Isaac Fitzgerald — American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed
Bestselling author Isaac Fitzgerald walks from Massachusetts to Indiana retracing Johnny Appleseed's path, blending American folklore, personal grief, and the history of a misunderstood folk hero.
Why we picked this
Fitzgerald uses the Johnny Appleseed pilgrimage as a frame for examining what American myths actually contain and what gets lost in the sanitized versions — the book arrives when questions about national mythology feel especially loaded.
Johnny Appleseed is one of the most recognizable figures in American mythology and one of the least accurately understood. The real John Chapman was an itinerant orchardist, a Swedenborgian mystic, and a figure far stranger and more interesting than the gentle barefoot character of children’s books. Isaac Fitzgerald — New York Times bestselling author of Dirtbag, Massachusetts and frequent contributor to The Atlantic, Esquire, and The Guardian — walked from Massachusetts to Indiana retracing Chapman’s route, and the resulting memoir, American Rambler, is partly a recovery of the historical figure and partly an exploration of how American mythology functions.
The walk takes Fitzgerald through grief and loss, through questions about ritual and faith, and through the specific American landscape that Chapman moved through two centuries ago. The memoir joins a recent tradition of books that use physical pilgrimage as a way of thinking — Cheryl Strayed’s Pacific Crest Trail, Robert Moor’s On Trails — but the American historical overlay gives it a distinct angle. What myths does a country need, and what do those myths conceal?
Fitzgerald is a natural live performer — he has appeared extensively on The Today Show and at readings that tend toward the warm and conversational. The Town Hall Seattle evening runs approximately 75 minutes, with an optional book add-on at purchase.