"Washington Irving... makes Nathaniel Hawthorne read like Dr. Seuss!"

Autorentext

Washington Irving; Introduction and Notes by Elizabeth L. Bradley

Klappentext

The timeless collection that introduced Rip Van Winkle, Ichabod Crane, and the Headless Horseman

Perhaps the marker of a true mythos is when the stories themselves overshadow their creator. Originally published under a pseudonym as The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories gave America its own haunted mythology. This collection of larger-than-life tales contains Washington Irving’s best-known literary inventions—Ichabod Crane, the Headless Horseman, and Rip Van Winkle—that continue to capture our imaginations today.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Zusammenfassung
Introduces us to Rip van Winkle, the Dutch colonist who slept through the Revolutionary War; Ichabod Crane, the superstitious, social-climbing schoolmaster; and the pumpkin-topped Headless Horseman, ancestor to countless horror film antiheroes.

Leseprobe

Introduction

To refer to a writer as the Father of American Literature is the quickest way to consign him to anthologies, and to popular oblivion. This is a truism in legend and history alike: Who prefers the dutiful Abraham to his rebellious sons, or Joseph to Jesus? Who—aside from their biographers—remembers the progenitor of Thomas Edison, the Wright Brothers, or Marie Curie? There is no faster way to doom an author than to slap him with a patriotic paternity suit. Washington Irving is often tarred with this well-meaning brush, despite the fact that he was by no means the first American fiction writer, nor did he ever publish in that consummate American form: the novel. It is true that Irving’s stories of the Hudson River Valley, composed more than 150 years ago, still exert a magnetic pull on the American imagination, and that during his lifetime, and for nearly a century after, Washington Irving was, as he once wrote of his character Diedrich Knickerbocker, “a household word.” Nor can it be denied that Irving’s satires, “sketches,” and histories captivated readers on both sides of the Atlantic. The Bard of Sunnyside, creator of icons and ambassador of letters, was arguably the nation’s first exportable celebrity—and its first professional writer to make his living by his pen. And it must be admitted that Irving’s stories do endure as the first fictional chronicle of the American experience, and that the unorthodox, fantastical sensibilities he displayed in his tales of the Hudson River Valley set the stage for the Romantic and Gothic writers who followed him, including Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, and Whitman. Certainly, the absurdist Knickerbocker sensibility of his early satires may be felt in the humor of Twain and Thurber, and even, most recently, the stories of George Saunders and Karen Russell, while his foray into regional literature, America’s first, was followed by that of Sarah Orne Jewett, Mark Twain, and Sherwood Anderson—for starters. No one denies, finally, that many of Irving’s best-known characters have themselves become household names: Rip Van Winkle, for example, or Ichabod Crane. But for the love of the Headless Horseman, please don’t call him the Father of American Literature—there is no more killing kindness than that shopworn phrase.

If you must call Irving something, you might call him the architect of America’s founding mythology. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when a very young Irving was just beginning his literary career, many writers and historians—American and European alike—dismissed the United States as not sufficiently sophisticated to have a history, and certainly too green for ghosts. New York, burned and battered by seven years of British occupation, seemed to exemplify this barren territory: what past was left to be celebrated in a city so decimated by war? “An apology for the present publication,” one contemporary account of New York City began, “may be derived from the scantiness and incorrectness of the information to be found in any collected or methodical form relative to New York.” Everything was in flux and on the brink of erasure: in Manhattan, even the street names were changing to keep up with the republican times. The Revolutionary War was still in the rearview mirror: surely it was too soon to look back? Irving fundamentally disagreed, and over the course of the next fifty years he wrote definitive accounts of the history and culture of colonial New Amsterdam and the postcolonial Hudson River Valley, published a five-volume life of George Washington, and spun the first yarns from the American frontier. Today, Americans can hardly begin to sort out where Irving’s vision leaves off and theirs begins, so steeped are they in his portrait of their “sublime and beautiful” country. While Irving’s work was almost instantaneously popular in England, it spoke with particular emphasis to brand-new Americans as they made sense of the wilderness they had fought so hard to govern, and as they looked for original narratives, forged out of this uncharted landscape, that they could adopt as their own. What made sense in a world as new and strange as theirs? Stories made sense—and the more fantastical they were, the more they gave meaning to the entire American enterprise. In The Sketch Book, Irving’s second work, we find his most supernatural imaginings, and his most unforgettable characters, tucked quietly among descriptions of idylls in the English countryside, waiting—like the proverbial monster under the bed—for the right moment to pounce.

The most monstrous of these characters, of course, is the Headless Horseman of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” a figure whose fame has all but outstripped that of his creator. It’s not hard to understand why: the Horseman is arguably the new nation’s first ghost, appearing in the first American ghost story, derived from the Revolutionary War. But it is not just the circumstances that make the tale of this “mysterious and appalling” mercenary soldier particularly American: there is also something faintly comic in Irving’s image of the decapitated soldier, perched on an enormous black steed, plunging into the woods “in nightly quest of his head.” No wonder he is the spirit ancestor of countless “creature of the week” movies—the Headless Horseman has a touch of kitsch. The humorous, emphatically human aspect of his work might explain how Irving’s “authentic histories” of the early republic came to serve as a kind of Good Housekeeping seal on American discourse, American sentiment, and American archetypes in his lifetime. His iconic characters are the fictitious ancestors of nineteenth-century folk heroes such as Natty Bumppo, Paul Bunyan, and Johnny Appleseed. And his invocations of the “unheeded beauties” of the Hudson helped to make that river into the nation’s first artistic pinup, the subject of countless paintings and engravings of the Hudson River School. Irving’s work also inspired a Dutch Colonial architectural revival, a literary magazine (Knickerbocker Magazine), and a bank (the Irvi…