The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories by Washington Irving (English) Pap

Description: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories by Washington Irving 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. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description The collection that invented an American mythology and some of its most memorable figures from Rip van Winkle to the Headless Horseman.The timeless collection that introduced Rip Van Winkle, Ichabod Crane, and the Headless HorsemanPerhaps the marker of a true mythos is when the stories themselves overshadow their creator. Originally published under a pseudonym asThe Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon,Gent.,The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Storiesgave America its own haunted mythology. This collection of larger-than-life tales contains Washington Irvings 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 1,700titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust theseries to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-datetranslations by award-winning translators. Author Biography Washington Irving(1783-1859) is generally credited with being the father of the American short story and was the first American writer to achieve international renown.Elizabeth L. Bradley, the author ofKnickerbocker-The Myth Behind New York, serves as literary consultant to Historic Hudson Valley, the caretakers of Sunnyside-Irvings Tarrytown, New York, home. She also wrote the introduction and notes for the Penguin Classics edition of IrvingsA History of New York. Review "Washington Irving... makes Nathaniel Hawthorne read like Dr. Seuss!" Promotional With an introduction by Irving expert Elizabeth L. Bradley, this new edition of Irvings greatest work demonstrates how inextricably his tales are woven into the fabric of American culture and celebrates his enduring contributions to the dream life of a nation. Review Quote "Washington Irving... makes Nathaniel Hawthorne read like Dr. Seuss!" Promotional "Headline" With an introduction by Irving expert Elizabeth L. Bradley, this new edition of Irvings greatest work demonstrates how inextricably his tales are woven into the fabric of American culture and celebrates his enduring contributions to the dream life of a nation. Excerpt from Book 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 Irvings 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 Irvings 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 nations first exportable celebrity--and its first professional writer to make his living by his pen. And it must be admitted that Irvings 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, Americas first, was followed by that of Sarah Orne Jewett, Mark Twain, and Sherwood Anderson--for starters. No one denies, finally, that many of Irvings 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 dont 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 Americas 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 Irvings vision leaves off and theirs begins, so steeped are they in his portrait of their "sublime and beautiful" country. While Irvings 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 , Irvings 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. Its not hard to understand why: the Horseman is arguably the new nations 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 Irvings 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 Irvings "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 nations first artistic pinup, the subject of countless paintings and engravings of the Hudson River School. Irvings work also inspired a Dutch Colonial architectural revival, a literary magazine ( Knickerbocker Magazine ), and a bank (the Irving Bank of the City of New York, which printed the authors face on its antebellum banknotes). But in recent years, a suspicion of Irvings most popular fiction has arisen, in the academy and bookstore alike. It doesnt help that Irvings more recent champions, such as the critics Harold Bloom and Perry Miller, put him in an exalted league with James Fenimore Cooper and William Cullen Bryant. Those other literary patriarchs have also fallen out of fashion. Nor does it improve matters to insist that every American has absorbed Irvings stories like plants do sunlight--through their depiction in television shows, movies, and even video games. His books must be facile, the logic goes, because they are so familiar. They must be childish because they are so beloved. And so we relegate Irving to the juvenile section, a Brother Grimm for the New World. Two hundred years ago, the suggestion that Washington Irving would someday be considered old-fashioned would have been received with disbelief. This is Americas hottest literary property were talking about--dowdy? Kid lit? You must have the wrong guy. And even taking into account the relative lack of competition in early republican America, Irvings success--both in the United States and in Europe--can only be described as meteoric. The native New Yorker, born to Scottish and Irish parents, began contributing theater reviews to his brother Williams newspaper, The Morning Chronicle , while still a teenager. By 1807, at the age of twenty-four, he was cofounder and editor of the satirical magazine Salmagundi , with William Irving and James Kirke Paulding. Salmagundi , a nineteenth-century forerunner of The Onion , only lasted for a year, but during that time it succeeded in deflating the pretensions of would-be plutocrats and bestowed a lasting nickname on New York City: Gotham, from the legendary town in Nottinghamshire whose inhabitants pretended to be fools in order to avoid paying taxes to the king. Two years later, while practicing law in a desultory way, Irving published his first book, entitled A History of New York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty. It arrived in a blaze of mock publicity: Irving had advertised the fictional author Diedrich Knickerbocker as missing, and his rent in arrears; the publication of his manuscript was presented as a landlords way of recouping his loss. The History itself was no hoax, but a satirical, mostly accurate account of the New Netherlands settlement and the city of New Amsterdam, now New York. The narrator, Knickerbocker, was a self-proclaimed descendant of the "Dutch Dynasty" of the books title--and exceptionally proud to be so. Knickerbockers not-so-secret ambition is easily detected: he intends for the History to serve as a kind of Old Testament for New York, recounting the history of its Dutch colonial forefathers, and in so doing, reclaim New York for Holland, nearly 150 years after it was lost. The book was, for its time, pure punk: it was "fake news" before "fake news" existed, equal parts irreverent ridicule and devout nostalgia, and riddled with more double entendres, false starts, political rants, and potty jokes than The Daily Show s Jon Stewart could manage on a banner night. Not surprisingly, A History of New York was a smash hit--on both sides of the Atlantic. Sir Walter Scott, himself no stranger to youthful international fame, complained that Irvings "excellent jocose" book left his "sides . . . sore from laughing." Years later, Irving would describe the book as a "temporary jeu desprit ," but in 1809, it was like nothing else that American readers had ever seen emanating from their shores. For the first time, an Ameri Details ISBN0143107534 Author Washington Irving Year 2014 ISBN-10 0143107534 ISBN-13 9780143107538 Format Paperback Media Book Birth 1783 Death 1859 DEWEY 813.3 Short Title LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW & OTHE Language English Residence Eagle Bridge, NY, US Imprint Penguin Classics Place of Publication London Country of Publication United Kingdom Pages 384 Publisher Penguin Books Ltd Publication Date 2014-10-07 UK Release Date 2014-10-07 Replaces 9780140437690 Audience General NZ Release Date 2014-11-18 AU Release Date 2014-11-18 We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:145059089;

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