"I seek only to blow a flute accompaniment in the national concert, and leave others to play the fiddle & frenchhorn," Washington Irving said in an 1819 letter. While his flute music for a time was a dominant strain, it still remains discernible in the national concert. Rip Van Winkle is part of American mythology, and Irving's legend of Sleepy Hollow is still read. There continues to be an audience, too, for the rest of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819-1820), Diedrich Knickerbocker's A History of New-York (1809), The Alhambra (1832), and Irving's Life of George Washington (1855- 1859). Other works such as Tales of a Traveller (1824), with its memorable story of "The Devil and Tom Walker," Astoria (1836), and The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828) remain appealing.

In his time, as Eugene Current-García notes in his 1973 essay in Studies in Short Fiction, Irving set "the pattern for the...