This Week in Literary History: Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” is Published

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Literary History newsletter, sign up here.

In the early 1800s, when people named their cliques, Washington Irving was “sort of a ringleader” of a group of men in Manhattan who called themselves “the Lads of Kilkenny.” The Lads were described by historian Edwin Burrows as “a loosely knit pack of literary-minded young blades out for a good time.” Which they clearly had: in 1807, Irving and some of these friends launched a short-lived, comedic magazine of literature and politics called Salmagundi; or The Whim-whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq. & Others, in which they, among other things, were the first to call New York City “Gotham.” (It was not a compliment.)

Irving’s first novel, A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809), was similarly satirical, purporting to be written by a Dutch-American historian in breeches, and after a guerrilla marketing campaign, the book made Irving famous. By the way: Irving had borrowed the name “Knickerbocker” from a friend, but his use of it in this book led to the word being attached to both the old-fashioned pants and the New York aristocracy of the time, when in turn led to it being adopted as the name of a certain New York athletic club, the “New York Knickerbockers,” in 1842, and eventually would be adopted by a basketball team, ahem, the New York Knicks (in 5).

Anyway, Irving became a magazine editor, but after the War of 1819, he found himself in England, unemployed and bankrupt. So he wrote, as writers do, and on June 23, 1819, Irving published the first volume of the first American edition of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. This volume, first out of what would be an eventual seven, included what would become his most iconic story, “Rip Van Winkle,” presented as “a posthumous writing of Diedrich Knickerbocker” (remember him?), a frame within a frame. (If you’re crying out into your coffee that Irving’s most iconic story is “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” it’s certainly arguable; that one was published in a later volume of the same book.)

The Sketch Book was a big success, even in England, Lord Byron was a particular fan, despite Irving not intending to publish the stories in his adopted country, writing in a preface to a later edition that he thought “much of their contents could be interesting only to American readers, and, in truth, being deterred by the severity with which American productions had been treated by the British press.” Read: you can thank Washington Irving for proving to the Brits that Americans could do literature.

Now, both “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” are considered some of the earliest (if not the “first,” whatever that might mean) great American short stories, and have permeated through the culture ever since, you know them, even if you don’t know them. So if you haven’t actually read “Rip Van Winkle” lately, or ever, it’s worth a go.