Rip Van Winkle

About this book

Rip Van Winkle, a good-natured, lazy villager in the Catskill Mountains of New York, loves fishing and telling stories but hates work, and escapes his scolding wife by wandering the hills with his dog. One afternoon he meets a strange company of little men in old Dutch clothes playing ninepins, drinks from their keg and falls asleep. When he wakes, his beard is a foot long, his gun has rusted and no one in the village knows him: twenty years have passed, and the American Revolution has come and gone.

Context and significance

Washington Irving (1783–1859) published the story in The Sketch Book in 1819, and with The Legend of Sleepy Hollow it became one of the founding legends of American literature. Rip's name is still used for anyone who has slept through great changes. Irving also wrote The Alhambra, about Moorish Granada.

About the author