Rip Van Winkle is a short story by the American author Washington Irving first published in 1819. Set in the years before and after the American Revolutionary War in a village at the foot of New York’s Catskill Mountains, it follows a Dutch-American villager named Rip Van Winkle who falls asleep in the Catskill Mountains and wakes up 20 years later, having missed the American Revolution. Irving wrote it while living in Birmingham, England as part of the collection The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., alongside his other famous tale “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Irving later admitted, When I wrote the story, I had never been on the Catskills. Since its publication, the story has become part of American popular culture and has been adapted many times for stage, film, radio, and television.

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