The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is a short story by Washington Irving contained in his collection The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., written while he was living in Birmingham, England, and first published in 1820. The story is set in the Dutch settlement of Tarry Town, New York in a secluded glen called Sleepy Hollow, around the year 1790. It tells the story of Ichabod Crane, a schoolmaster from Connecticut who is scared away from town by Abraham Brom Bones Van Brunt, his rival in love for the hand of eighteen-year-old Katrina Van Tassel, daughter of Baltus Van Tassel and a fifth-generation Dutch immigrant herself. The legend featured in the story is that of The Headless Horseman, the ghost of a Hessian trooper who lost his head to a cannon-ball during the American Revolutionary War.
