What Do I Read Next?
‘‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,’’ another tale from Irving's The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent, is the second of Irving's stories that has remained popular since its publication in 1819-1820. In the upstate New York town of Sleepy Hollow, the arrogant schoolteacher Ichabod Crane abandons his courtship of the village's most beautiful and wealthy young woman after being terrified by a Headless Horseman.
The Leatherstocking Tales, by James Fenimore Cooper, is a series of five novels set in upstate New York, featuring Natty Bumppo, a quintessential American wilderness hero. In The Pioneers, published in 1823, Natty Bumppo becomes disillusioned with civilization and heads west.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem ‘‘Kubla Khan,’’ written in 1797, is believed to have been created during an opium-induced sleep. Critic Deanna C. Turner argues that Irving borrowed heavily from the poem’s imagery when writing 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 resides. One of the mysteries discussed is the legend of Kaaterskill Falls, which is 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 uses Hudson's original logs to narrate the story of his explorations.
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