Knickerbocker TJteratiire in the Benjamin Collections 13

returned to New York with him in 18 3 2, so that he seemed indeed
to certify, not only the excellencies of American writings to
Europe, but also the certainty that transatlantic good taste could
be duplicated at home. He wrote so lucidly well that almost every¬
one imitated him, even Professor Longfellow. It was Mr. Irving
who had given a name to early nineteenth-century New York
some twenty years before when he used the pseudonym of
"Diedrich Knickerbocker" for his first book, a comical history of
the city, and the word "Knickerbocker" seemed so appropriate
that it became attached to a distinctive and Dutch-like kind of
trousers, as well as to New York's most fashionable company
of cadets and the city's first baseball club. Today it appears more
than a hundred times in Manhattan's telephone directory, its tight¬
ness for any New York activity demonstrated in its application to
such diverse enterprises as a hotel, a delicatessen, a hospital, an
ice company, a magazine, a brewery and a basketball team.

The later Knickerbocker period in New York can be said to
extend from the 1830s, when both ^^'ashington Irving and Feni¬
more Cooper returned from residence abroad, until the end of the
Civil War. It was a period of growth in every direction, when
New York could now in fact make good her long vaunted boast
of being the commercial and financial center of the United States.
She also thought of herself as the literary center and struck trucu¬
lent poses in defiance of Boston's assumed supremacy. Salons like
that of Mrs. Lynch attracted men of good will and bluestockings
of every variety for philosophic conversations—like those which
Miss Margaret Fuller had made popular in New England—or for
evenings of music or literary talk. Indeed, Horace Greeley had
enticed Miss Fuller herself to New York as literary editor of his
Tribune. Henry Thoreau from Concord had come down briefly
to discover whether he might not make some kind of connection
as a writer, but he did not do well. Edgar Poe from Virginia settled
in Fordham with high literary plans cut short only by his tragic
death. Walter Whitman, editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle,