Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving, unabridged republishing of a classic tale. "Rip Van Winkle" is a short story by American author Washington Irving published in 1819. Written while Irving was living in Birmingham, England, it was part of a collection entitled The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. Although the story is set in New York's Catskill Mountains, Irving later admitted, "When I wrote the story, I had never been on the Catskills." The story's title character is a Dutch-American villager living around the time of the American Revolutionary War.