SOURCE: “‘An Avenue to Some Degree of Profit and Reputation’: The Sketch Book as Washington Irving's entrée and Undoing,” Journal of American Studies, Vol. 31, No. 2, August, 1997, pp. 275-93.

In the following essay, Hiller traces the events which influenced The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Grayon, Gent., arguing that with this work, Irving lost his distinctive voice.

“I have,” confided Washington Irving to his friend and effective literary agent Henry Brevoort, “by patient & persevering labour of my most uncertain pen, & by catching the gleams of sunshine in my cloudy mind, managed to open to myself an avenue to 1

The “avenue” in question was The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.—America's first internationally acclaimed work of literature—which, by March 1821, had become a direct route to respectability and the British establishment, opening to Irving the world of stately homes and their real-life avenues, previously only glimpsed from afar. Pieced...