Washington Irving and the Knickerbocker Group

Ill
WASHINGTON IRVING AND THE KNICKER-
BOCKER GROUP

AMERICAN LITERATURE, a transplantation,
. originated not in the usual manner of national litera-
tures, in ritual and oral recitation of ethnic legends, but in
prose, much of it controversial.

Seventeenth century American literature was pre-
dominantly theological, that of the eighteenth century
primarily political; not a scientific analysis, for Michael
Wigglesworth and Ann Bradstreet wrote verse in the seven-
teenth century; Jonathan Edwards composed his powerful
theological-philosophical discourses in the eighteenth cen-
tury ; and toward the end of that same century several Amer-
ican men and women wrote fiction. Not before the nineteenth
century did Americans attempt systematically creative litera-
ture as a fine art, in the Knickerbocker group, including
Irving, Cooper, Bryant, Halleck, Drake, Paulding and others.

Geographically, American writing began in New Eng-
land, with offshoots in Virginia, shifted to Pennsylvania,
home of Franklin, thence to New York (the Knicker-
bockers), thence to New England, centers in Hartford, Bos-
ton, Salem, Cambridge, Concord. From New England the
center oscillated back to New York, which became the capi-
tal of business, including the publishing business, and ab-
sorbed authors, to the detriment of some whose local burnish
was bruised by alien contacts.

We elders remember when the Middle West, Chicago and
Indianapolis, began to challenge the supremacy of New
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