The proposed collection comprises the best-known works by Washington Irving (1783—1859), the founder of the American short-story prose. Being over head and ears in love with the legends about the first settlers on the shores of the Hudson, the writer takes their plots as a basis for his stories. Still, his mythical heroes are often endowed with not fairy-tale features at all. They are go-ahead, quick-witted, they objectively perceive their surroundings. That is why the author’s novelle breathe humor, easiness, and irony, thrill the readers with the mixture of the serious and the ludicrous, of fiction and reality. Having united illusion and triviality, Irving determined the ways of the development of American romanticism and forever went down in history of the world writers’ community as one of the first classic-romanticist in American literature.
