Legend of Sleepy Hollow (Version 2)

America's first great ghost story, Washington Irving's 1820 masterpiece invented an American mythology that still haunts our imagination. Set in the Dutch farmlands of post-Revolutionary Sleepy Hollow, New York, the story follows Ichabod Crane, a tall, lean Connecticut schoolteacher with pretensions above his station, as he pursues Katrina Van Tassel, the wealthy heiress of the valley. His rival is the burly, rustic Brom Bones, a man of local muscle who plays crude jokes on the bookish Ichabod. But when Ichabod stays late at a Halloween party and must cross the dark woods alone, he encounters something far more dangerous than romantic humiliation: the Headless Horseman, a spectral Hessian soldier who haunts the hollow. Irving's tale is both a genuinely chilling Gothic ghost story and a sly social comedy about class, aspiration, and the ghosts of a young nation's past. It created the Headless Horseman, defined early American literature, and endures because it captures something true about how Americans tell stories about what we fear and what we want.