Was this merely the "tall talk" then so characteristic of American oratory and soon to be satirized in Martin Chuzzlewit? Or was it prompted by a deep and true instinct for the significance of the vast changes that had come over American life since 1776? The external changes were familiar enough to Webster's auditors: the opening of seemingly illimitable territory through the Louisiana Purchase, the development of roads, canals, and manufactures; a rapid increase in wealth and population; a shifting of political power due to the rise of the new West--in a word, the evidences of irrepressible national energy. But this energy was inadequately expressed by the national literature. The more cultivated Americans were quite aware of this deficiency. It was confessed by the pessimistic Fisher Ames and by the ardent young men who in 1815 founded The North American Review. British critics in The Edinburgh and The Quarterly, commenting upon recent works of travel in America, pointed out the literary poverty of the American soil. Sydney Smith, by no means the most offensive of these critics, declared in 1820: "During the thirty or forty years of their independence they have done absolutely nothing for the sciences, for the arts, for literature.... In the four quarters of the 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 tree-tops of Elmwood. But it was Washington Irving who showed all of these men that nineteenth century England would be interested in American books.