Isaac Fitzgerald + Emily St. John Mandel: American Rambler
Isaac Fitzgerald discusses his memoir of walking Johnny Appleseed's trail across America, in conversation with novelist Emily St. John Mandel, at The Strand.
Why we picked this
Fitzgerald walked the entire route of Johnny Appleseed — Massachusetts to Indiana — over a year. The book is part travelogue, part grief memoir, part American mythology. Mandel knows how to excavate meaning from landscape and history; this is a better conversation than the typical launch event.
Isaac Fitzgerald spent a year walking from Massachusetts to Indiana, following the approximate route of John Chapman — the figure history compressed into the legend of Johnny Appleseed. The resulting book, American Rambler, is what happens when a writer uses a long-distance walk to think through grief, faith, landscape, and the gap between American mythology and American reality. It blends memoir, history, and travelogue in ways that resist easy categorization.
Emily St. John Mandel, best known for Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel, brings her own preoccupation with how people move through history and landscape to the conversation. The match feels organic rather than promotional — two writers who think seriously about time, place, and the stories people tell themselves about the country they inhabit.
The event takes place in the Strand’s Third Floor Rare Book Room, an intimate setting that suits the scale of the book. Signed copies are available for purchase; the book releases the same day.