Irving's Big Bash

With a new intro for the classic collection

It was the 200th anniversary of Washington Irving’s Sketch Book collection, containing “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” that put this place on the map. Literally, the story came first and the village name officially came much, much later (in 1996!). The villages of Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow, which almost coexist as one, save for the fact that are actually bounded by different towns, decided to throw a really big ongoing party in our namesake’s honor. My part of this was being heavily involved in coordinating our first ever Lit Fest. (Which we thought we would continue in subsequent years, but um…pandemic.)

“No ordinary lit fest” as we tagged it, was an astounding success in the spring of 2019, and it just so happened I had been asked to write a new intro for that Irving collection for a new anniversary edition out by that time. I’m so grassroots, the way I sell books best is setting up a table at a fair. But here as well is this gorgeous flexibound edition on sale online if you care to read the Legend for yourself.

Newsflash from the future—here in 2024 now with an update that this flexibound edition is nearly out of copies, so I wanted to share some excerpts from the introduction that were reconfigured for The Hudson Independent newspaper:

• Installment One on Irving’s life reworking these stories for a 1848 reissue from his riverside retirement home at Sunnyside

• Two about The Sketch Book and its contents

• and Three about his much fan-fared death in 1859.

Finally, I offer Installment Four, which wasn’t shared with the local paper, but I will reproduce here—about the aftermath in the place that would be named after the fiction, Sleepy Hollow:

The area north of Tarrytown including Sleepy Hollow is incorporated as North Tarrytown in 1874. Sunnyside remains in the Irving family until 1945, when they sell it to John D. Rockefeller, Jr. with the intent of preserving it as a museum, now owned and operated by Historic Hudson Valley. When the waterfront General Motors production plant shuts down in 1996, North Tarrytown trustees vote (not without objectors) to bank on a more intangible product, the legend of Washington Irving and his most enduring “Legend.” They change the village name to Sleepy Hollow at last. 

Ichabod and bully Brom Bones are characters every local child knows whether or not they’ve actually read the tale, and the Headless Horseman their mascot – quite literally. A man in a headless costume trots out on horseback for everything from the St. Patrick’s Day parade to the start of the high school homecoming game. The villain is evident on orange street signs and a stained glass window on Village Hall from local Donovan Glass company. The Hudson Valley Writers Center, repurposing an old chestnut-paneled train station in the Philipse Manor neighborhood, publishes the Slapering Hol chapbook, Dutch for Sleepy Hollow, and hosts regular readings and workshops – always mentioning the legacy of Irving in their letters to writers.

The village of Irvington now boasts a life-size bronze reclining statue of Rip Van Winkle on a patch of grass along Main Street. “Bearded and bewildered,” writes Susan Hodara in The New York Times in 2014, when the region’s fame further escalates due to an invasion of migrating Brooklynites and the second season of Sleepy Hollow show on the Fox network, only tangentially linked to the story (and filmed in a studio in North Carolina, though residents are proud to point out some interstitial aerial footage). 

Come summer, Jim Logan, superintendent of the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, is busy prepping for his busiest season – and the region’s most photogenic – when thousands of visitors will wander the hilly grounds looking for one of its most famous residents. About ten guides are kept on rotation to herd the numerous thematic daytime tours and nighttime lantern tours on offer in autumn. “Legend” hunters often ask about the whereabouts of Katrina. There is a Catriena (Ecker) Van Tessel in the adjacent Burying Grounds of the Old Dutch Church, whose name, Logan says, “Irving most certainly lifted,” but she was most decidedly not a love interest as she died when he was ten. He won’t fess up to seeing any ghosts; rather, Logan says, cemeteries are for the living.

“We kind of own Halloween here because of Irving,” says Michael Lord of the holiday that lasts a month. 

At Sunnyside, October weekends are dedicated to The Legend Behind Legend, when a costumed interpreter tells a spooky story on the rolling grounds Irving helped design; in a small theater, guests watch a shadow puppet rendition of the classic; and within the wisteria-vined gingerbread-like house, they behold the iconic portrait of the older Irving in his fur-collared housecoat and that lovely Putnam desk, fit trophy for his lifetime achievement. 

Collections manager Jessa Krick has taken to gathering twentieth-century artifacts inspired by Irving’s “Legend.” “It helps to show the enduring appeal of the story, and frankly, how far removed from the actual text some of the representations are,” Krick says. “I like to think of it as a game of cultural/literary ‘telephone,’ except that it’s still recognizable – or even more recognizable – in the altered form (thanks, Disney!). Like many classics, the story can stand up to different artistic treatments and re-imaginings, inspire updates, spin-offs, ‘modernization’ and faux backstories.” 

Among the many derivatives in her catalogue: “Legend”-themed postage stamps designed by Leonard Everett Fisher and first issued in North Tarrytown, October 1974; two boxes of Fruit Snackers™ distributed by the Brock Candy Company, 1995, with an abridged version of the story on the back and the horseman on the front; Disney soundtrack album, 1963; Horseman action figure from the Tim Burton version of the movie, made for McFarlane Toys for Paramount Pictures, 2000; playbill for the musical “Sleepy Hollow,” which, Krick notes, “had a very short run” in 1948. “The Legend” has also inspired an opera, piano music (1915) and, more recently, a ballet. 

You can’t help but wonder what Irving – who worried in his family letters about the threat of being forgotten – would think of all this. Of his impressive output, The Sketch Book survives best, rarely out of print in its nearly two-hundred-year history. And of the thirty-five pieces within, his two short stories “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” tend to mark the limits of what contemporary readers know about Irving. Though regarded as the father of the American short story, he more often wrote in other forms. His most famous ghost story, with that tease of an open ending, actually reads as more of a comedy. Spending time with this collection promises a more complete picture of the actual man, this cosmopolitan, world-traveling homebody whose daydreams prefer going back more than forward. These stories once fed a fledgling America’s hunger for its own mythologies (however borrowed they were); their longevity testifies to our ongoing desire to keep them, contort and retell them. 

And, even more exciting news:

If you can’t find copies of the now-scarce 2017 edition, I’m created my own “best of” edition of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow & Other Stories collection, with a new intro, original cover design (incorporating a few female artists of the Hudson River School landscape movement), and ending with blank “sketch pages” for you to insert your own musings and drawings. I hope you enjoy Sleepy Hollow, inK.’s first foray into book publishing—there will be more!