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American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed
Win a free print copy of this book!
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80 copies available
U.S. only
New York Times bestselling author Isaac Fitzgerald sets off to the heart of America, following the path of the legendary Johnny Appleseed on an epic journey that both takes him far from home and brings him closer to it
It’s a difficult thing, to separate legend from story from memory from fact. • The Reverend “In the spirit of John Chapman, who loved apples for their nutrition and their symbolism…”
“And cider,” I whispered.
As a child, Isaac Fitzgerald became obsessed with Johnny Appleseed. Maybe because the legendary rambler—born John Chapman—grew up just down the road from his mother’s family farm. Maybe because of the larger-than-life tales his dad told him on walks in the woods, stories that planted the idea that adventure and discovery lay around every bend in the road. Or perhaps it was a shared sense of restlessness; the same search for both freedom and solitude and what they mean in America 250 years ago and today. Who hasn’t wanted to simply walk out the front door and see what’s out there?
American Rambler is a story about walking; about searching; about one man following the myth of another to find something true about himself and about America. Over the course of a year, Fitzgerald walks in Appleseed’s footsteps, following the path Chapman took from birth to death, from Leominster, MA to Fort Wayne, IN. Using as a starting point the lesser-known facts of Appleseed’s biography—that he belonged to an obscure Christian sect, or that that the bitter, hard apples he distributed were used almost exclusively for making alcoholic beverages—Fitzgerald weaves history and memoir seamlessly, reckoning with his own relationship with alcohol and his family’s shadow of mental illness, reflecting on this nation’s rich, raw, often romanticized past and myths we still tell ourselves about the heartland of the country today.
On his journey, Fitzgerald is attacked by dogs, nearly hit by a train, and taken in by strangers more than once. With each step he takes, we see his unique talent for teasing out the human capacity for contemplation and kindness, bearing him up amidst loss and grief, ritual and faith, grimy gas-station bathrooms, and a whole lot of apple lore. From choral music in cathedrals to tattoo-trimmed vets in back-alley bars, this is a true American odyssey and an antidote to the breakneck pace of modern life. Hopeful, intimate, and often hilarious, this story is about uncovering the things that really matter in this life.
It’s a difficult thing, to separate legend from story from memory from fact. • The Reverend “In the spirit of John Chapman, who loved apples for their nutrition and their symbolism…”
“And cider,” I whispered.
As a child, Isaac Fitzgerald became obsessed with Johnny Appleseed. Maybe because the legendary rambler—born John Chapman—grew up just down the road from his mother’s family farm. Maybe because of the larger-than-life tales his dad told him on walks in the woods, stories that planted the idea that adventure and discovery lay around every bend in the road. Or perhaps it was a shared sense of restlessness; the same search for both freedom and solitude and what they mean in America 250 years ago and today. Who hasn’t wanted to simply walk out the front door and see what’s out there?
American Rambler is a story about walking; about searching; about one man following the myth of another to find something true about himself and about America. Over the course of a year, Fitzgerald walks in Appleseed’s footsteps, following the path Chapman took from birth to death, from Leominster, MA to Fort Wayne, IN. Using as a starting point the lesser-known facts of Appleseed’s biography—that he belonged to an obscure Christian sect, or that that the bitter, hard apples he distributed were used almost exclusively for making alcoholic beverages—Fitzgerald weaves history and memoir seamlessly, reckoning with his own relationship with alcohol and his family’s shadow of mental illness, reflecting on this nation’s rich, raw, often romanticized past and myths we still tell ourselves about the heartland of the country today.
On his journey, Fitzgerald is attacked by dogs, nearly hit by a train, and taken in by strangers more than once. With each step he takes, we see his unique talent for teasing out the human capacity for contemplation and kindness, bearing him up amidst loss and grief, ritual and faith, grimy gas-station bathrooms, and a whole lot of apple lore. From choral music in cathedrals to tattoo-trimmed vets in back-alley bars, this is a true American odyssey and an antidote to the breakneck pace of modern life. Hopeful, intimate, and often hilarious, this story is about uncovering the things that really matter in this life.
352 pages, Hardcover
Published May 12, 2026
About the author
Isaac Fitzgerald
13 books346 followersIsaac Fitzgerald appears frequently on The Today Show and is the author of the bestselling children’s book How to Be a Pirate as well as the co-author of Pen & Ink: Tattoos and the Stories Behind Them and Knives & Ink: Chefs and the Stories Behind Their Tattoos (winner of an IACP Award). His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Boston Globe and numerous other publications. His debut memoir, Dirtbag, Massachusetts, is forthcoming in July, 2022. He lives in Brooklyn.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 43 reviews
April 25, 2026
American Rambler indeed. Emphasis on “ramble.” My silly little brain expected this to be heavier on the Johnny Appleseed life history. But when little is known about a historical figure, there’s still space to fill in with…something. Enter the rambling. Yes, the writer is philosophical and introspective, but a reader can only zig so many zags before it becomes tiresome.
This advanced copy was sent to me by NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.
January 22, 2026
American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed by Isaac Fitzgerald is memoir mixed with a history lesson that follows Isaac along the path of the legendary Johnny Appleseed (John Chapman)
With charm and humanity, Isaac recalls the stories of his youth, the history of John Chapman, and the tales of his current pilgrimage. This doesn’t feel like a history lesson though; it feels like a trusted friend is guiding you from state to state recalling stories of his childhood while also coming to a reckoning about his own life.
Isaac brings a vulnerability to his writing that makes you wish you were walking along side him. His warmth and openness with the people he meets along the way shows that no one escapes a conversation unchanged.
American Rambler will take you on a journey of the faith and friendship that connects more than divides.
With charm and humanity, Isaac recalls the stories of his youth, the history of John Chapman, and the tales of his current pilgrimage. This doesn’t feel like a history lesson though; it feels like a trusted friend is guiding you from state to state recalling stories of his childhood while also coming to a reckoning about his own life.
