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Recommended Reading: 600 Classics Reviewed

Rip Van Winkle

by Washington Irving

1819-1820

Short Story

Fantasy

This tongue-in-cheek tale of a simple country bumpkin who escapes his shrewish wife by going into the woods and sleeping for twenty years is regarded as the first American short story.

“Rip Van Winkle,” published as the end of the first installment of Irving's Sketch Book, purports to be “A Posthumous Writing of Diedrich Knickerbocker"—Irving's imaginary chronicler of the early Dutch history of New York.

The story itself could hardly be simpler. Rip, a good-natured, lazy fellow, is henpecked by his wife, whom he escapes by taking daylong jaunts with his gun and dog into the Catskill Mountains. One evening, having scrambled onto one of the highest peaks, he is hailed by a stranger dressed in “the antique Dutch fashion,” who without speaking asks Rip to help him with a keg he is carrying. Rip complies, and the stranger leads him to a hollow where a whole company of similarly dressed men is playing a ninepins.

Rip begins to drink along with them, falls asleep, and awakes to find himself alone with an old rusty gun beside him. When he gets home it emerges that he has slept right through the American Revolution; his wife is dead, so, happier if no wiser, he goes back to his old idle ways and is “reverenced as one of the patriarchs of the village.”

On one level the story is a gentle satire on politics: Freedom to Rip has nothing to do with King George or George Washington, but is simply a matter of being out from under his wife. “Rip Van Winkle” is also a wish-fulfillment fantasy. Its charm however, lies mostly in Irving's invocation of “the magical hues and shapes” of those “fairy mountains,” where the ghosts of Henry Hudson and his crew play at nine-pins and make the thunder.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Irving, Washington. "Rip Van Winkle." Recommended Reading: 600 Classics Reviewed, edited by Editors of Salem Press, Salem Press, 2015. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=6CR_0467.
APA 7th
Irving, W. (2015). Rip Van Winkle. In E. Salem Press (Ed.), Recommended Reading: 600 Classics Reviewed. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Irving, Washington. "Rip Van Winkle." Edited by Editors of Salem Press. Recommended Reading: 600 Classics Reviewed. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2015. Accessed September 15, 2025. online.salempress.com.