Suspended animation in fiction which is indistinguishable from death. In American fiction, the first story to deal with suspended animation is the tale of Rip Van Winkle, a short story by American author Washington Irving published in 1819 as well as the name of the story's fictional protagonist. In the story, a British subject in the American colonies wanders into the Catskill Mountains in the years before the American Revolutionary War, and finds a group of fairies, whose moonshine he drinks. He then falls asleep for 20 years, and returns to his village in what is now the United States, finding his home town
Washington Irving introduced the erroneous idea that Europeans believed the world to be flat prior to the discovery of the New World. Borrowed from Irving, the flat-Earth myth has been taught in schools as fact to many generations of Americans. The American painter John Quidor based many of his paintings on scenes from the works of Irving about Dutch New York, including such paintings as "Ichabod Crane Flying from the Headless Horseman" (1828), "The Return of Rip Van Winkle" (1849), and "The Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane" (1858). In 1854, the village of Dearman, New York changed its name, by popular vote,