Washington Irving is the first American writer to gain worldwide fame and to win young American literature the “right of citizenship” in the minds of an experienced and discerning European reader, “the first ambassador of the New World to the Old,” in the words of W. Thackeray. Irving was the pioneer of themes that would later become mainstream in US literature; he was the first to develop the short story, a favorite genre of American writers, and created a prose style that was considered exemplary for several generations. In the short stories, Irving appears as a true romantic. The first romantic to emerge from American literature.