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
Rip Van Winkle afterward, by John Miller, who went out of business immediately thereafter. With help from his friend Walter Scott, Irving was able to convince John Murray to take over British publication of the "Sketch Book". Following the success of Rip Van Winkle in print and on stage, later celebrated editions were illustrated by Arthur Rackham (Heinemann, 1905) and N.C. Wyeth (McKay, 1921). In the tenth chapter of his book "Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers", the third-century AD Greek historian Diogenes Laertius relates the story of the legendary sage Epimenides of Knossos, who was said to have been a shepherd on