Isaac brings a vulnerability to his writing that makes you wish you were walking along side him. His warmth and openness with the people he meets along the way shows that no one escapes a conversation unchanged.
American Rambler will take you on a journey of the faith and friendship that connects more than divides.
May 17, 2026
This book is all over the place. He's supposed to be walking the Johnny Appleseed Trail which makes it sound like he's going from one place to another on a clear path with a clear narrative arc. Nope. I suppose the title of the book says a lot: Isaac Fitzgerald is just rambling.
May 24, 2026
Isaac is fascinated by the path of the legendary John Chapman ( Johnny Appleseed). He retraces his trail across the East and into the Midwest, meeting a whole slew of fascinating and kind people along the way. To say this book is about Johny Appleseed would be to write it short. American Rambler is an exploration of mental health, processing loss, and learning to embrace the challenging parts of life when shit gets real. Chapman's story is simply the motivation for this adventure. The real crux of this book is confronting how challenging life can be, but that, in the end, we are in it together.
May 18, 2026
This was fine. A little pedestrian (heh), but Isaac Fitzgerald seems genuinely charming. Big golden retriever, goofy older brother energy. I’m not sure what my takeaway was, if any, but I didn’t mind tagging along.
May 20, 2026
"Stories mixed with facts. The soul of this country, a wad of myths and barely-agreed-upon rules strapped together to make up these United States of America. A country built to hold room for--or perhaps cover up, or even purposefully forget--the shifting sands of history."
I don't really have any interest in the myth of Johnny Appleseed, and if you don't either, that's okay. I loved Fitzgerald's Dirtbag, Massachusetts, and if you enjoyed that book, this will appeal to you as well. Yes, it's about John Chapman, but it's also about the myth of the United States and how malleable history can be. It's about the changing landscape of this country and how it's progressed, for better or for worse depending on who you ask. Reading this book feels like cozying up to a bar in a non-descript strip center in the middle of the middle of America and sharing a cold beer with a friendly stranger.
I don't really have any interest in the myth of Johnny Appleseed, and if you don't either, that's okay. I loved Fitzgerald's Dirtbag, Massachusetts, and if you enjoyed that book, this will appeal to you as well. Yes, it's about John Chapman, but it's also about the myth of the United States and how malleable history can be. It's about the changing landscape of this country and how it's progressed, for better or for worse depending on who you ask. Reading this book feels like cozying up to a bar in a non-descript strip center in the middle of the middle of America and sharing a cold beer with a friendly stranger.
March 2, 2026
I got an early ARC of American Rambler from NetGalley. I’m a fan of Bill Bryson and journey memoirs, so I was excited to dive in. I didn’t know much about Johnny Appleseed before this, so learning about that bit of history and legend was really interesting. That said, I wish Fitzgerald had leaned more deeply into his own story. I felt a bit disconnected from the emotional core of the book. The journey also felt somewhat fragmented since it isn’t continuous (he drives between sections), and that lack of continuity isn’t really explained upfront. Still, it was an enjoyable read overall and I’d recommend it if you’re drawn to this kind of memoir-meets-travelogue.
May 12, 2026
The Trail That Was Only a Road
Isaac Fitzgerald’s “American Rambler” follows Johnny Appleseed into the uneasy country between myth, grief, cider, and home.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | May 12th, 2026
“The Trail That Was Only a Road” – the top-of-review watercolor distills “American Rambler” into a solitary walker, a roadside shoulder, and the quiet irony of a country that kept Johnny Appleseed’s legend while making the path itself disappear.
Isaac Fitzgerald begins “American Rambler” by looking for a trail that does not exist. The metaphor has the decency to wait a few pages, though not many. He arrives at the Johnny Appleseed Visitors’ Center in Massachusetts ready to walk the Johnny Appleseed Trail, only to learn that the “trail” is a tourist highway meant “for motorists.”
The joke is small, local, and quietly incriminating: America has kept the walker’s name while paving over the conditions that made walking possible. Fitzgerald, being Fitzgerald, does not respond by revising his plan. He slips through a hole in a fence, cuts through tire-strewn woods, wanders onto active train tracks, hides from a railway cop while praying, and begins a yearlong pursuit of Chapman’s trace.
That false trail becomes the method: start with an official story, then find the hole in the fence. “American Rambler” will not sit where it is shelved – too much barroom for a walking book, too much grief for a road book, too much cider and theology for a folklore errand in clean shoes. Fitzgerald follows John Chapman from Leominster, Massachusetts, toward Fort Wayne, Indiana, and discovers that wandering’s old temptation is also its danger: the dream of moving until the bill stops arriving, until a mother, a father, a childhood, and a country finally lose the address.
The public Johnny Appleseed is a cheerful schoolroom saint: tin-pot hat, seed bag, bare feet, benevolent seed-scattering, the frontier fit for bulletin boards. Fitzgerald knows that version. He grew up with it through classroom folklore and the old Disney film “Melody Time,” but also through a more private split inheritance. His father gave him high-flying legends to keep his small legs moving on childhood hikes. His mother gave him dates, sources, and the useful suspicion that enchantment usually edits the bill. “American Rambler” is pitched between them. It loves a good story and keeps checking the receipt.
The John Chapman who emerges here is less useful and more alive than the mascot. He was a devout follower of Emanuel Swedenborg, a nurseryman, a landholder, a man who embraced poverty by choice rather than necessity, and a figure whose apples were less lunchbox innocence than cider and applejack. Fitzgerald does not file him neatly under fraud or saint. Chapman remains too odd to be domesticated: religious eccentric, entrepreneur, wanderer, folk emblem, settler-adjacent figure, warning. If Michael Pollan’s “The Botany of Desire” helped teach readers that apples carry human appetite and cultural history far beyond sweetness, Fitzgerald asks what happens when the schoolroom apple starts hiding cider. The fruit is wholesome until it ferments. So is the legend.
