America’s SketchbookAmericas Sketchbook recaptures the drama of nineteenth century American cultural life, placing at its center a genrethe literary sketchmore available than the novel, less governable by the critical establishment, and shot through with the tensions and types of local and national culture making. In the first Golden Age of magazines (1820 1860), the brief, open form of the sketch seized the attention of a brand new mass audience, readers of magazines as