"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," also from Irving's The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., is the second of the two Irving stories that have remained popular since their publication in 1819-1820. In the upstate New York town of Sleepy Hollow, pompous schoolteacher Ichabod Crane gives up courting the village's most beautiful and wealthy young woman when he is frightened by a Headless Horseman.

The Leatherstocking Tales, by James Fenimore Cooper, is a series of five novels set in upper New York State and featuring the character of Natty Bumppo, a traditional American hero of the wilderness. In The Pioneers, published in 1823, Natty Bumppo grows disgusted with civilization and heads for the West.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "Kubla Khan," written in 1797, is said to have been composed during an opium-induced sleep. Critic Deanna C. Turner believes that Irving drew heavily...