Fitzgerald organizes the journey by season – Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter – and the chapters are numbered rather than titled. They count steps instead of hanging signs. Spring sets the first stones in the shoe: childhood poverty, family volatility, a father’s stories, a mother’s facts, the old Massachusetts farm, work collapse, heartbreak, and walking as a way to keep the mind from chewing through its own leash. Summer opens westward into Pennsylvania, Ohio, rivers, bars, strangers, apple lore, and Chapman’s ledger marks, nurseries, and rumors. Fall darkens into festivals, fatigue, old-growth forest, roadside unease, a black dog with the timing of an unpaid debt, and the approach to Chapman’s grave.
Winter does not extend the journey; it makes the earlier jokes colder. Fitzgerald’s mother dies by suicide, and the road snaps back toward a house, a father, a phrase, and the grief that had been traveling with him before he knew its name.
The ending lands because the book has been carrying its weather from the first pages. Fitzgerald places walking, prayer, and drinking too close together for comfort. Each is a ritual; each can quiet the mind; each can become a way of getting out of one’s own head. He is “drinking a bit less and praying a lot more,” though he qualifies the claim almost immediately, as if virtue might spoil if left unattended. Whiskey stays in the pack. Bars remain attractive. Hospitality and harm sometimes arrive in the same glass. A bar can be refuge, trap, theater, chapel – occasionally all four before last call.
The book runs on Fitzgerald’s voice: shaggy on the surface, sneakily exact under the mud. His sentences swerve from anecdote to memory, from history to joke, from joke to hurt without polish. He lets himself look foolish: underprepared, hungry, startled by dogs, susceptible to questionable bars, loyal to bad plans. He can find a little holiness where a tidier writer would be busy scrubbing the restroom scene out of the manuscript. The jokes do moral work. They keep pain from dressing too formally for the occasion.
The prose at its best has a heel-to-toe rhythm. It advances, detours, notices, forgets, remembers, circles, and returns. A public bathroom in Warren becomes a civic marvel. A hole in a fence becomes the true trailhead. Susie Q, a barking dog behind a property fence, becomes a test of trust across a boundary. A minor-league baseball team in Fort Wayne becomes local mythmaking in cleats and apple logos. Fitzgerald notices places usually asked to stand in the background: rest stops, diners, riverbanks, damp campsites, parking lots, and bars lit by the democracy of bad decisions. He likes them without sentimentalizing them. Charm beside threat. Kindness beside both.
Its bravest risk is trusting that a detour can think. Fitzgerald sees a thing, follows its history, remembers his own life, corrects a legend, makes a joke, gets cold, gets fed. Then he keeps moving. The repetition is the pulse. Walking repeats. Drinking repeats. Prayer repeats. Family fear repeats. So do the flattering national stories, the ones with clean hats and no blood on the map. The seasonal design gives those repetitions weather: thaw, heat, ripening, rot, frost.
The freedom of the form has a toll. “American Rambler” sometimes keeps moving before the last scene has tightened. Its middle passages have all the pleasures and dangers of a long conversation with someone funny who has one more story, and then one more after that. Most are good enough that you keep listening. Some bars, roadside encounters, and historical asides feel essential. Others feel like material gathered but not fully milled. The sprawl is the gait and sometimes the drag. A stricter shape might have sacrificed some charm, but it also might have sharpened the middle third.
That critique matters because Fitzgerald’s looseness is not accidental. It is the book’s argument under stress. To walk is to repeat, to drift, to think sideways, to pass through dullness as well as revelation. The question is whether the dullness has been shaped. Often it has. Sometimes it has merely been carried along. The book is strongest when the road does not simply produce material but alters it – when a town, a dog, a grave, or a meal changes the pressure of the journey rather than merely extending the itinerary.
The looseness also permits Fitzgerald’s best scenes, the ones that carry a joke, a ghost, and a claim at once. The abandoned Johnny Appleseed amphitheater is one of the book’s finest images: an abandoned theater of belief, built to stage a national folk saint and left to weeds, metal apple logos, empty seats, and the black dog that has begun to seem less like a symbol than like something the book itself has failed to outrun. No single mood gets custody of the scene. It says more about myth than a lecture could. America built a venue for the legend; the legend did not show up for the run.
Fitzgerald is especially alert to memory bolted into public view. He keeps finding names nailed to things: plaques, jerseys, festival banners, monuments, tanks, graves. Chapman’s birthplace, veterans’ memorials, historical markers, Fort Wayne’s Appleseed celebrations, the TinCaps’ apple-branded baseball pleasures, and Chapman’s uncertain grave all ask what remembrance does, whom it comforts, and whom it politely omits. The question is not only whether the story is true. The sharper question is why a community needs a certain version to be true enough. Fitzgerald does not sneer at festivalgoers, re-enactors, small-town pride, or souvenir history. He sees the sweetness in public memory and the cost of making it too sweet to taste the alcohol.
The present enters through pavement: the trail is a road, and the walker is treated as a design mistake. “American Rambler” speaks to a country engineered for cars and nostalgic for walkers. It also speaks to a culture still polishing settlement and dispossession until they can sit neatly under the apple tree. Chapman’s story opens onto westward expansion, property, faith, commerce, and the national habit of turning hard history into inspirational décor. Fitzgerald is not writing a classroom correction, and the book would be worse if he were. His method is quieter and more affecting: he keeps placing the tin-pot emblem beside the messier fact until the emblem starts to wobble.
The family material is not a side road; father’s gear and mother’s phrase give the book’s argument a body. Fitzgerald’s father is myth, faith, story, and age. His mother is fact, severity, generosity, mental illness, home, and the old phrase “Spring will come.” That phrase begins as a survival charm and returns with grief caught in its teeth. When his mother dies, the earlier scenes of walking away, family damage, prayer, and the unstable border between freedom and abandonment become newly charged. The road does not save him; it proves how much of the self can keep pace.
