With these words, Washington Irving expresses the dilemma of every American artist in the nineteenth century. The Sketch-Book (1820-1) looks simultaneously towards audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, as Irving explores the uneasy relationship of an American writer to English literary traditions. He sketches a series of encounters with the cultural shrines of the parent nation, and in two brilliant experiments with tales transplanted from Europe creates the first classic American short stories, `Rip Van Winkle` and `The Legend of the Sleepy Hollow`.

The result was not only a hugely successful travel book; it exerted a strong formative influence on American writers from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe to Henry James, and is well worth rediscovery in its own right today.

Based on Irving`s final revision of his most popular work, this new edition includes comprehensive explanatory notes of The Sketch-Book`s sources for the modern reader. In her introduction, Susan Manning suggests that the author forged a new idiom, the `Literary Picturesque`, to accommodate and turn to advantage his dilemma of dual literary allegiances.