[2] Unsuspecting readers followed the story of Knickerbocker and his manuscript with interest, and some New York city officials were concerned enough about the missing historian to offer a reward for his safe return.

Irving then published A History of New York on December 6, 1809, under the Knickerbocker pseudonym, with immediate critical and popular success.

[6][7] John Neal, in his critical work American Writers (1824–25), offered a mixed review: In a word, we look upon this volume of Knickerbocker; though it is tiresome, though there are some wretched failures in it; a little overdoing of the humorous—and a little confusion of purpose, throughout—as a work, honourable to English literature—namely—bold—and so altogether original, without being extravagant, as to stand alone, among the labors of men.

[8]Stanley Thomas Williams and Tremaine McDowell, editors of the 1927 edition of A History of New York, called this the most intelligent review of the book since its release in 1809.

[10] In the introduction to the 2008 edition, Elizabeth L. Bradley argues that the work is an unconventional novel; she notes that early readers were reminded of Sterne's Tristram Shandy, and that "the proto-postmodern innovations of the History" resemble "the same inventive qualities in such subsequent American writers as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo".