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
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