“Before Daybreak”: The Unfinished Quest of Washington Irving’s Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow

Abstract

Washington Irving’s tale, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”, was the last story in his collection of literary sketches published as The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. in 1819–20. As his most enduring and popular work, The Sketch Book followed a ten year hiatus after his spoofing A History of New York (1809), written pseudonymously under the name of Diedrich Knickerbocker, like Geoffrey Crayon, another of Irving’s alter egos. Knickerbocker’s importance is that he is a fictive persona whose writings reappear as twice-told tales throughout Irving’s corpus, and allow Irving a way to distance authorial voice.1 In The Sketch Book, “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” are the only two sketches recounted as “found among the papers of the late Diedrich Knickerbocker” (LSH, p. 329).2