The Legend of Sleepy Hollow — Full Reading | The Open Book Reads

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820) by Washington Irving, read aloud in full with the text on screen, from the drowsy valley to the final postscript. Some thirty years after the Revolution, in a sheltered Dutch valley on the east bank of the Hudson, the people still see strange sights and tell of a figure on horseback without a head. Into this valley comes Ichabod Crane, the schoolmaster, a tall, loose-jointed man from Connecticut with a large appetite and an even larger belief in ghosts. He teaches the children, leads the psalm singing and sets his heart on Katrina Van Tassel, the only daughter of a rich farmer. His rival is Brom Bones, the boldest rider in the countryside. Then comes an invitation to an autumn party at the Van Tassel farm, and a long ride home in the dark. If you know the story from the screen, the book may surprise you. Ichabod is a schoolmaster, not a constable, and there is no witchcraft plot. Much of the tale is gentle comedy: harvest tables, a country dance, and an awkward rider on a borrowed plow horse named Gunpowder. Irving never settles what happened on that road, and neither will we. Washington Irving was born in New York City in 1783 and named after George Washington. In 1798, when yellow fever sent him out of the city, he stayed with a friend in Tarrytown and came to know the hollow beyond the village. In 1815 he went to England to help with his brothers' import business. By 1818 the firm had failed, and he decided to write for a living. He wrote the Legend in England. It appeared in 1820 in the sixth number of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., a collection of essays and stories that Irving issued in New York in seven installments over 1819 and 1820, under a pen name. The first number had included Rip Van Winkle. The Sketch Book was one of the first works of American fiction to find a wide audience abroad, and Irving is often called the first American to earn his living by his pen. He later made his home at Sunnyside, near Tarrytown, and he is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. In 1996 the neighboring village of North Tarrytown voted to take the name Sleepy Hollow. This video reads Project Gutenberg eBook 41, which gives the Legend on its own rather than the whole Sketch Book. As in 1820, the tale is presented as "found among the papers of the late Diedrich Knickerbocker," the invented Dutch historian of Irving's earlier History of New York, and opens with four lines from James Thomson's poem The Castle of Indolence. It closes with Knickerbocker's short postscript. All of it is read aloud, with separate voices for Ichabod, Brom Bones and Baltus Van Tassel, after a short spoken introduction written for this edition. Illustrations were made for this edition, and the words appear on screen as they are read. Only the Project Gutenberg header and licence are left out. Content note: the story describes Black characters, a messenger, a fiddler and the onlookers at a dance, in the condescending language and caricature of its time, and mentions an "Indian chief" as a wizard of local legend. The ghostly ride is suspenseful but not gory. Chapters 0:00 Welcome 1:29 The Legend of Sleepy Hollow 1:21:50 Postscript.: Found in the Handwriting of Mr. Knickerbocker. 1:24:55 Thank you for listening ── About this video ── Text: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820), from The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., Project Gutenberg eBook 41. Public domain in the United States. This channel is not affiliated with or endorsed by Project Gutenberg, or with any film or television adaptation. Narration: synthetic (text-to-speech) voices. The introduction is original to The Open Book. Images: illustrations created for this edition. Texts read on this channel are in the U.S. public domain and presented for educational and cultural purposes. Subscribe and keep the page turning. Which line stayed with you? Tell us in the comments, along with the book you'd like to hear next. #SleepyHollow #Audiobook #TheOpenBookReads