Rip Van Winkle is a short story by the American author Washington Irving first published in 1819. Set in the years before and after the American Revolutionary War in a village at the foot of New York's Catskill Mountains, it follows a Dutch-American villager named Rip Van Winkle who falls asleep in the Catskill Mountains and wakes up 20 years later, having missed the American Revolution. Irving wr...