Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.

In this book, American literature discovers itself. Before Washington Irving wrote these tales, there was no distinctly American short story. There was no narrator as winning as Geoffrey Crayon, no haunted schoolmaster as memorable as Ichabod Crane, no rippling laugh as dangerous as Brom Bones's. Rip Van Winkle's twenty-year sleep beneath the Kaatskill Mountains remains one of the most haunting images in American fiction: a man wakes to find everyone he knew has aged or died, the revolution has happened, and he is a stranger in his own world. Irving populates his pages with ghosts and gooses, English eccentrics and Dutch yeomen, while Geoffrey Crayon guides us through it all with the warm, slightly sad authority of a man who knows that every story is really a story about time passing and memory deceiving us. These are the tales that taught America how to dream about its own past.