A defrocked Romanian Orthodox priest with an unconventional lifestyle, Creangă made an early impact as an innovative educator and textbook author, while pursuing a short career in nationalist politics with the Free and Independent Faction.

[11] Ion Creangă spent several months at Irinuca's remote house on the Bistrița River, before the proximity of goats resulted in a scabies infection and his hastened departure for Pipirig, where he cured himself using birch extract, a folk remedy mastered by his maternal grandmother Nastasia.

[10] Having witnessed, according to his own claim, the indifference and mundane preoccupations of his peers, Creangă admitted to having taken little care in his training, submitting to the drinking culture, playing practical jokes on his colleagues, and even shoplifting, while pursuing an affair with the daughter of a local priest.

Only weeks after his wedding, the groom, who had probably agreed to marriage only because it could facilitate succeeding Grigoriu,[15] signed a complaint addressed to Metropolitan Sofronie Miclescu, denouncing his father in law as "a killer", claiming to have been mistreated by him and cheated out of his wife's dowry, and demanding to be allowed a divorce.

By 1864, he and several others, among them schoolteacher V. Răceanu,[20] were working on a new primer, which saw print in 1868 under the title Metodă nouă de scriere și cetire pentru uzul clasei I primară ("A New Method of Writing and Reading for the Use of 1st Grade Primary Course Students").

For five months after quarreling with Samson Bodnărescu, his fellow poet and previous landlord, Eminescu even moved inside the house, where he reputedly pursued his discreet love affair with woman writer Veronica Micle, and completed as many as 22 of his poems.

[77] Reflecting back on Maiorescu's role in the process, George Călinescu wrote: "A literary salon where the personal merit would take the forefront did not exist [before Junimea] and, had Creangă been born two decades earlier, he would not have been able to present 'his peasant material' to anyone.

[85] Although he occasionally downplayed his own contribution to literature,[21][41] Creangă himself was aware that his texts went beyond records of popular tradition, and made significant efforts to be recognized as an original author (by corresponding with fellow writers and willingly submitting his books to critical scrutiny).

[41] Vianu commented at length on the exact relationship between the narrative borrowed from oral tradition and Creangă's "somewhat surreptitious" method of blending his own style into the folkloric standard, likening it to the historical process whereby local painters improvised over the strict canons of Byzantine art.

[87] Similarly, Z. Ornea notes that the poet used Creangă's positions to illustrate his own ethnonationalist take on Romanian culture, and in particular his claim that rural authenticity lay hidden by a "superimposed stratum" of urbanized ethnic minorities.

[64] Also discussing the impression that Creangă's work should be read with a Moldavian accent, noted for its "softness of sound" in relation to standard Romanian phonology, Călinescu cautioned against interpretative exaggerations, maintaining that the actual texts only offer faint suggestions of regional pronunciation.

[124] Z. Ornea sees the main protagonists in Creangă's comedic narratives as, in effect, "particularized incarnations of the same symbolic character", while the use of humor itself reflects the traditional mindset, "a survival through intelligence, that of a people with an old history, whose life experience has for centuries been concentrated into gestures and words.

[128] With "The Goat and Her Three Kids", written mainly as a picturesque illustration of motherly love,[97] Creangă produced a fable in prose, opposing the eponymous characters, caricatures of a garrulous but hard-working woman and her restless sons, to the sharp-toothed Big Bad Wolf, a satirical depiction of the cunning and immoral stranger.

[42][101] The plot shows the wolf making his way into the goat's house, where he eats the two older and less obedient kids, while the youngest one manages to escape by hiding up the chimney—the symbolism of which was psychoanalyzed by Dan Grădinaru, who claims it constitutes an allusion to Creangă's own childhood.

[42][131] The mother-in-law's end turns into a farce: the eldest and most intelligent of the killers manipulates her victim's dying sounds into a testament partitioning her wealth, and a thin decorum is maintained at the funeral ceremony by the daughters' hypocritical sobbing.

According to Călinescu, the mission bases itself on travels undertaken by young men in Creangă's native region, while the subsequent episodes in the narrative reinforce the impression of familiarity, from the "peasant speech" adopted by the villain known as the Bald Man, to the "crass vulgarity" evidenced by the antagonist Red Emperor.

[153] In one noted instance, the characters Setilă ("Drink-All") and Flămânzilă ("Eat-All") help the hero overcome seemingly impossible tasks set by the Red Emperor, by ingesting unnaturally huge amounts of food and drink.

[161] Another significant part of the account, detailing Creangă's education, shows him frustrated by the old methods of teaching, insisting on the absurd image of children learning by heart and chanting elements of Romanian grammar and even whole texts.

[163] The negative portrayal of teaching priests was commented by writer and critic Horia Gârbea as proof of the author's anticlericalism, in line with various satirical works targeting the Romanian clergy: "Creangă's Memories of the catechism school would discourage any candidate.

"[164] Creangă's contribution to literature also covers a series of didactic fables written as lively dialogues, among them "The Needle and the Sledge Hammer", in which the objects of traditional metalworking scold the byproducts of their work for having forgotten their lowly origin.

[169] Partly didactic in scope, several of Creangă's anecdotes involve Ion Roată, a representative to the ad hoc Divan which voted in favor of Moldo-Wallachian union, and the newly elected Domnitor Alexandru Ioan Cuza.

The episode, which the text itself indicates is just one in a series of Nichifor's conquests among his female clients, highlights the seducer's verbose monologue, which covers accounts of his unhappy marriage, allusions about the naturalness of physical love, and intimidating suggestions that wolves may be tempted to attack the wagon (prompting the young woman to seek refuge in his arms).

Discussing "stylistic harmony", which he believed to be bridging all of Romania's social and literary environments, philosopher Mircea Eliade wrote: "Romanians consider Ion Creangă a classic writer belonging to the modern age.

"[193] The "thematic grip of the village" was noted by American academic Harold Segel, who investigated its impact on "some of the most revered names in the history of Romanian literature", from Creangă and Slavici to interwar novelist Liviu Rebreanu.

"[197] According to Ornea, Creangă has "nothing in common" with the Sămănătorul ideology in particular: while the group shared his nostalgic outlook on the rural past in stark contrast to the modernized world, the Moldavian author could "maintain, intelligently, the middle ground between contraries".

[209] Likewise, while formally affiliating with Surrealism, the avant-garde author Ion Călugăru contributed various prose works which borrow some of Creangă's storytelling techniques to depict the lives of Jewish Romanian communities from Moldavia.

[31] In 1939, as part of a press campaign targeting Călinescu's work, the fascist journal Porunca Vremii accused the literary historian of having exposed Creangă's biography for the sake of compromising the "genial Moldavian" by turning him into "an unfrocked epileptic and a drunk.

[243] In 1967, Ioviță and filmmaker Gheorghe Vodă released Se caută un paznic: an adaptation of "Ivan Turbincă" and one of the successful samples of early Moldovan cinema, it was also noted for the musical score, composed by Eugen Doga.

[247] The patrimony associated with Creangă's life has also sparked debates: local authorities in Târgu Neamț were criticized for not maintaining the site near his house in its best condition,[228] while the Fălticeni where he once lived was controversially put up for sale by its private owners in 2009, at a time when city hall could not exercise its pre-emption right.

Some of these are Cornel Todea's variant of "Harap Alb" (with music by Nicu Alifantis),[230][255] Cristian Pepino's take on "The Goat and Her Three Kids",[256] Mihai Mălaimare's Prostia omenească (from "Human Stupidity")[257] and Gheorghe Hibovski's Povestea poveștilor, a fringe theater show using both Creangă's original and Nedelciu's text.