The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow & Rip Van Winkle (Treasury of Illustrated Classics). This item is unavailable.The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow & Rip Van Winkle (Treasury of Illustrated Classics)

In the first of these stories from the Catskill Mountains a superstitious schoolmaster encounters a headless horseman; in the second, a man sleeps for twenty years, waking to a much-changed world.

Washington Irving (April 3, 1783 – November 28, 1859) His parents were William Irving, Sr., originally of Quholm, Shapinsay, Orkney, and Sarah (née Sanders), Scottish-English immigrants. The Irving family settled in Manhattan, New York City, and was part of the city's small, vibrant merchant class when he was born. An uninterested student, Irving preferred adventure stories and drama and, by age fourteen, was regularly sneaking out of class in the evenings to attend the theater. The 1798 outbreak of yellow fever in Manhattan and Irving was dispatched to stay with his friend James Kirke Paulding in Tarrytown, New York, where he became familiar with the nearby town of Sleepy Hollow, with its quaint Dutch customs and local ghost stories, which inspired these yarns. He began writing at 19, toured in Europe from 1804 to 1806, then returned to New York to study law, barely passing the bar. He became not only became an author, but an essayist, biographer and historian. He is best known for the short stories included in this book: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle, both of which first appeared in his book The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. Because of these he was one of the first American authors to achieve fame in Europe in 1819. His historical works include biographies of George Washington, Oliver Goldsmith and Muhammad, as well as several histories of 15th-century Spain dealing with subjects such as Christopher Columbus, the Moors, and the Alhambra. Irving also served as the U.S. ambassador to Spain from 1842 to 1846.