The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Rip Van Winkle, and Other Gothic Tales

He was the greatest American writer of his time: mentor to Poe, Longfellow, and Hawthorne, his country's first professional author, transformed copyright laws to give writers and artists more representation, and cultivated a previously non-existent literary culture throughout the United States. He was idolized internationally, and adored by great authors of the day, including Byron, Walter Scott, and his greatest supporter, Charles Dickens. His works and influence have left their mark on American and even global culture. Largely misunderstood due to his relatively moderate politics, his courtly personality, and his literary sentimentalism, Irving - once America's most popular author - is due for rediscovery. His was the complex personality of an existentially anxious, emotionally complex man disturbed by his fame and haunted by loneliness. These disquieting themes course through his Gothic tales - "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," "Rip Van Winkle," "The Devil and Tom Walker," and more - tales haunted by spectres of anxiety.While infrequently counted among the great American supernaturalists - writers like Poe, Lovecraft, Hawthorne, and Bierce - Irving's fictional oeuvre is primarily devoted to speculative fiction: ghost stories, weird tales, fantasies, and horror. In fact, of the sixty-one short stories he penned, nearly forty of them have a supernatural or macabre basis. And there's far more than the Headless Horseman to frighten readers: ghost pirates, vengeful Doppelgangers, guillotined women, haunted treasure chests, hanged men's ghosts, rural superstitions, dancing furniture, portraits with moving eyes, hellhounds, goblin horses, enchanted princesses, supernatural caves of wonder, haunted paintings, ghostly nuns, spectral crusaders, and possessed bedchambers are among his many bogeys.His universe is among the sunniest in horror fiction - brighter certainly than Le Fanu's, Hodgson's, or Stoker's - but its sunnyside hides a dark posterior, engulfed in shadow and swallowed up in night. Irving is the very definition of one who whistles past a graveyard, bringing sangfroid into spaces of anxiety and self-doubt, and while his characters are grotesque, bordering on the burlesque - like the spindly Ichabod Crane, the bearded Rip Van Winkle, or the leather-trousered Bold Dragoon - they cannot entirely hide the very real fears that they represent. Irving's horrors aren't likely to make you jump, but they might just keep you awake, or fill your waking life with strange dreams. You may look twice at the twisted shadows beckoning you towards an unexplored street at night, or find yourself compelled to wander down an unfamiliar hiking trail, or staring out the window at night, questioning your life's path. At its kindest, Irving's world is one of narcotic daydreams that seduce and intoxicate; at its worst, it is waking up later that night - alone, confused, and hungover. His fantasies are pleasantly seductive, but like Rip Van Winkle's "wicked flagon," they ...