Two writers at the very beginning of the American short story tradition, Washington Irving (1783–1859) and William Austin (1778–1843), produced stories which not only constitute the foundations of a genre but also deal with the foundations of modern American society itself. Other stories by Irving and Austin approach the genre by way of Romance, parable and sketch, and prepared the ground for the greater achievement of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Irving's ‘Rip Van Winkle’ (1819) and Austin's ‘Peter Rugg, the Missing Man’ (1824) also provide paradigmatic examples of the way the short story frequently – one might almost say typically – takes a moment of crisis as its subject matter: the moment which marks a radical change in the life of an individual, a group or, as here, a whole nation. Their small handful of other stories also tend to deal with crisis, usually psychological or moral, by way of ‘Romance’ (defined by Hawthorne as ‘a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other’) or the semi-supernatural or ‘fantastic’. The term ‘tale’ was commonly used in the nineteenth century for this kind of story.

Washington Irving

Irving's ‘Rip Van Winkle’ is one of only three short stories or tales, as he more often called them, in The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819–20), a collection mostly made up of essays, sketches and anecdotes, many of which are not on American topics but grew out of Irving's travels in Britain between 1815 and 1817.