The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and Other Stories

A lanky, superstitious schoolmaster courts the richest girl in a drowsy Dutch valley — until a moonlit ride home brings him face to face with the Headless Horseman. Washington Irving gave American literature its first enduring legends, written in England out of homesickness for the Hudson he had left. The volume closes with Old Christmas, his four sketches of a Yorkshire country-house Christmas from The Sketch Book. Ninety-98 plates, from Bierstadt and Inness to the Hudson Valley and Niagara, give the drowsy countryside of these tales its native ground.