Santa’s sleigh in the sky, Gotham as a nickname for New York, the phrase the almighty dollar, the Knicks, and the false myth that medieval people believed the earth was flat all trace back to one man. This episode follows Washington Irving from his birth in Manhattan the same week news of the Treaty of Paris arrived, through a childhood blessing from George Washington himself, to a teenage evacuation from yellow fever to Tarrytown, where Dutch customs and ghost stories in the area known as Sleepers’ Haven lodged in his memory.

We cover the satirical magazine Salmagundi, the missing-person hoax that launched A History of New York under the name Diedrich Knickerbocker, the death of his fiancee Matilda Hoffman, and the family bankruptcy that stranded him in England. From the single-night writing of Rip Van Winkle, adapted from a German folktale, and the dual-country serialization of The Sketch Book to beat copyright pirates, we move to his years in Spain, life inside the Alhambra, the romantic history of Columbus that planted the flat-earth myth, his unhappy diplomatic posting, the frontier books that answered critics, Sunnyside, his mentorship of Edgar Allan Poe, and the five-volume biography of Washington finished months before his death.

• Named for Washington, blessed by Washington, and buried in Sleepy Hollow
• The 1809 newspaper hoax that made a fictional Dutch historian a citywide concern
• Transplanting European folktales into the Catskills to manufacture an American past
• How a dramatized Columbus biography rewrote history in classrooms for a century
• The first American to live by writing alone, and his fight for international copyright