Choose the best paraphrase for the original passage.

Original passage:

"In the more than a century and a half of their existence, Washington Irving's two most famous stories, 'Rip Van Winkle' and 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,' have taken on a life of their own. They have been read, listened to, and, from the time of Joseph Jefferson's first staging of "Rip" to our own age of mass media, watched in various of productions, by generations of adults and children alike. Yet relatively few people are aware that they were once—and, for that matter, still technically are—part of of an apparently miscellaneous, but actually quite coherent unified, collection of sketches, essays, and stories called The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon" (Rubin-Dorsky 393).