It has literary neighbors, but no twin. Bill Bryson’s “A Walk in the Woods” has comic outdoor misadventure, but Fitzgerald is more spiritually bruised. William Least Heat-Moon’s “Blue Highways” offers American back-road encounter, but Fitzgerald is less map-minded and more haunted by family weather. Cheryl Strayed’s “Wild” is the obvious market cousin for physical journey as emotional reckoning, but “American Rambler” is shaggier, funnier, less redemptive, and more suspicious of damage becoming lesson. Fitzgerald’s best pages do not claim that walking fixes a life. They suggest that walking gives a life enough rhythm for the unsolved things to speak.
The book’s great achievement is its refusal to pretend the wound has closed on schedule. It begins with the old fantasy: what if a person simply walked west and did not stop? It ends with a harder recognition. At Chapman’s grave, Fitzgerald understands that he wants the wildness of the rambler but not the loneliness of dying on someone else’s floor. The insight would be moving even without the winter epilogue. With it, it becomes the hinge. The desire to leave is real. So is the obligation to return. The difference between the two is not always clear until someone is gone.
“American Rambler” does not hide its scuffed boots. It repeats itself. Its appetite for Americana occasionally overfills the plate. Its reflections on the country are strongest when rooted in object and scene, weaker when the word America swells into a shapeless container. A few episodes depend more on Fitzgerald’s charm than on necessity. Yet charm is not a minor gift here. It is how the book brings grief into the room without making everyone stand at attention. It is how the prose stays loyal to ordinary ridiculousness, which is where life does most of its business.
I’d rate it 86/100, or 4/5 Goodreads stars – high praise for a book whose finest passages are excellent, even when the middle occasionally chooses another mile over a sharper turn. Perfection would be a strange demand for a ramble. A perfectly disciplined “American Rambler” might have arrived sooner and understood less.
By the end, west is no longer the saving direction. Fitzgerald has followed Johnny Appleseed far enough to see that the folk saint was never the destination. He was the figure walking just ahead, seed bag over shoulder, leading Fitzgerald toward the harder country: the father waiting, the mother gone, the road underfoot, and the body, at last, turning back.
Early thumbnail studies for “The Trail That Was Only a Road,” testing how road, fence, figure, and negative space could turn a false trail into the visual argument of the review.
Cover-palette swatches for the emblematic watercolor, mapping the burnt sienna, weathered gray, parchment, olive, ochre, and near-black tones that hold the image to “American Rambler.”
The faint pencil underdrawing establishes the bones of the finished piece – the roadside geometry, the small walker, the absent trail, and the lower space reserved for title and signature.
The first watercolor wash begins to set the image’s weather – pale sky, road edge, autumn ground, and the first emotional distance between the walker and the path that is not there.
A focused study of road, fence, and emptiness, refining the central tension of the watercolor: the promise of movement interrupted by infrastructure and open, uneasy space.
A posture study for the solitary walker, keeping the face unresolved while letting boots, shoulders, and stance carry the book’s tension between forward motion and doubt.
A border study in faded map tones and weathered-paper washes, testing how the frame could suggest route, inheritance, and old travel documents without becoming decorative clutter.
A lettering study for the title, author name, and “demetri” signature line, integrating the hand-painted text into the border as part of the watercolor’s road-worn design.
All watercolor illustrations by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.
Watercolors are done on 140lb vellum and then scanned into the computer using an Epson scanner. From there, they are finalized in Procreate. All art and opinions are my own.
Isaac Fitzgerald’s “American Rambler” follows Johnny Appleseed into the uneasy country between myth, grief, cider, and home.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | May 12th, 2026
“The Trail That Was Only a Road” – the top-of-review watercolor distills “American Rambler” into a solitary walker, a roadside shoulder, and the quiet irony of a country that kept Johnny Appleseed’s legend while making the path itself disappear.
Isaac Fitzgerald begins “American Rambler” by looking for a trail that does not exist. The metaphor has the decency to wait a few pages, though not many. He arrives at the Johnny Appleseed Visitors’ Center in Massachusetts ready to walk the Johnny Appleseed Trail, only to learn that the “trail” is a tourist highway meant “for motorists.”
The joke is small, local, and quietly incriminating: America has kept the walker’s name while paving over the conditions that made walking possible. Fitzgerald, being Fitzgerald, does not respond by revising his plan. He slips through a hole in a fence, cuts through tire-strewn woods, wanders onto active train tracks, hides from a railway cop while praying, and begins a yearlong pursuit of Chapman’s trace.
That false trail becomes the method: start with an official story, then find the hole in the fence. “American Rambler” will not sit where it is shelved – too much barroom for a walking book, too much grief for a road book, too much cider and theology for a folklore errand in clean shoes. Fitzgerald follows John Chapman from Leominster, Massachusetts, toward Fort Wayne, Indiana, and discovers that wandering’s old temptation is also its danger: the dream of moving until the bill stops arriving, until a mother, a father, a childhood, and a country finally lose the address.
The public Johnny Appleseed is a cheerful schoolroom saint: tin-pot hat, seed bag, bare feet, benevolent seed-scattering, the frontier fit for bulletin boards. Fitzgerald knows that version. He grew up with it through classroom folklore and the old Disney film “Melody Time,” but also through a more private split inheritance. His father gave him high-flying legends to keep his small legs moving on childhood hikes. His mother gave him dates, sources, and the useful suspicion that enchantment usually edits the bill. “American Rambler” is pitched between them. It loves a good story and keeps checking the receipt.
The John Chapman who emerges here is less useful and more alive than the mascot. He was a devout follower of Emanuel Swedenborg, a nurseryman, a landholder, a man who embraced poverty by choice rather than necessity, and a figure whose apples were less lunchbox innocence than cider and applejack. Fitzgerald does not file him neatly under fraud or saint. Chapman remains too odd to be domesticated: religious eccentric, entrepreneur, wanderer, folk emblem, settler-adjacent figure, warning. If Michael Pollan’s “The Botany of Desire” helped teach readers that apples carry human appetite and cultural history far beyond sweetness, Fitzgerald asks what happens when the schoolroom apple starts hiding cider. The fruit is wholesome until it ferments. So is the legend.
