Sometimes we’re tempted to think that people who lived “back in the day” were simpler and less sophisticated than we are, and perhaps because Rip Van Winkle celebrates a simple soul, we might think that the author himself was also simple. Irving, born in New York City in the late 1700s, wrote early biographies of George Washington, Christopher Columbus, and thus was a prominent part of the process of forming our own national legends about those figures. Irving served as U.S. minister to Spain, and was one of a small handful of American figures who actually managed to make a living as a full-time writer. —AmLit Podcast #1: Washington Irving “The Wife” (MP3)