Editor’s Note: This article is part of “The Unfinished Revolution,” a project exploring 250 years of the American experiment.
Washington Irving was born just as the news reached New York City: The war with England was over. To celebrate, his mother named him after the victorious American general. When he was a boy of 6, Irving was out for a walk with a Scottish maidservant, who spotted George Washington, now the nation’s first president, on a Manhattan street. The enterprising maidservant followed him into a shop. (Apparently, presidents once ran their own errands.) “Please, Your Honor,” she said. “Here’s a bairn was named after you.” Putting his hand on the young man’s head, Washington bestowed his blessing.
Thus anointed, Irving went on to become America’s original literary celebrity. During the first half of the 19th century, Charles Dudley Warner wrote in The Atlantic in 1880, “probably no citizen of the republic, except the Father of his Country, had so wide a reputation as his namesake, Washington Irving.” Irving wrote one of the first, and still one of the best, American ghost stories: “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” about a Hessian soldier who lost his head to a Patriot cannonball. He wrote satirical sketches, romantic tales, travelogues, and, near the end of his life, a five-volume biography of George Washington.
Yet the story that established Irving’s literary reputation is, at first glance, not a likely one to build a new national literature around. Irving wrote it during a sojourn in Britain. He took its bones from a German folktale. And although set in the Revolutionary era, the story doesn’t dramatize America’s fight for independence. Rather, the protagonist dozes right through it.
“Rip Van Winkle” is one of those stories that is at once familiar and obscure. Its contours remain well known: Man takes long nap, grows very long beard, returns to changed world. Its hero has become shorthand, to the point of cliché, to describe any long slumber. Yet Irving’s short story is not as widely anthologized or read as it once was. Its complexities and peculiarities are only dimly recalled, if at all, by many readers.
That is a shame, because unlike a lot of antique American writing, “Rip Van Winkle” has retained much of its original appeal. Mark Twain famously accused Irving’s contemporary James Fenimore Cooper of committing 114 of a possible 115 literary offenses on a single page of The Deerslayer. That may not have been entirely fair to Cooper, but his violations of Twain’s rules (“Employ a simple and straightforward style”; “Use the right word, not its second cousin”) can make reading the Leatherstocking Tales an arduous walk in the wilderness. Irving’s stories, like Twain’s, are as funny now as the day they were written.
“Rip Van Winkle” isn’t merely comic, however. More than just an account of a very long nap, it is a story about the role of memory in the young republic; it’s about how to create something new while retaining a connection to what came before. America’s first folktale, in other words, is a folktale about the making of America.
“Rip Van Winkle” appeared in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., a collection of stories and essays published serially beginning in 1819. The title character is “a simple, good-natured fellow” who lives in a village at the foot of New York’s Catskill Mountains. Ostensibly a farmer, he abhors the drudgery of tending his land, which has dwindled under his management to little more than a sorry patch of potatoes and Indian corn. Rip, we’re told, is “one of those happy mortals, of foolish, well-oiled dispositions, who take the world easy, eat white bread or brown, whichever can be got with least thought or trouble, and would rather starve on a penny than work for a pound.”
Rip is a beloved figure in his village, quick to help a neighbor build a fence or teach a child to fly a kite. His laziness seems to set in only when he is called to attend to his own affairs, and it is only in his own home that he finds an adversary—his wife, Dame Van Winkle, who deplores his loafing. Years of marriage have done nothing to diminish her disdain. On the contrary, Irving writes, “a tart temper never mellows with age, and a sharp tongue is the only edged tool that grows keener with constant use.”
It is to escape Dame Van Winkle’s “petticoat government” that Rip, together with his equally put-upon dog, Wolf, repairs to the woods to do some squirrel hunting. Here, a bit of magic enters the story. Venturing into the wild, Rip encounters a strange group of men, done up in traditional Dutch dress and playing ninepins—bowling—in a mountain hollow. These, we later learn, are the ghosts of Hendrick Hudson’s crew, the first Europeans to explore the Hudson River, aboard the Half Moon.
After helping one of the Dutchmen lug a keg of liquor to the game, Rip drinks several flagons, passes out, and wakes up two decades later. He returns to his village, fearing the wrath of Dame Van Winkle, only to find most of the people he knew, his wife among them, dead or gone.
