华盛顿·欧文的另一篇短篇小说《睡谷的传说》(The legend of the Sleepy Hollow)与《瑞普·凡·温克尔》堪称姊妹篇,影响较广。在这些以荷兰殖民地时期的乡村为背景的故事里,欧文用轻快、幽默和带有浪漫色彩的笔调把朴实敦厚、知足常乐的民风展示给读者。作品含蓄地讽刺了殖民地时期陈规陋习和当时唯利是图的商业气氛。这两篇小说均包含在他的著名散文集《见闻札记》中。Rip Van Winkle is a short story by Washington Irving published in 1819, as well as the name of the story's fictional protagonist. It was part of a collection of stories entitled The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon. The story has become a part of cultural mythology: even for those who have never read the original story, "Rip Van Winkle" means either a person who sleeps for a long period of time, or one who is inexplicably (perhaps even blissfully) unaware of current warning: Plot and/or ending details story, written while Irving was staying with his sister Sarah and her husband Henry van Wart in Birmingham, England, is set in the years before and after the American Revolutionary War. A villager of Dutch descent escapes his nagging wife by wandering up Kaaterskill Clove near his home town of Palenville, New York in the Catskill Mountains. After various adventures (in one version of the tale, he encounters the spirits of Henry Hudson and his crew playing ninepins at the top of Kaaterskill Falls), he settles down under a shady tree and falls asleep. He wakes up 20 years later and returns to his village. He finds out that his wife is dead and his close friends have died in a war or gone somewhere else. He immediately gets into trouble when he hails himself a loyal subject of George III, not knowing that in the meantime the American Revolution has taken place and he is not supposed to be a loyal subject of any Hanoverian any end story is a close adaptation of "Peter Klaus the Goatherd" by . Nachtigal, which is a shorter story set in a German is also close to Karl Katz, a German fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm. This story is almost identical. One difference is when he sees dwarfs playing a game of ninepins in a mountain meadow, he joins the game. The dwarfs give him a magic drink that makes him fall asleep for twenty years. It is implied that the dwarfs are teaching him a lesson about story is also remarkably similar to the ancient Jewish story about Honi the Circle-Maker who falls asleep after berating a very old man for planting a fig tree (which traditionally takes 70 years to mature). He sleeps under the tree, covered by the brush and out of sight for 70 years. When he awakens, he finds a fully mature tree and that he has a grandson. When nobody believes that he is Honi, he wishes death upon choice of "Van Winkle" for the character's name may have been influenced by the fact that Irving's New York publisher was C. S. Van story is also remarkably similar to a 3rd century AD Chinese tale of Ranka, as retold in Lionel Giles in A Gallery of Chinese an essayist Irving was not interested in the meaning of nature like Emerson or self-inspection like Montaigne. He observered the vanishing pasts of old Europe, the riverside Creole villages of Louisiana, the old Pawnee hunting grounds of Oklahoma, and how ladies fashion moves from one extreme to the other. 'Geoffrey Crayon' was his most prolific fictional mask. Irving once wrote: "There rise authors now and then, who seem proof against the mutability of language, because they have rooted themselves in the unchanging principles of human nature." He was the earliest literary figure of the American abroad, who appeared in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., in which also Irving's best-known story 'Rip Van Winkle' was included. It was based on a German folktale, set in the Dutch culture of Pre-Revolutionary War in New York State.如果你是研究他的话,就看看这段,有关于他作为个essayist的风格,也提到了rip van winkle