Rip Van Winkle
Rip Van Winkle is a short story by the American author Washington Irving, first published in 1819. It follows a Dutch-American villager in colonial America named Rip Van Winkle who meets mysterious Dutchmen, imbibes their liquor and falls asleep in the Catskill Mountains. He awakes 20 years later to a very changed world, having missed the American Revolution.
Inspired by a conversation on nostalgia with his American expatriate brother-in-law, Irving wrote the story while temporarily living in Birmingham, England. It was published in his collection, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. While the story is set in New York's Catskill Mountains near where Irving later took up residence, he admitted, "When I wrote the story, I had never been on the Catskills."
Excerpted from Rip Van Winkle on Wikipedia.
Rip Van Winkle
Author | Washington Irving |
Country | United States |
Genre | Short stories, Fantasy, Time travel |
Copyright | Public domain worldwide. |
Book cover | "The Return of Rip Van Winkle" Image: John Quidor | wikimedia |
Ebooks | Project Gutenberg |
Scans | Google-digitized |
Audio | Librivox | Internet Archive: Reader: Julie Ross Rushton 01 |
Read online | Rip Van Winkle |