In June 1818, a bankrupt and homesick Washington Irving sat in his brother-in-law’s house in Birmingham, England, and wrote the first draft of Rip Van Winkle in a single night, setting it in Catskill Mountains he had never visited. This episode reconstructs that turning point, from the collapse of the Irving family import-export firm after the War of 1812 to the conversation with Henry Van Wart about Hudson Valley Dutch folklore that broke his writer’s block.

We then walk through the tale itself: the idle villager fleeing his nagging wife, the strange men in old Dutch garb playing ninepins in the mountains, the drink that costs him twenty years, and the return to a village that has lived through the American Revolution while he slept, where declaring loyalty to King George III nearly gets him mobbed. The episode traces the story’s DNA back through the German tale Peter Klaus, the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, Honi the Circle Drawer, Urashima Taro and Epimenides, and forward into science fiction from H.G. Wells and Robert Heinlein to Fallout and Captain America.

• How Dame Van Winkle’s nagging mirrors the creditors hounding Irving over his real bankruptcy
• Why Irving chose the ghosts of Henry Hudson’s Half Moon crew as the mountain’s mysterious bowlers
• How Walter Scott rescued the British publication after Irving’s first publisher went bust
• How actor Joseph Jefferson built a decades-long career performing Rip on stage
• The irony of a work-averse character lending his name to a bridge, statues and a sought-after bourbon