SOURCE: Current-Garcia, Eugene. “Irving Sets the Pattern.” In The American Short Story before 1850: A Critical History, pp. 25-41. Boston: Twayne, 1985.

In the following excerpt, Current-Garcia focuses on the tales and sketches of Washington Irving, suggesting that while Irving “did not actually invent the short story, he set the pattern for the artistic re-creation of common experience in short fictional form” that was later employed and improved by Poe and Hawthorne.

Did the American short story actually begin “in 1819 with Washington Irving,”¹ as Pattee flatly asserts, or did Irving merely point the way toward its origin in the three collections of short prose narratives that made him famous in the 1820s? When he discovered with The Sketch Book that he “could turn out regularly books which readers were willing to buy regularly,”² his professional status was assured. Yet it may be argued that the urge to exploit the bonanza...