Washington Irving is generally credited for launching the short story in the United States. He adapted European folklore, sketchy characters, and uncanny stories to an American literary setting, providing the United States with a set of myths that are revived time and again in American popular culture. In keeping with recent scholarship, my contribution reads Irving as a transatlantic author and respondent to Romanticism on both sides of the Atlantic. The chapter’s main focus is on Irving’s professional self-assertion as author through his narrators, their historic and transatlantic positionalities, and their arrangement of the tales in Irving’s collections. As I show in a close reading of “The Adventures of the German Student” and “The Devil and Tom Walker” from Tales of a Traveler (1824), Irving’s fictional historians and travelers claim the “Americanness” of his writings, while pointing self-critically to the preposterousness of this endeavor of national and cultural distinction.