Fitzgerald organizes the journey by season – Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter – and the chapters are numbered rather than titled. They count steps instead of hanging signs. Spring sets the first stones in the shoe: childhood poverty, family volatility, a father’s stories, a mother’s facts, the old Massachusetts farm, work collapse, heartbreak, and walking as a way to keep the mind from chewing through its own leash. Summer opens westward into Pennsylvania, Ohio, rivers, bars, strangers, apple lore, and Chapman’s ledger marks, nurseries, and rumors. Fall darkens into festivals, fatigue, old-growth forest, roadside unease, a black dog with the timing of an unpaid debt, and the approach to Chapman’s grave.
Winter does not extend the journey; it makes the earlier jokes colder. Fitzgerald’s mother dies by suicide, and the road snaps back toward a house, a father, a phrase, and the grief that had been traveling with him before he knew its name.
The ending lands because the book has been carrying its weather from the first pages. Fitzgerald places walking, prayer, and drinking too close together for comfort. Each is a ritual; each can quiet the mind; each can become a way of getting out of one’s own head. He is “drinking a bit less and praying a lot more,” though he qualifies the claim almost immediately, as if virtue might spoil if left unattended. Whiskey stays in the pack. Bars remain attractive. Hospitality and harm sometimes arrive in the same glass. A bar can be refuge, trap, theater, chapel – occasionally all four before last call.
The book runs on Fitzgerald’s voice: shaggy on the surface, sneakily exact under the mud. His sentences swerve from anecdote to memory, from history to joke, from joke to hurt without polish. He lets himself look foolish: underprepared, hungry, startled by dogs, susceptible to questionable bars, loyal to bad plans. He can find a little holiness where a tidier writer would be busy scrubbing the restroom scene out of the manuscript. The jokes do moral work. They keep pain from dressing too formally for the occasion.
The prose at its best has a heel-to-toe rhythm. It advances, detours, notices, forgets, remembers, circles, and returns. A public bathroom in Warren becomes a civic marvel. A hole in a fence becomes the true trailhead. Susie Q, a barking dog behind a property fence, becomes a test of trust across a boundary. A minor-league baseball team in Fort Wayne becomes local mythmaking in cleats and apple logos. Fitzgerald notices places usually asked to stand in the background: rest stops, diners, riverbanks, damp campsites, parking lots, and bars lit by the democracy of bad decisions. He likes them without sentimentalizing them. Charm beside threat. Kindness beside both.
Its bravest risk is trusting that a detour can think. Fitzgerald sees a thing, follows its history, remembers his own life, corrects a legend, makes a joke, gets cold, gets fed. Then he keeps moving. The repetition is the pulse. Walking repeats. Drinking repeats. Prayer repeats. Family fear repeats. So do the flattering national stories, the ones with clean hats and no blood on the map. The seasonal design gives those repetitions weather: thaw, heat, ripening, rot, frost.
The freedom of the form has a toll. “American Rambler” sometimes keeps moving before the last scene has tightened. Its middle passages have all the pleasures and dangers of a long conversation with someone funny who has one more story, and then one more after that. Most are good enough that you keep listening. Some bars, roadside encounters, and historical asides feel essential. Others feel like material gathered but not fully milled. The sprawl is the gait and sometimes the drag. A stricter shape might have sacrificed some charm, but it also might have sharpened the middle third.
That critique matters because Fitzgerald’s looseness is not accidental. It is the book’s argument under stress. To walk is to repeat, to drift, to think sideways, to pass through dullness as well as revelation. The question is whether the dullness has been shaped. Often it has. Sometimes it has merely been carried along. The book is strongest when the road does not simply produce material but alters it – when a town, a dog, a grave, or a meal changes the pressure of the journey rather than merely extending the itinerary.
The looseness also permits Fitzgerald’s best scenes, the ones that carry a joke, a ghost, and a claim at once. The abandoned Johnny Appleseed amphitheater is one of the book’s finest images: an abandoned theater of belief, built to stage a national folk saint and left to weeds, metal apple logos, empty seats, and the black dog that has begun to seem less like a symbol than like something the book itself has failed to outrun. No single mood gets custody of the scene. It says more about myth than a lecture could. America built a venue for the legend; the legend did not show up for the run.
Fitzgerald is especially alert to memory bolted into public view. He keeps finding names nailed to things: plaques, jerseys, festival banners, monuments, tanks, graves. Chapman’s birthplace, veterans’ memorials, historical markers, Fort Wayne’s Appleseed celebrations, the TinCaps’ apple-branded baseball pleasures, and Chapman’s uncertain grave all ask what remembrance does, whom it comforts, and whom it politely omits. The question is not only whether the story is true. The sharper question is why a community needs a certain version to be true enough. Fitzgerald does not sneer at festivalgoers, re-enactors, small-town pride, or souvenir history. He sees the sweetness in public memory and the cost of making it too sweet to taste the alcohol.
The present enters through pavement: the trail is a road, and the walker is treated as a design mistake. “American Rambler” speaks to a country engineered for cars and nostalgic for walkers. It also speaks to a culture still polishing settlement and dispossession until they can sit neatly under the apple tree. Chapman’s story opens onto westward expansion, property, faith, commerce, and the national habit of turning hard history into inspirational décor. Fitzgerald is not writing a classroom correction, and the book would be worse if he were. His method is quieter and more affecting: he keeps placing the tin-pot emblem beside the messier fact until the emblem starts to wobble.
The family material is not a side road; father’s gear and mother’s phrase give the book’s argument a body. Fitzgerald’s father is myth, faith, story, and age. His mother is fact, severity, generosity, mental illness, home, and the old phrase “Spring will come.” That phrase begins as a survival charm and returns with grief caught in its teeth. When his mother dies, the earlier scenes of walking away, family damage, prayer, and the unstable border between freedom and abandonment become newly charged. The road does not save him; it proves how much of the self can keep pace.
