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the opening sketch, “The Voyage,” Crayon’s passage across the Atlantic leaves him doubly detached from family and place. Crossing the Atlantic is like opening “a blank page in existence” that “severs” the chain of memories that otherwise would “[grapple] us to home” (p. 52). His arrival in Liverpool is no joyous return of a prodigal son to the land of his forefathers. It only deepens his isolation. While preparing to disembark from the ship, he witnesses a dying sailor being carried ashore and feels himself “a stranger in the land” (p. 57). The melancholy Irving evokes from Crayon’s situation as an aimless tourist suggests a feeling of placelessness often associated with American individualism. Crayon’s alienation is the other side of Emerson’s self-reliant assertion that “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist” (Emerson, The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 2, p. 29). The poignant detachment of Crayon’s point of view anticipates such first-person narrators as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Miles Coverdale, Herman Melville’s Ishmael, or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway. Yet it was Irving’s displacement from home that caused him to imagine Sleepy Hollow as an ideal “retreat, whither I might steal from the world and its distractions, and dream quietly away the remnant of a troubled life” (p. 163).

Two-thirds of The Sketch-Book is made up of observational essays that fall into the genre of travel literature. Only five of its “sketches” are recognizably what we would call short stories (if we include “The Wife” and “The Mutability of Literature” along with “Rip Van Winkle,” “The Spectre Bridegroom,” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”). Yet it is these few stories that make Irving an innovative artist whom some have called the inventor of the short story in America. As Fred Lewis Pattee observed, Irving “was the first prominent writer to strip the prose tale of its moral and didactic elements and to make of it a literary form solely for entertainment” (The Development of the American Short Story, p. 21). The short stories in The Sketch-Book are regularly interspersed among sketches of daily life and social customs in Great Britain and provide imaginative relief from what might otherwise become a mundane travel narrative. Irving actively pursued the commercialization of literature in his next two works as well, enlarging the fictional component of both Bracebridge Hall (1822) and Tales of a Traveller (1824). In Bracebridge Hall, he capitalized on the success of his descriptions of rural England, while at the same time pursuing his interest in prose fiction. The premise for Bracebridge Hall is simple. Geoffrey Crayon returns to the fictional manor he had described in some sections of The Sketch-Book to spend a few weeks there while preparations are being made for the marriage of Julia, “the daughter of a favorite college friend” of Simon Bracebridge. Like The Sketch-Book, a majority of Bracebridge Hall is made up of descriptions of the Hall and its environs and character sketches of the family, their guests, and the inhabitants of the local village. As the book proceeds, Irving regularly creates opportunities for characters to relate stories, the longest of which, “Dolph Heyliger,” Crayon presents as “a manuscript tale from the pen of my fellow-countryman, the late Mr. Diedrich Knickerbocker, the historian of New York” (p. 214).

Irving is doing more than simply filling out the pages of his book with an occasional story set in America. He is using the conventional genres that were popular with readers of magazines and gift books—the observational essay or character sketch written in a confessional mode—as a platform for staging stories mildly Gothic in tone and content. He would take this method a step further in Tales of a Traveller, the first of his collections in which fiction predominates over travel narrative. Divided into four books, Tales lacks the unity that a common setting gives to Bracebridge Hall, but Irving compensates for this by creating tale-telling contests, or by using frame-narratives to nest a story