Rip Van Winkle
Washington Irving 1819
This short story follows a villager who falls asleep in the Catskill Mountains and wakes twenty years later. He returns to find that the American Revolution has changed his village while he slept.
29 pages 33 min reading time
- One of the first great American short stories, and one of the best-known tales in American literature.
- Imagines how strange it would feel to lose twenty years and come home to a world that has moved on without you.
- Gently mocks people who resist change, showing Rip happier as an idle old storyteller than he ever was as a hard-working husband.
- Gave English the name "Rip Van Winkle" as an everyday term for someone badly out of touch with the times.
- Helped make the Catskill Mountains and Hudson River Valley famous as places of legend and romance, and it has been retold many times on stage and screen.
Written far from home
Irving wrote this tale about New York while living with his sister in Birmingham, England.
Borrowed from a German tale
The plot closely follows an old German folktale about a goatherd named Peter Klaus who sleeps for years.
Hidden behind two names
It first appeared under the pen name Geoffrey Crayon, as a story found among an imaginary historian's papers.
Sold in small parts
It came out in a series of thin booklets, and their success let Irving earn his living by writing.