Two hundred years ago this summer, Washington Irving sat down one night and poured out the tale of an 18th-century Hudson Valley layabout who wandered up into the Catskill Mountains, drank some magical cider and fell asleep for 20 years, only to wake up and find himself in a brand-new country called the United States. That story, “Rip Van Winkle,” along with other tall tales like “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” helped establish Irving's claim to being the first genuinely American author, a founder of a tradition marked by folksy vernacular, rapturous paeans to nature and a stretched relationship to the truth.
https://ift.tt/2MDGU3T
No comments:
Post a Comment