Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories Read Online
Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories
Table of Contents
PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION
THE AUTHOR’S ACCOUNT OF HIMSELF
THE BOAR’S HEAD TAVERN, EAST CHEAP - A Shakespearian Research
THE MUTABILITY OF LITERATURE A COLLOQUY IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY
THE SPECTRE BRIDEGROOM - A Traveller’s Tale
PHILIP OF POKANOKET - An Indian Memoir
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
PENGUIN
CLASSICS
THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW AND OTHER STORIES
WASHINGTON IRVING (1783-1859), America’s first successful professional writer, was born and raised in New York City. His literary talent manifesting itself early, he broke into print before he was twenty years old. In 1809, under the pseudonym of Diedrich Knickerbocker, he published the rollicking burlesque A History of New York, the first work in belles lettres by an American to catch the public imagination and endure. Although he had trained to be a lawyer, the urge for authorship long distracted him from a serious career in law or business. Yet not until he was approaching forty did he attempt to support himself exclusively by writing. The Sketch Book (1819-20), published almost simultaneously in England (where he was then living) and the United States, won him immediate acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic and established a demand for his work. Foreign travel inspired much of his writing. Between 1822 and 1832 he issued three more collections of humorous and lightly romantic sketches and tales, most of them evocative of European scenes and the European past: Bracebridge Hall, Tales of a Traveller, and The Alhambra In 1828 a biography of Columbus appeared, the first of several historical works by Irving notable for their romantic coloring. After seventeen years in Europe, he returned home in 1832 a national celebrity. His later writings include A Tour on the Prairies (1835), Astoria (1836), The Adventures of Captain Bonneville (1837), biographies of Goldsmith (1849) and Mahomet (1850), and a five-volume Life of Washington (1855-59). Irving’s sprightly and often half-mocking prose style, together with the felicitous blend of humor, pathos, and the picturesque in his fiction, made a major impact on the popular literature of his age.
WILLIAM L. HEDGES was the author of Washington Irving. An American Study, 1802—1832 (1965) and numerous essays on Washington Irving, and coauthor-editor of Land and Imagination: The American Rural Dream (1980). He taught English and history at Goucher College, where he chaired the program in American Studies.
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This collection under the title The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.
edited by Haskell S. Springer first published in the United States of
America by Twayne Publishers, a division of G. K. Hall & Co. 1978
Published with an introduction and notes by
William L. Hedges in Penguin Books 1988
This edition with the title The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and
Other Stories published in Penguin Books 1999
Introduction copyright © Viking Penguin Inc., 1988
All rights reserved
eISBN : 978-1-101-17378-7
(CIP data available)
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INTRODUCTION
The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. is a literary anomaly that keeps eluding strict classification and analysis. Seldom, if ever, out of print in the nearly 170 years since its highly acclaimed initial publication (1819-20), Washington Irving’s loose assortment of essays, sketches, and tales has delighted large popular audiences in the United States and Great Britain and traveled worldwide in translation. Its critical reputation diminished as the nineteenth century waned: modern taste at times finds parts of the potpourri insufficiently seasoned, a bit thin and derivative, overly sentimental. Nonetheless “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” on the basis of which Irving is generally credited with inventing the short story as a distinct genre, still stand as undoubted American classics. And for readers who relish irony and burlesque humor, the wry, self-mocking imagination of Irving’s persona, Geoffrey Crayon, has a way of redeeming most of The Sketch Book from its apparent weaknesses.
Turning to the text, we find everywhere anomaly, irony, ambiguity. The book is Janus-faced, looking almost simultaneously back and forth across the Atlantic, fondly viewing selected English scenes, characters, and institutions, while voicing Crayon’s loneliness and homesickness for America. Although addressed primarily to an American audience, it has English readers also in mind before it is finished.
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