Other editions of book Rip Van Winkle and the Legend of Sleepy Hollow: Easy Reading Classic Literature

These 2 stories from the pen of one of America's earliest and most popular writers draw upon the myths and legends of local and European folklore to create memorable, richly American tales and characters. In the title story, Rip Van Winkle wanders into the Catskill Mountains before the Revolutionary War. When he helps a dwarf carry a heavy keg to a ninepins game, it seems natural to drink the strange, small men's brew - but he hasn't the head for it, and wakes up 20 years later! In "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," the gawky schoolmaster, Ichabod Crane, and his rival Brom Bones, both court beautiful Katrina Van Tassel - until a Headless Horseman makes a ghostly ride.

Rip Van WinkleThe story of Rip Van Winkle is set in the years before and after the American Revolutionary War. In a pleasant village, at the foot of New York's Catskill Mountains, lives the kindly Rip Van Winkle, a colonial British-American villager.Go BompaCrazy!After a failed business venture with his brothers, Irving filed for bankruptcy in 1818. Despondent, he turned to writing for possible financial support, though he had difficulty thinking of stories to write. He stayed in Birmingham, England with his brother-in-law Henry Van Wart. The two were reminiscing in June 1818 when Irving was suddenly inspired by their nostalgic conversation. Irving locked himself in his room and wrote non-stop all night. As he said, he felt like a man waking from a long sleep. He presented the first draft of "Rip Van Winkle" to the Van Wart family over breakfast.The Legend of Sleepy HollowThe story is set in 1790 in the countryside around the Dutch settlement of Tarry Town (historical Tarrytown, New York), in a secluded glen called Sleepy Hollow. Sleepy Hollow is renowned for its ghosts and the haunting atmosphere that pervades the imaginations of its inhabitants and visitors.Irving, while he was an aide-de-camp to New York Gov. Daniel D. Tompkins, met an army captain named Ichabod Crane in Sackets Harbor, New York during an inspection tour of fortifications in 1814. He may have patterned the character in "The Legend" after Jesse Merwin, who taught at the local schoolhouse in Kinderhook, further north along the Hudson River, where Irving spent several months in 1809.The story was the longest one published as part of The Sketch Book, which Irving issued using the pseudonym "Geoffrey Crayon" in 1820. Alongside "Rip Van Winkle," The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is one of Irving's most anthologized, studied, and adapted sketches. Both stories are often paired together in books and other representations, and both are included in surveys of early American literature and Romanticism. Irving's depictions of regional culture and his themes of progress versus tradition, supernatural intervention in the commonplace, and the plight of the individual outsider in a homogeneous community permeate both stories and helped to develop a unique sense of American cultural and existential selfhood during the early nineteenth century.Go BompaCrazy!The Legend of Sleepy Hollow follows a tradition of folk tales and poems involving a supernatural wild chase The headless horseman has been a motif of European folklore since at least the Middle Ages.The Irish dullahan or dulachán ("dark man") is a headless fairy, usually riding a black horse and carrying his head under one arm (or holding it high to see at great distance). He wields a whip made from a human corpse's spine. When the dullahan stops riding, a death occurs. The dullahan calls out a name, at which point the named person immediately perishes. In another version, he is the headless driver of a black carriage. A similar figure, the gan ceann ("without a head"), can be frightened away by wearing a gold object or casting one in his path.The German Legends of the Brothers Grimm (Deutsche Sagen) recount two German folk tales of a headless horseman being spotted with their own eyes.One is set near Dresden in eastern Germany. In this tale, a woman from Dresden goes out early one Sunday morning to gather acorns in a forest. At a place called "Lost Waters", she hears a hunting horn. When she hears it again, she turns around she sees a headless man in a long grey coat sitting on a grey horse.In another German tale, set in Braunschweig, a headless horseman called "the wild huntsman" blows a horn which warns hunters not to ride the next day, because they will meet with an accident.In some German versions of the headless horseman, he seeks out the perpetrators of capital crimes. In others, he has a pack of black hounds with tongues of fire.

