‘Legacies’ offers an analysis which takes the form of a juxtaposition between Auster's New York Trilogy and texts by his American forefathers. As I have already stated, my aim is not to trace influences or chase allusions, if only because Auster makes such a task superfluous by drawing attention to them in a very explicit manner. Nor does my method involve a study of the historical progression of American literature from the nineteenth century to the present, and this is not only due to the fact that any such history may be ideologically suspect, and often necessarily simplistic, but also because it has for a long time been recognised that literature is also read backwards from the present. In ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1917), T.S. Eliot called attention to this effect when he wrote: ‘What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all works of art which preceded it... The past [is] altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.’ Borges gave a more specific example, emphasising the contribution of individual authors to the way we read earlier texts. In his essay on Nathaniel Hawthorne, he drew parallels between ‘Wakefield’ and Kafka's stories, and he concluded:

In his book Reverse Tradition: Postmodern Fictions and the Nineteenth Century Novel, Robert Kiely expands on this proposition, and offers readings of nineteenth-century texts through contemporary ones.