The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
By Washington Irving
The story is set in 1790 in the countryside around the former Dutch settlement of Tarry Town, in a secluded glen known as Sleepy Hollow. The legend relates the tale of Ichabod Crane, a lean, lanky, and superstitious schoolmaster from Connecticut. Crane competes with Abraham “Brom Bones” Van Brunt, the town rowdy, for the hand of Katrina Van Tassel, the daughter of wealthy farmer Baltus Van Tassel. Ichabod Crane sees marriage to Katrina as a means of procuring Van Tassel’s wealth. The tension among the three continues for some time and is soon brought to a head. On a peaceful autumn night, Crane attends a harvest party at the Van Tassels’ homestead. He dances, partakes in the feast, and listens to ghostly legends from Brom and the locals, but he fails to secure Katrina’s hand. Ichabod rides home on a temperamental plough horse named Gunpowder.
He encounters a cloaked rider and believes it to be the Headless Horseman, a figure of local legend, supposedly the restless ghost of a Hessian trooper whose head had been shot off by a stray cannonball. Ichabod rides for his life, desperately goading Gunpowder down the Hollow. The Horseman rears his horse and hurls his severed head directly at Crane, knocking the schoolmaster off his horse. The following day, Gunpowder is found eating the grass at his master’s gate, but Ichabod has disappeared. Katrina marries Brom Bones. Although the true nature of both the Headless Horseman and Ichabod’s disappearance that night are left open to interpretation, the story implies that the Horseman was Brom in disguise, using a Jack-o’-lantern as a false head, and suggests that Crane survived the fall and fled Sleepy Hollow in horror.
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Washington Irving
Washington Irving (April 3, 1783 – November 28, 1859) was an American short-story writer, essayist, biographer, historian, and diplomat of the early 19th century.
Biography.
He wrote the short stories “Rip Van Winkle” (1819) and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820), both of which appear in his collection The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. His historical works include biographies of Oliver Goldsmith, Muhammad, and George Washington, as well as several histories of 15th-century Spain that deal with subjects such as the Alhambra, Christopher Columbus, and the Moors. Irving served as American ambassador to Spain in the 1840s. Irving was born and raised in Manhattan to a merchant family. He made his literary debut in 1802 with a series of observational letters to the Morning Chronicle, written under the pseudonym Jonathan Oldstyle.
He temporarily moved to England for the family business in 1815, where he achieved fame with the publication of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent, which was serialized from 1819 to 1820. He continued to publish regularly throughout his life, and he completed a five-volume biography of George Washington just eight months before his death at age 76 in Tarrytown, New York. Irving was one of the first American writers to earn acclaim in Europe, and he encouraged other American authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe. He was also admired by some British writers, including Lord Byron, Thomas Campbell, Charles Dickens, Mary Shelley, Francis Jeffrey, and Walter Scott. He advocated for writing as a legitimate profession and argued for stronger laws to protect American writers from copyright infringement.
Washington Irving
