Short Story Review - Rip Van Winkle

I can only talk about myself and my own stories for so long, you know.

For the past year or so, I've been attempting to read a short story per day, from the best short stories I can find. I don't look for the easy ones, or too many modern ones. I go back a hundred years or so to stories that don't seem to dry up and blow away like so many autumn leaves. The evergreen stories.

This is one of them, and I'd like to share you a summary, as well as my own impressions. There's lots of good ones to share, so you might see these in place of my own stories while they're still being written.

Short Story Summary

Rip Van Winkle was a likeable guy who lived in New York. He lacked discipline, with a wife who wanted him to be something more, and who scolded him at every opportunity to get out and get his work done.

This constant criticism made him very sad, and one day he went up in the Catskill Mountains hunting with his dog Wolf to escape her. What happened next?

You probably already know, unless you've been living under a rock yourself.

If you don't, I won't tell you. Go ahead and listen to or read the story here.

My Take

This one take a moderately advanced reader, because of the thickness of the language, but the story is good. It's a little bit of a fantasy fulfillment for me, particularly during an election year, when the temptation is great to simply hibernate until it's all over.

Although what happened to him at first glance seems to be some tragic mischief or supernatural trickery, it turned out as much a blessing as a curse.

Something particularly interesting about the writer, Washington Irving - the beginning of the written story claims that this story was written instead by a Diedrich Knickerbocker, who was dead at the time of the publication of this story. Irving invented the pseudonym of the writer and then pretended he was dead in order to drum up more interest and sales of his story - similar to a viral marketing campaign today.

He placed advertisements in the paper for a 'missing person' with the name of Diedrich Knickerbocker. He also placed a notice, supposedly from the hotel Knickerbocker went missing from that, if Knickerbocker was not found, he would publish the manuscript left in the room in order to pay the missing man's bill.

Sneaky! I like it! Enjoy.