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Washington Irving (April 3, 1783 – November 28, 1859) was an American short story writer, essayist, biographer, historian, and diplomat of the early 19th century. He is best known for his short stories "Rip Van Winkle" (1819) and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (1820), both of which appear in his collection, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. His historical works include biographies of Oliver Goldsmith, Muhammad, and George Washington, as well as several histories of 15th-century Spain dealing with subjects such as Alhambra, Christopher Columbus, and the Moors. Irving served as the U.S. ambassador to Spain from 1842 to 1846. He made his literary debut in 1802 with a series of observational letters to the Morning Chronicle, written under the pseudonym Jonathan Oldstyle. After moving to England for the family business in 1815, he achieved international fame with the publication of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., serialized from 1819–20. He continued to publish regularly—and almost always successfully—throughout his life, and just eight months before his death (at age 76, in Tarrytown, New York), completed a five-volume biography of George Washington. Irving, along with James Fenimore Cooper, was among the first American writers to earn acclaim in Europe, and Irving encouraged American authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe. Irving was also admired by some European writers, including Lord Byron, Thomas Campbell, Charles Dickens, Francis Jeffrey, and Walter Scott. Also, as the United States' first internationally best-selling author, Irving advocated for writing as a legitimate profession and argued for stronger laws to protect American writers from copyright infringement. Washington Irving's parents were William Irving, Sr., originally of Quholm, Shapinsay, Orkney, Scotland, and Sarah (née Sanders), both Scottish-English immigrants. They married in 1761 while William was serving as a petty officer in the British Navy. They had eleven children, eight of whom survived to adulthood. Their first two sons, each named William, died in infancy, as did their fourth child, John. Their surviving children were: William, Jr. (1766), Ann (1770), Peter (1771), Catherine (1774), Ebenezer (1776), John Treat (1778), Sarah (1780), and Washington.The Irving family settled in Manhattan, New York and was part of the city's small, vibrant merchant class when Washington Irving was born on April 3, 1783,the same week New York City residents learned of the British ceasefire that ended the American Revolution; Irving's mother named him after the hero of the revolution, George Washington.At age 6, with the help of a nanny, Irving met his namesake, who was then living in New York after his inauguration as President of the United States, in 1789. The president blessed young Irving,an encounter Irving later commemorated in a small watercolor painting, which continues to hang in his home.The Irvings lived at 131 William Street at the time of Washington Irving's birth. The family later moved across the street to 128 William St. Several of Washington Irving's older brothers became active New York merchants, and they encouraged their younger brother's literary aspirations....

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One day Rip wanders off with his dog Wolf into the Catskill Mountains where he runs into an odd group of men drinking and playing bowls. He drinks some of their mysterious brew and falls asleep. When he awakens under a tree he is astonished to learn, when he returns home, that 20 years have passed, and things are a lot different, finding out that the town believes he has died. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: As Crane heads home after attending a party at the Van Tassel farm, he is pursued by the Headless Horseman, who is supposedly the ghost of a Hessian trooper who had his head shot off by a stray cannonball during a local battle of the American Revolutionary War. Ichabod mysteriously disappears from town, leaving Katrina to marry Brom Bones. This story is open-ended, and left to conjecture for anyone with an opinion, including the fact that perhaps Ichabod was slain by his rival. Enough red-herrings, false clues, and suspenseful moments are included to make it an early detective story.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface.We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

“Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” are Washington Irving’s best known stories. However they were written so long ago that they are now very difficult to understand. -The language of almost two hundred years ago has been extensively modernized.-End notes, interpretation, and discussion of major themes follow the text.-Biographical information on Irving is included.-The stories are the originals--only difficult vocabulary and sentence structure has been changed.-Modern readers will better understand and appreciate these very first American short stories.

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