It has literary neighbors, but no twin. Bill Bryson’s “A Walk in the Woods” has comic outdoor misadventure, but Fitzgerald is more spiritually bruised. William Least Heat-Moon’s “Blue Highways” offers American back-road encounter, but Fitzgerald is less map-minded and more haunted by family weather. Cheryl Strayed’s “Wild” is the obvious market cousin for physical journey as emotional reckoning, but “American Rambler” is shaggier, funnier, less redemptive, and more suspicious of damage becoming lesson. Fitzgerald’s best pages do not claim that walking fixes a life. They suggest that walking gives a life enough rhythm for the unsolved things to speak.
The book’s great achievement is its refusal to pretend the wound has closed on schedule. It begins with the old fantasy: what if a person simply walked west and did not stop? It ends with a harder recognition. At Chapman’s grave, Fitzgerald understands that he wants the wildness of the rambler but not the loneliness of dying on someone else’s floor. The insight would be moving even without the winter epilogue. With it, it becomes the hinge. The desire to leave is real. So is the obligation to return. The difference between the two is not always clear until someone is gone.
“American Rambler” does not hide its scuffed boots. It repeats itself. Its appetite for Americana occasionally overfills the plate. Its reflections on the country are strongest when rooted in object and scene, weaker when the word America swells into a shapeless container. A few episodes depend more on Fitzgerald’s charm than on necessity. Yet charm is not a minor gift here. It is how the book brings grief into the room without making everyone stand at attention. It is how the prose stays loyal to ordinary ridiculousness, which is where life does most of its business.
I’d rate it 86/100, or 4/5 Goodreads stars – high praise for a book whose finest passages are excellent, even when the middle occasionally chooses another mile over a sharper turn. Perfection would be a strange demand for a ramble. A perfectly disciplined “American Rambler” might have arrived sooner and understood less.
By the end, west is no longer the saving direction. Fitzgerald has followed Johnny Appleseed far enough to see that the folk saint was never the destination. He was the figure walking just ahead, seed bag over shoulder, leading Fitzgerald toward the harder country: the father waiting, the mother gone, the road underfoot, and the body, at last, turning back.
Early thumbnail studies for “The Trail That Was Only a Road,” testing how road, fence, figure, and negative space could turn a false trail into the visual argument of the review.
Cover-palette swatches for the emblematic watercolor, mapping the burnt sienna, weathered gray, parchment, olive, ochre, and near-black tones that hold the image to “American Rambler.”
The faint pencil underdrawing establishes the bones of the finished piece – the roadside geometry, the small walker, the absent trail, and the lower space reserved for title and signature.
The first watercolor wash begins to set the image’s weather – pale sky, road edge, autumn ground, and the first emotional distance between the walker and the path that is not there.
A focused study of road, fence, and emptiness, refining the central tension of the watercolor: the promise of movement interrupted by infrastructure and open, uneasy space.
A posture study for the solitary walker, keeping the face unresolved while letting boots, shoulders, and stance carry the book’s tension between forward motion and doubt.
A border study in faded map tones and weathered-paper washes, testing how the frame could suggest route, inheritance, and old travel documents without becoming decorative clutter.
A lettering study for the title, author name, and “demetri” signature line, integrating the hand-painted text into the border as part of the watercolor’s road-worn design.
All watercolor illustrations by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.
Watercolors are done on 140lb vellum and then scanned into the computer using an Epson scanner. From there, they are finalized in Procreate. All art and opinions are my own.
May 18, 2026
Too much “I” and not enough Johnny
Did Not Finish
May 19, 2026DNF
I found the author to be exhausting in how little he thought about this trek. Although I do appreciate his honesty regarding his lack of preparedness and that he’s not a historian. I just found him annoying.
I found the author to be exhausting in how little he thought about this trek. Although I do appreciate his honesty regarding his lack of preparedness and that he’s not a historian. I just found him annoying.
May 12, 2026
This is my first non-fiction ARC! I listened to a podcast recently where Fitzgerald was talking about this book and I’ve been so excited to read it. So when I saw it available as an ARC, I jumped on it. Thank you Knopf and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this one a little early.
#AmericanRambler is Isaac Fitzgerald’s tale about following the trail of John Chapman, also know as Johnny Appleseed. From the first page, I'm hooked on Fiztgerald’s narrative voice, ready to buy all of his previous books and recommend him to several of my family members.
Fitzgerald sets off on Massachusetts’ Johnny Appleseed trail only to realize it's not a hiking trail, just a name for that stretch of the highway; but he stays on the path, hiking alongside the highway and through backyards; buying a jacket from the Salvation Army, only to return it to a donation bin down the road once he finds a crumpled up tissue inside the pocket; sleeping outside despite his fear of coyotes -- all to stay true to his Johnny Appleseed journey, but all while clarifying that John Chapman didn't live quite as nomadic of a life as legends have claimed.
After Massachusetts, he makes separate trip to Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Ohio. There are so many quirky stories along the way, as he journeys through several small towns, meeting lots of people and learning about each town’s history.
One of my favorite parts of this book were all the very fascinating tidbits I learned while reading - like how apples were involved in and affected by prohibition and the logistics of rebranding a Minor League Baseball team.
And while this was more about Fitzgerald’s journey and these small towns than it was about Chapman, I learned way more about Johnny Appleseed than I ever have anywhere else.
#AmericanRambler is Isaac Fitzgerald’s tale about following the trail of John Chapman, also know as Johnny Appleseed. From the first page, I'm hooked on Fiztgerald’s narrative voice, ready to buy all of his previous books and recommend him to several of my family members.
Fitzgerald sets off on Massachusetts’ Johnny Appleseed trail only to realize it's not a hiking trail, just a name for that stretch of the highway; but he stays on the path, hiking alongside the highway and through backyards; buying a jacket from the Salvation Army, only to return it to a donation bin down the road once he finds a crumpled up tissue inside the pocket; sleeping outside despite his fear of coyotes -- all to stay true to his Johnny Appleseed journey, but all while clarifying that John Chapman didn't live quite as nomadic of a life as legends have claimed.