Writing at a time when there was little American literature to speak of, Irving borrowed liberally from European sources. The nap, the beard, and even the mysterious bowlers are lifted directly from “Peter Klaus,” a German folktale about a goatherd. In terms of style, the story is something of a mock-epic, a form that would have been familiar to readers of the time. The Irving biographer Andrew Burstein has described Rip as “a lazy Odysseus,” and the story can be read as a series of clever inversions of Homer’s poem. Whereas the Greek hero knew to avoid the Lotus-Eaters’ soporific drug, Rip drinks deeply of the enchanted Dutch liquor. Rather than returning to a patient Penelope, Rip has fled the termagant Dame Van Winkle. Arriving back in Ithaca after a 20-year absence, Odysseus is recognized by his loyal dog, Argos. Rip, gone for the same duration, is greeted with a snarl by a dog he takes for Wolf. No less an authority than James Joyce noted the similarities, weaving allusions to “Rip Van Winkle” into the story of his own wayward Ulysses, Leopold Bloom.
Yet “Rip Van Winkle” isn’t just a pastiche of Old World mythologies. By sending Rip off to sleep precisely at the moment America declares its independence, Irving underlines how radically life would be altered by the ensuing Revolution. The village Rip returns to is strange to him: “The very character of the people seemed changed. There was a busy, bustling, disputatious tone about it, instead of the accustomed phlegm and drowsy tranquillity.” So abrupt was the shift that the portrait of King George III that had hung above the village inn seems not to have been replaced but rather hastily updated: “The red coat was changed for one of blue and buff, a sword was held in the hand instead of a sceptre, the head was decorated with a cocked hat, and underneath was painted in large characters, GENERAL WASHINGTON.” Irving was writing before the Americanized spelling of words like scepter, pioneered by Noah Webster, had fully taken hold, a reminder that the transformations the story describes were still very much ongoing.
Rip wakes from his torpor not just on any day, but on an election day, which allows Irving to magnify his hero’s disorientation. The men with whom he used to gossip at the inn are nowhere to be found. “In place of these, a lean, bilious-looking fellow, with his pockets full of handbills, was haranguing vehemently about rights of citizens—elections—members of congress—liberty—Bunker’s Hill—heroes of seventy-six—and other words, which were a perfect Babylonish jargon to the bewildered Van Winkle.” When the townspeople encounter Rip, wizened and unrecognizable, they buffet him with questions he can’t comprehend: For which side did he vote? Is he “Federal or Democrat?” Rip tries to quiet them by pledging his allegiance to King George—only to be denounced as a Tory.
Irving was clearly fascinated—and perhaps not a little frightened—by the question of what it means for a nation to spring into existence. What could unite this bustling, disputatious new country? It was founded on noble ideas (rights of citizens, representative government), and the Revolution had produced its own mythology (Bunker’s Hill, heroes of seventy-six). But could ideas hold a country together? In the early decades of American history, these were open questions. They still are.
As a storyteller, Irving was particularly concerned with how America would fare without a common culture. He worried, the scholar Howard Horwitz has written, “that the legendary transmission of tales and thus of cultural memory was fragile in the new republic.” In “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” also published in The Sketch Book, Irving wryly explains that the village of the title was rife with ghost stories because it was an old Dutch village; elsewhere in the country, such stories were uncommon: “There is no encouragement for ghosts in most of our villages, for they have scarcely had time to finish their first nap and turn themselves in their graves, before their surviving friends have travelled away from the neighborhood; so that when they turn out at night to walk their rounds, they have no acquaintance left to call upon.” Americans were too rootless and restless, too eager to seek their fortune—they didn’t stay in one place long enough to be haunted by ghosts.
“Rip Van Winkle” is a story about the young nation making room for a figure from the past. In an unpublished fragment written while Irving was serving as minister to Spain under President John Tyler—this was a time when literary achievement could lead to a choice diplomatic appointment—he described what he was up to: “When I first wrote the Legend of Rip van Winkle my thought had been for some time turned towards giving a colour of romance and tradition to interesting points of our national scenery which is so deficient generally in our country.”
While the events of the story’s first half (the nap, the return) remain familiar, the less famous denouement is crucial to understanding Irving’s purpose. The village is initially skeptical of Rip, but eventually his identity is established and his fantastical account confirmed. Peter Vanderdonk, “the most ancient inhabitant of the village, and well versed in all the wonderful events and traditions of the neighbourhood,” explains that it is widely known that Hendrick Hudson returns at regular intervals to the Catskills “to revisit the scenes of his enterprise, and keep a guardian eye upon the river”—and to bowl a few frames. His strange story thus corroborated, Rip is welcomed back to the village. He seems more relieved to be free of his wife’s tyranny than that of the English—to have “got his neck out of the yoke of matrimony.” (Irving’s portrait of Dame Van Winkle, who is never granted so much as a first name, has made the story a ready target for feminist critique.)
