Rip Van Winkle adapted for other media for the last two centuries, in cartoons, films, stage plays, music, and other media. 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
Time travel en fût jamais" (1770) by Louis-Sébastien Mercier, "Rip Van Winkle" (1819) by Washington Irving, "Looking Backward" (1888) by Edward Bellamy, and "When the Sleeper Awakes" (1899) by H.G. Wells. Prolonged sleep, like the more familiar time machine, is used as a means of time travel in these stories. The earliest work about backwards time travel is uncertain. Samuel Madden's "Memoirs of the Twentieth Century" (1733) is a series of letters from British ambassadors in 1997 and 1998 to diplomats in the past, conveying the political and religious conditions of the future. Because the narrator receives these letters from his guardian