his year, for the big U.S. 250, I’ve been producing a series called “The Jiffty 250” that looks at how New York looks at itself during the nation’s semiquincentennial.
And as part of this research of this tumultuous time in U.S. history, I realized there was someone who slept through it all – Rip Van Winkle. He met some mysterious Dutchmen in the woods, drank a little too much of the “wicked flagon,” enjoyed too “much of the flavor of excellent Hollands,” and passed out for two decades.
He woke up to find his gun rusted, his dog gone, and his country changed without him. A painting of King George III was now George Washington. Washington Irving (George’s namesake) published that story in 1819, and it still feels relevant as we continue to blink and discover the world seems to change so quickly around us.
That’s why Season Two of The Jiffy Book Club is heading into the Catskills – in search of Rip, but also of Washington Irving and the Hudson Valley where he became one of the most famous American writers ever, and helped create a vision of “upstate New York” that still persists today.
We’re reading “Rip Van Winkle’s Republic: Washington Irving in History and Memory,” a collection of essays edited by historians Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg, with contributions from a dozen scholars reconsidering Irving’s outsized, and often underappreciated, place in American culture – as a satirist, antiquarian, biographer, world traveler, literary celebrity, and arguably the man who invented the Hudson Valley as a tourist destination just as a tourism industry started to take shape.
The plan is the same as how we read “Glorious Country,” by Victoria Johnson: We start with a shared reading window, companion newsletter issues, a short audio series, and a self-guided Jiffy Jaunt through Rip Van Winkle’s Hudson Valley – Sleepy Hollow, Sunnyside, and the Catskills.
Season Two begins this autumn. Add your email above and we’ll let you know the moment reading opens. Welcome, in advance, to Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle’s Republic.”