After Massachusetts, he makes separate trip to Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Ohio. There are so many quirky stories along the way, as he journeys through several small towns, meeting lots of people and learning about each town’s history.
One of my favorite parts of this book were all the very fascinating tidbits I learned while reading - like how apples were involved in and affected by prohibition and the logistics of rebranding a Minor League Baseball team.
And while this was more about Fitzgerald’s journey and these small towns than it was about Chapman, I learned way more about Johnny Appleseed than I ever have anywhere else.
May 20, 2026
I started this book skeptical. I thought, here we go, another dude who's trying to be a modern Jack Kerouac. (Even got more skeptical when he quoted Dharma Bums), but the author won me over. By the end of the journey, I was crying on my couch.
Isaac Fitzgerald is a good writer. American Rambler was an easy read, even when he did ramble, which, I think, was kind of the point. He's aging, reflecting, and thinking about the country he lives in –ingredients for a self-important, nauseating memoir. But that's not the journey we went on with Isaac. Instead, he keeps a nondualistic mind throughout. Whether that's drinking Bud in a racist bar in Pennsylvania, retelling the story of Johnny Appleseed, or zooming out to American culture and life as a whole. It's rare that you see white authors write with such balance.
He toes the line of self-deprecating, but has restraint and never fully topples into it. The reader gets to know him because we realize, as he does, who he is.
I began the book expecting to eye-roll my way through and ended up with what felt like a new friend.
Isaac Fitzgerald is a good writer. American Rambler was an easy read, even when he did ramble, which, I think, was kind of the point. He's aging, reflecting, and thinking about the country he lives in –ingredients for a self-important, nauseating memoir. But that's not the journey we went on with Isaac. Instead, he keeps a nondualistic mind throughout. Whether that's drinking Bud in a racist bar in Pennsylvania, retelling the story of Johnny Appleseed, or zooming out to American culture and life as a whole. It's rare that you see white authors write with such balance.
He toes the line of self-deprecating, but has restraint and never fully topples into it. The reader gets to know him because we realize, as he does, who he is.
I began the book expecting to eye-roll my way through and ended up with what felt like a new friend.
May 20, 2026
4.5 stars, this is a very good "road trip" book following the trail of Johnny Appleseed, meeting people who live in his legacy, and experiencing the events and locations dedicated to him. The author is a character in his own right, you feel like he might be too well drawn to be real, but it makes this excellent.
Want to Read
May 19, 2026Saw his Substack, entered the giveaway. Maybe? Just published May 12, 2026
May 9, 2026
At first blush, you might consider American Rambler a concentrated history of a very narrow corridor of the midwest and northeastern regions of the United States, as seen through the eyes of a man wrapped up in the myth of Johnny Appleseed. But as you sink deeper into Mr. Fitzgerald’s road trip, what is quickly uncovered is that this is not just a mere uncovering of a legend, but of the author himself. By the time you flip the last pages, it becomes clear that what he has drafted is the most poignant love letter to our country, his personal history, and the people he holds close. Joy and grief coexist between the covers of this book, and it is a two lane road worth traveling. Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf for my gifted ARC.
May 9, 2026
Ostensibly a story about retracing the path of Johnny Appleseed (John Chapman) in MA, PA,OH and IN, Fitzgerald uses the journey to turn inward. With a remarkably honest voice he balances his introspection on his life and family with a need to talk to people he meets along the way. His discoveries about John Chapman mirror the complexities he finds in small town America and the people he meets as well as himself. A smart, funny yet at times sad social commentary told with intelligence and always a strong dose of self-deprecation. You will not forget his journey both historical and personal.
May 14, 2026
Isaac Fitzgerald is on a mission, and it sounds a bit crazy. Okay, maybe not, but it is fair to say that the author of
American Rambler
wonders about his own sanity as he journeys in the footsteps of American legend John Chapman, more commonly known as Johnny Appleseed.
While this book is ostensibly about Fitzgerald retracing the life of Johnny Appleseed, it’s really more of a peek into Fitzgerald’s own life, filtered through his connection with the legend, both geographically and spiritually.
Chapman/Appleseed was born in 1774 in Leominster, Massachusetts, not far from the farm where Fitzgerald’s mother grew up, and died in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Chapman was a restless soul who never settled in one place but moved from town to town planting and growing apples. He was a convert to Swedenborgianism, based on the teachings of the Christian theologian Emanuael Swedenborg. Many credit his transient lifestyle to this faith, which teaches that the more we suffer in this life the more we will be blessed in the next.
Fitzgerald was born poor, the son of two parents who were married at the time, just not to each other. As a child his family never owned a home of their own, and since he moved out, and up to the time of writing American Rambler, he’d never signed a lease himself, always crashing with friends or rooming with others. His transient life has led him across the country and back again. And his spiritual journey is on display in the book too. He often pauses for prayer and participates in a Swedenborgian service about midway through his Appleseed travels.
Mental health plays a role in the book as well. Fitzgerald’s mother had mental health issues when he was a child, and he has a few visions while on Appleseed’s trail that make him wonder if he may be facing mental health issues of his own.
Here’s a link with a video clip of Fitzgerald on the Today Show, reviewing books, and talking about American Rambler. I hadn’t seen this until after I read the book, but the large, intense personality he shows in this video definitely comes across in his writing.
American Rambler is in turns very funny and quietly serious. Its deeply personal while offering a vision of the humanity and kindness to be found across the country. It’s a modern Travels with Charley or Blue Highways, with a few more stops at local bars and a bit more partaking of illicit substances. It’s also one of the best books I’ve read in 2026, and my first five-star review this year.
While this book is ostensibly about Fitzgerald retracing the life of Johnny Appleseed, it’s really more of a peek into Fitzgerald’s own life, filtered through his connection with the legend, both geographically and spiritually.
Chapman/Appleseed was born in 1774 in Leominster, Massachusetts, not far from the farm where Fitzgerald’s mother grew up, and died in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Chapman was a restless soul who never settled in one place but moved from town to town planting and growing apples. He was a convert to Swedenborgianism, based on the teachings of the Christian theologian Emanuael Swedenborg. Many credit his transient lifestyle to this faith, which teaches that the more we suffer in this life the more we will be blessed in the next.
