It includes more than thirty pieces, and while Irving’s contemporaries praised it as a whole, only three of its tales (“The Specter Bridegroom” is the third) are now taken into consideration when we speak of him as “one of the early American romantic writers”. The rest of the stories are in oblivion, though we usually mention that Irving invented for them a new narrative model of the “sketch”. This short narrative model is something between an essay and a tale that is told by a narrator, who, in the case of The Sketch Book, is an American painter named Geoffrey Crayon.