Rip Van Winkle And The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow

Washington Irving is best known as the father of American literature. Irving developed an intricate, romantic, comical, and ironic writing style. Irving’s writing style is fictional. Irving helped established an American identity with his writing style. Irving is best known for his short stories “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”. In the short story, “Rip Van Winkle” the main character Rip Van Winkle sleeps for twenty years. Winkle wakes up to a greatly changed world as Irving eloquently describes in this excerpt from “Rip Van Winkle” , “…through thickets of birch, sassafras, and witch hazel, and sometimes tipped up or entangled by the wild grapevines that twisted their coils and tendrils from tree to tree, and spread a kind
It’s these great visuals and settings that actually allow the reader to be in the characters shoes. Irving was great at depicting a scene with ease as shown in another excerpt from “Rip Van Winkle”, “…they came by a hollow like a small amphitheater, surrounded by perpendicular precipices, over the brinks of which impending trees shot their branches, so that you only caught glimpses of the azure sky and the bright evening cloud” (Irving 150). This quote shows that Irving payed attention to fine detail to depict what the character sees. Irving’s other short story “The Legend of The Sleepy Hollow” is about a man name Ichabod Crane who tries to marry a beautiful and rich women named Katrina. Ichabod throughout the whole story is trying to woo Katrina so he can marry her. Irving is famous for the theme of undesired love in his fictional pieces; this theme was immensely popular in fictional American literature because it is what people desired at the time. In the following excerpt from “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” the reader can infer that Crane desires Katrina, but Katrina may or may not feel the same towards Crane, which reveals the theme of undesired