With the publication of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent (18]9-]829), Washington Irving is believed by many to have created the genre of the short story in America, mixing superstition and history, the European tradition of fairy tales and folktales, and local Indian legends. The often humorous and ironic, but also matter-of-fact, tone in these stories, which is the familiar form of legend, is woven into a tapestry with the very real corporeal world. In Irving's rural America, farmyards arc filled with gobbling turkeys and guinea fowl, yet ghostly tales rule the imagination.

The glorious heart of this collection of stories within stories, tales within tales, is The Legend of Sleepy Hollow."This fable about a gullible schoolteacher who thinks quite highly of himself is also a lesson in the power of the imagination and of the potent influences of storytelling. And so it begins that Ichabod Crane journeys to one of the dreamy, bewitched villages in New York State's Hudson Valley, a drowsy, enchanted region where even "good people ... arc given to all kinds of marvelous beliefs; subject to trances and visions .... There was a contagion in the very air that blew from that haunted region; it breathed forth an atmosphere of dreams and fancies infecting all the land."

Ichabod Crane has both a runaway steed and a runaway imagination, but even his hunger for the marvelous is more than matched when he comes to this rural village where people have an enormous appetite for stories, particularly for those concerning the miraculous - whether they be "the twilight superstitions" that surround natural phenomena such as shooting stars and meteors, or stories of haunted bridges and haunted houses, and of a haunted horseman who long ago lost his head but not his fury.

"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" begins in the very real geography of upstate New York, a rich landscape of farms and fields that look down upon "the mighty Hudson," an area peppered with towns whose names we can still find on the map. Irving is a master at depicting rustic life, and it is with a firm foothold in the natural world that the element of the supernatural is rooted. Nature itself, in Irving's hands, has stupendous effects: " ... to inhale the witching influences of the air and begin to grow imaginative - to dream dreams, and see apparitions," such are the results of living in a "spellbound" region so marvelous, anything seems conceivable within its confines.

The inhabitants of Sleepy Hollow find their way to the dim and dusky world of the fantastic on very real roads, over very real bridges. Yet there is magic in the very air, especially for those who look beneath the surface of everyday life, beneath the brambles and alders, and for those who listen to what music echoes beyond the songs of crickets and bullfrogs. The mesmerizing effect this world of beast and bloom have upon the hapless Ichabod Crane is evident from the start:

Then, as he wended his way, by swamp and stream and awful woodland, to the farm house where he happened to be quartered, every sound of nature, at that witching hour, fluttered his excited imagination: the moan of the whip-poor-will from the hill side; the boding cry of the tree toad, that harbinger of storm; the dreary hooting of the screech owl; or the sudden rustling in the thicket, of birds frightened from their roost. The fire flies, too, which sparkled most vividly in the darkest places, now and then startled him, as one of uncommon brightness would stream across his path; and if, by chance, a huge blockhead of a beetle came winging his blundering flight against him, the poor varlet was ready to give up the ghost, with the idea that he was struck with a witch's token.

In Irving's Sleepy Hollow, the real and imagined collide, conspire, and become interchangeable. It is a land of contradiction that has an undercurrent of hellfire and mischief at its core. Perhaps it is human nature, however, rather than the doings of goblins and ghouls, that is most dangerous: For love can transform men into demons, and gluttony and greed can bring down even the most good-natured and foolish of men. What begins as a rivalry between Ichabod Crane and the local hero and practical joker, Brom Bones, as they vie for the hand of the lovely and wealthy Katrina Van Tassel, ends as a contest of the imagination. It is a brilliant, funny, and brutal battle, one which takes place in the characters' minds as well as in the dark, unexplored woods.

The books Irving's schoolmaster carries with him on his journey, Cotton Mather's History of Witchcraft, a New England Almanack, and a book of dreams and fortune telling - stand together as a guidepost for all American literature to follow, from Hawthorne to Updike to Stephen King, plaiting images of our beloved landscape to our darkest dreams, and joining the reaches of our imaginations to the rugged roads we travel, the fields we walk upon, and the possibilities we find at every stony turn, especially when the hour reaches midnight in the village of Sleepy Hollow.