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Washington Irving was one of the first American authors who was internationally famous. I have visited his house in the Hudson Valley, near the Hudson River and not all that far from the little town of Sleepy Hollow, made famous by Irving’s story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” On his back porch, on which I have sat, also sat Charles Dickens on one of his several visits to and tours of the United States.
The other story for which Irving is most remembered is Rip van Winkle, reviewed here. It is a short story, set in the days where the Dutch held New York City and the Hudson Valley. Did you know that New York City used to be called New Amsterdam when it was still under the Dutch in the late 1600s? There is a Landmark book on the most famous governor of New Amsterdam, Peter Stuyvesant. Rip van Winkle is a lazy man who falls in with some magical little people and falls asleep for 20 years. He awakes to find everything has changed in his little village and has to deal with those changes. The story is quite humorous and is greatly enlivened by the whimsical illustrations of Arthur Rackham (1867 to 1939), one of the greatest British illustrators. In fact, his color illustrations for Rip van Winkle, published in 1905, are what first made him famous and kicked his career into high gear. Rip van Winkle has some difficult vocabulary and sentence structure, because of when it was written, so I would recommend it for middle school or older readers.