globe, who reads an American book? or goes to an American play?
or looks at an American picture or statue?"

Sydney Smith's question "Who reads an American book?" has
outlived all of his own clever volumes. Even while he was asking
it, London was eagerly reading Irving's "Sketch Book." In 1821
came Fenimore Cooper's Spy and Bryant's "Poems," and by 1826,
when Webster was announcing in his rolling orotund that Adams and
Jefferson were no more, the London and Paris booksellers were
covering their stalls with Cooper's "The Last of the Mohicans."
Irving, Cooper, and Bryant are thus the pioneers in a new phase
of American literary activity, often called, for convenience in
labeling, the Knickerbocker Group because of the identification
of these men with New York. And close behind these leaders come a
younger company, destined likewise, in the shy boyish words of
Hawthorne, one of the number, "to write books that would be read
in England." For by 1826 Hawthorne and Longfellow were out of
college and were trying to learn to write. Ticknor, Prescott, and
Bancroft, somewhat older men, were settling to their great tasks.
Emerson was entering upon his duties as a minister. Edgar Allan
Poe, at that University of Virginia which Jefferson had just
founded, was doubtless revising "Tamerlane and Other Poems" which
he was to publish in Boston in the following year. Holmes was a
Harvard undergraduate. Garrison had just printed Whittier's first
published poem in the Newburyport "Free Press." Walt Whitman was
a barefooted boy on Long Island, and Lowell, likewise seven years
of age, was watching the birds in the treetops of Elmwood. But it
was Washington Irving who showed all of these men that nineteenth
century England would be interested in American books.