The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

The pitch

A gangling, greedy schoolmaster courts a rich farmer’s daughter, loses her to the local strongman, and rides home alone past the haunted bridge. Washington Irving wrote it in 1820 and effectively invented the American ghost story in the process: a specific valley, a specific bridge, and a rider with no head coming up fast behind.

What to know

It is one story, about twelve thousand words, and most kids finish it in a sitting — which is why it works on readers who bounce off long books. The sentences are the obstacle, not the plot: Irving writes 1820 English, long and looping and stuffed with jokes, and a grade-5 reader will meet words they have to ride past. Read aloud it goes down easily from about eight, and the last four pages are worth saving for the dark. This edition carries the twelve wood engravings from the 1864 Putnam printing, by F. O. C. Darley and by Hudson River School painters — William Hart, John F. Kensett, Emanuel Leutze — who had actually stood in that valley.

Life when written

Irving wrote it in Birmingham, England, in an industrial city of smoke and foundries, staying with his sister Sarah and her husband after the family import business went bankrupt in 1818 and left him with nothing to fall back on but writing. He set the story in the Hudson valley he had known as a boy — Tarrytown, the Old Dutch Church, the mill-pond — places a homesick man could still walk in his head from three thousand miles away. The Sketch Book came out in seven instalments in 1819 and 1820, sold on both sides of the Atlantic at once because Irving feared pirated copies, and it made him the first American author Europe took seriously.