Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving

‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,’’ also from Irving's The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., is the second of the two Irving stories that have remained popular since their publication in 18191820. In the upstate New York town of Sleepy Hollow, pompous schoolteacher Ichabod Crane gives up courting the village's most beautiful and wealthy young woman when he is frightened by a Headless Horseman.

The Leatherstocking Tales, by James Fenimore Cooper, is a series of five novels set in upper New York State and featuring the character of Natty Bumppo, a traditional American hero of the wilderness. In The Pioneers, published in 1823, Natty Bumppo grows disgusted with civilization and heads for the West.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem ‘‘Kubla Khan,’’ written in 1797, is said to have been composed during an opium-induced sleep. Critic DeannaC. Turner believes that Irving drew heavily on imagery from the poem when he composed the descriptive passages in ‘‘Rip Van Winkle.’’

In Catskill Country: Collected Stories of Mountain History, Life and Lore (1995), by Alf Evers, is a collection of essays about the region where Rip Van Winkle lives. Among the mysteries explored is the legend of Kaaterskill Falls, mentioned at the end of ‘‘Rip Van Winkle.’’

In Charting the Sea of Darkness: The Four Voyages of Henry Hudson (1995), author Donald S. Johnson draws on Hudson's original logs to create a narrative of his explorations.