Category: Early American Short StoriesClue: "This short story, written around 1820, contains the line "If I can but reach that bridge...I am safe!"
Answer: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Nice, a chance for me to flex my literary muscles. This one was really easy...it was Washington Irving's Ichabod Crane. One one contestant got it write, and one couldn't even come up with a guess. The thing I appreciate most about Irving is that before he started writing, the genre of "American literature" could barely be called literature at all. It was all Thomas Paine political stuff, or Benjamin Franklin political stuff, or Thomas Jefferson political stuff, or hyper-religious, fire & brimstone stuff. Not that there's anything specifically wrong with any of that (well, maybe the fire & brimstone stuff) but our young nation had yet to take up the hobby of story-telling. Then Irving came along. And I've always felt kind of bad for him, because despite creating some of the more recognizable literary figures from early American lit -- Crane, the Headless Horseman, Rip Van Winkle -- most people would fail to identify him as their author.
And "Brom Bones" is just an ill name for an antagonist.
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