Why did Melville cling so tightly to his Knickerbocker roots and remain lifelong friends with Young America’s central coordinator, Evert Duyckinck, even decades after publicly assaulting him in the pages of Pierre, his most bizarre and angry fictional fulmination against the literary market? Why would Thoreau, long after his personal falling out with Emerson, persistently identify himself as a Transcendentalist? One of the premises of this book is to revise the notion that these groups were factionalized and shared little, if any, common ground, which is a method of understanding antebellum U.S. literary coteries handed down by Perry Miller’s The Raven and the Whale (1956). Although some loose definitions of “Knickerbocker” describe New York writers in general, I use the term specifically as it applies to Irving’s original Lads of Kilkenny and its growth into later generations such as the Bread and Cheese Club, which scattered and coalesced into Evert Duyckinck’s Young America. All these groups consciously acknowledged their legacy in Irving. The two major Knickerbocker circles were more cohesive and collaborative than Miller and others after him, such as Andrew Delbanco and Edward Widmer, have posited partially in pursuit of a more captivating historical narrative yarn.