Washington Irving 34 min read

In the Catskills before the Revolution, henpecked Rip Van Winkle wanders the mountains, drinks with a band of strange old men, and sleeps twenty years, waking to a world utterly changed.

Washington Irving's 1819 tale, here in an Arthur Rackham-illustrated edition, is a foundational American fantasy of enchanted sleep. Timeless, wry, beloved. Read it for the immortal story of the man who slept through a revolution, one of the great early works of American imaginative fiction.

In its time

Published in 1819, during the 1810s, frankenstein's decade.

Reading it

34 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).

Illustrated by

Arthur Rackham