Irving was an inventive stylist, with tricks up his ruffled sleeve. The tale of Rip Van Winkle is nested within various layers of storytelling, to a degree that can be confounding even for contemporary readers accustomed to such authorial gamesmanship. The Sketch Book was published under the name Geoffrey Crayon, one of Irving’s literary alter egos. “Rip Van Winkle,” though, opens with a prefatory note explaining that this story was discovered among the papers of the late historian Diedrich Knickerbocker—another of Irving’s alter egos. In a note appended to the story, Knickerbocker reveals that he has talked to Rip himself and is certain his account is true.
Knickerbocker allows, however, that it took some time for Rip to arrive at the version we’ve just read. “He was observed, at first, to vary on some points every time he told it, which was, doubtless, owing to his having so recently awaked. It at last settled down precisely to the tale I have related, and not a man, woman, or child in the neighbourhood but knew it by heart.” That didn’t mean they all believed it. “Some always pretended to doubt the reality of it, and insisted that Rip had been out of his head,” Knickerbocker writes, before assuring the reader that the old Dutch inhabitants of the village “almost universally gave it full credit.” Almost universally—lurking over Knickerbocker’s shoulder, Irving raises an eyebrow: This historian is credulous, and not entirely reliable.
What is the purpose of this layering and undermining of the story’s authenticity? In the end, what matters isn’t whether the story is true, but rather that everyone in the village knew it by heart. Rip returns to his favorite old haunt, the inn, where he tells his story to all who will listen: “He took his place once more on the bench at the inn-door, and was reverenced as one of the patriarchs of the village, and a chronicle of the old times ‘before the war.’ ” He’s become a link to the past, a living connection to the history that predates the Revolution.
The remarkable achievement of Irving’s fiction is that it solved the very problem it identified: “Rip Van Winkle” itself became a story that the nation knew by heart. It propelled The Sketch Book to blockbuster sales and Irving to international acclaim, a first for an American author. The story was widely anthologized, including in McGuffey Readers, making it a staple of American childhood. It was also adapted into a popular stage play, with the same actor, Joseph Jefferson, in the title role for an astonishing four-decade run. The production, which toured the country, made its debut just after the Civil War, when its pastoral setting and evocation of the Founding may have soothed audiences still scarred by sectional conflict.
What was it about Rip? As the critic Donald R. Anderson has written, he embodies few traditional American values: “He has an aversion to hard work; he is an apparently inadequate family man; he is, from what we are told, without those Leatherstocking virtues of courage and inventiveness; he is lacking in Yankee shrewdness; he is not a ‘winner.’ ”
Perhaps this is what made him so beloved. Irving may have intuited, at the dawn of American history, that the nation would need a foil for flintier heroes like Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, self-improvers like the Benjamin Franklin of the Autobiography, and secular saints such as Parson Weems’s George Washington.
Herman Melville, one of Rip’s admirers, called him a “good-natured good-for-nothing.” That’s an American archetype, too. He presides over Hart Crane’s modernist masterpiece The Bridge, published in 1930, at another moment when the nation’s past and present seemed to be sundering: “And Rip forgot the office hours, / and he forgot the pay; / Van Winkle sweeps a tenement / way down on Avenue A.” In his influential study Love and Death in the American Novel, Leslie Fiedler saw Rip’s “old scapegrace charm” in Jiggs, the hero of the long-running comic strip Bringing Up Father, and in Dagwood Bumstead, of Blondie . This past spring, when the actor George Wendt died, it occurred to me that Norm Peterson of Cheers was a descendant of Rip, too: the man at the corner stool, adored by all but his long-suffering wife, avoiding the responsibilities of work and home in favor of one more flagon.
The Cheers finale, which aired in 1993, was watched by an estimated an estimated 93 million Americans. It’s impossible to imagine a television series, let alone a short story, uniting that share of the country today. Irving’s animating concern in “Rip Van Winkle” is also a problem for the present: Can a nation with no common stories, and a fleeting sense of its own history, hope to hang together? Rip has wandered back into the mountains. Maybe it’s time to wake him up and hear what he has to say.
This article appears in the November 2025 print edition with the headline “America’s Most Famous Nap.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
