, and it took the
United States a long time to develop viable magazines with an interest in literature.
The history of American publishing in the early nineteenth century is fi lled with
failed attempts to establish signifi cant literary magazines, and the relatively small
number that survived for a time rarely paid very well. Furthermore, book publishers
were generally reluctant to produce collections of stories, deeming them inherently
unprofi table. Both Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne attempted to launch
their literary careers with collections of short stories, but had great diffi culty in fi nding
publishers for their fi rst projected books. The stories that were to comprise Poe ’ s Tales
of the Folio Club and Hawthorne ’ s Provincial Tales and The Story - Teller were instead
scattered in various publications and not collected until later and then in very differ-
ent arrangements from the authors ’ original plans. Hawthorne ’ s careful plans for his
fi rst volumes were discarded and the individual stories were simply lifted out of
context and published in magazines or The Token , one of the gift - books that publishers
discovered they could sell annually. The gift - books provided one of the few outlets
available to writers of short stories, but they paid poorly and usually published anony-
mously, which meant that they also added little to a young writer
’
s reputation.
Moreover, these very pretty volumes appeared designed as decorative gifts that were
suitable for gracing a parlor table; there was little in their appearance to suggest they
contained literary works meant to be taken seriously. Nevertheless, these annuals
published a number of writers whose importance is now fi rmly established, and The
Token had the distinction of providing the fi rst home for many of Hawthorne ’ s most
powerful stories.
If Irving merits credit as the inventor of the American story, then Hawthorne and
Poe surely deserve praise for solidifying its status as a work of art. They grounded the
short story more fi rmly in a clear commitment to narrative structure and plot, replac-
ing Irving ’ s genial rambling and lengthy descriptions with a fi rm sense of architec-
tural form. Furthermore, they added a startling psychological depth to the development
of character, employing a treatment of aberrational psychology in ways that trans-
formed the Gothic mode into an enduring part of the American short story tradition.
A Companion to the American Short Story Page 3