Rip Van Winkle Rip Van Winkle "Rip Van Winkle" is a short story by the American author Washington Irving first published in 1819. It follows a Dutch-American villager in colonial America named Rip Van Winkle who falls asleep in the Catskill Mountains and wakes up 20 years later, having missed the American Revolution. Irving wrote it while living in Birmingham, England, as part of the collection "The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent." The story is set in New York's Catskill Mountains, but Irving later admitted, "When I wrote the story, I had never been on the Catskills." "Rip Van Winkle" is set
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow Van Tassel was based on an actual young woman named Katrina Van Tassel. Washington Irving stayed with her family for a short time, and asked permission to use her name, and loosely base the character on her. He told her and her family he liked to give his characters the names of people he had met. The story was the longest one published as part of "The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent." (commonly referred to as "The Sketch Book"), which Irving issued serially throughout 1819 and 1820, using the pseudonym "Geoffrey Crayon". With "Rip Van Winkle", "The Legend of