Fitzgerald was born poor, the son of two parents who were married at the time, just not to each other. As a child his family never owned a home of their own, and since he moved out, and up to the time of writing American Rambler, he’d never signed a lease himself, always crashing with friends or rooming with others. His transient life has led him across the country and back again. And his spiritual journey is on display in the book too. He often pauses for prayer and participates in a Swedenborgian service about midway through his Appleseed travels.
Mental health plays a role in the book as well. Fitzgerald’s mother had mental health issues when he was a child, and he has a few visions while on Appleseed’s trail that make him wonder if he may be facing mental health issues of his own.
Here’s a link with a video clip of Fitzgerald on the Today Show, reviewing books, and talking about American Rambler. I hadn’t seen this until after I read the book, but the large, intense personality he shows in this video definitely comes across in his writing.
American Rambler is in turns very funny and quietly serious. Its deeply personal while offering a vision of the humanity and kindness to be found across the country. It’s a modern Travels with Charley or Blue Highways, with a few more stops at local bars and a bit more partaking of illicit substances. It’s also one of the best books I’ve read in 2026, and my first five-star review this year.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Solid Travelogue/Memoir Needs Documentation To Be Solid As History. This is one of those books where read as a travelogue/ memoir from a 40 ish yr old dude who has lived a life few of us can really imagine (though far too many can imagine quite well, at least in some experiences discussed herein), it really works quite well. Fitzgerald found an esoteric thing connected (ish) to his home area and childhood and uses that in midlife as a way to both connect with people he otherwise would never have met and to examine his own life, and in these aspects the tale here really is a solid slice of Americana as it exists in this post-COVID world.
But approaching this as anything remotely resembling a history of Johnny Appleseed - even though this history is discussed - would be a mistake. Because even though Fitzgerald frequently mentions various actual biographies of Appleseed, he never once actually cites them - at least not in this Advance Review Copy text I've had for a little over four months prior to publication day. Indeed, that is actually the star deduction here - there is not one shred of any bibliography at all in this text, when similar nonfiction books - even similar memoir based books! - average out around the 15% or so documentation point.
But there again, Fitzgerald isn't an academic. At all. As this story will tell you. Repeatedly.
Those interested in seeing the actual lived lives of their fellow humans will enjoy this book. It has an interesting structure and due to the particular event chosen for that structure has an interesting cadence to the tale that is atypical and indeed refreshing to a point, and it reads as particularly raw and honest at pretty well all points herein. Specifically including at least some stories here where Fitzgerald doesn't exactly come out looking as perfect as those memes say we generally try to show ourselves on Instagram or LinkedIn. And yes, there are even points where the room gets a touch dusty.
Overall an interesting tale that will absolutely appeal to at least some readers, and one that helps bring out the commonalities in so many of us even as so much of our lives tries to tear us apart by our differences, and for that reason alone it should get more attention than it likely will.
Very much recommended.
But approaching this as anything remotely resembling a history of Johnny Appleseed - even though this history is discussed - would be a mistake. Because even though Fitzgerald frequently mentions various actual biographies of Appleseed, he never once actually cites them - at least not in this Advance Review Copy text I've had for a little over four months prior to publication day. Indeed, that is actually the star deduction here - there is not one shred of any bibliography at all in this text, when similar nonfiction books - even similar memoir based books! - average out around the 15% or so documentation point.
But there again, Fitzgerald isn't an academic. At all. As this story will tell you. Repeatedly.
Those interested in seeing the actual lived lives of their fellow humans will enjoy this book. It has an interesting structure and due to the particular event chosen for that structure has an interesting cadence to the tale that is atypical and indeed refreshing to a point, and it reads as particularly raw and honest at pretty well all points herein. Specifically including at least some stories here where Fitzgerald doesn't exactly come out looking as perfect as those memes say we generally try to show ourselves on Instagram or LinkedIn. And yes, there are even points where the room gets a touch dusty.
Overall an interesting tale that will absolutely appeal to at least some readers, and one that helps bring out the commonalities in so many of us even as so much of our lives tries to tear us apart by our differences, and for that reason alone it should get more attention than it likely will.
Very much recommended.
May 24, 2026
American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed. Isaac Fitzgerald. Knopf, 2026. 352 pages.
I'm only just realizing that "white trash memoir" is a literary subgenre. I'm aware of many of the titles and authors associated with it, but I haven't really read any of the big ones. When I chose this book, I wasn't really aware that it is an example. I was intrigued by the subject matter, the search for the man behind the Johnny Appleseed myth, and the "tracing his footsteps across contemporary America" format. I might not have picked it up had I known more about Fitzgerald. He had a rough childhood, including long homeless stretches and emotional, if not physical, violence. His parents had psychological issues. He is/was a heavy drinker and drug user. At almost 40 years old, he had never owned a car or signed a lease, spending his life sleeping out in the open or on somebody's couch or floor. He freely admits that he has no compunction whatsoever about accepting handouts. And he's not the brightest bulb. For example, he actually planned to float down the Allegheny River on a cheap inflatable raft from Walmart, and, in one episode, he spent half of a baseball game rooting for the wrong team. I wouldn't necessarily want to hang out with him, but that's just me. I'm not typically drawn to Jack Kerouac types. All that being said, I actually enjoyed the book. The meat of the story, of course the myth of Johnny Appleseed, real name John Chapman. In the minds of many, Appleseed is an American legend like Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill, the subject of many fantastic tall tales, but he was very much a real man with an incredible real life. Unfortunately, the myth has become greater than the man, clouding his place in American history. Fitzgerald dispels those myths and does a good job of developing a picture of the real man. Along the way he has great interactions with average Americans and offers great insights into the American psyche. Of the three genres attempted here - history, memoir, and travelogue - history is maybe the least successful, but I did learn a bit more about Appleseed and discovered a few people connected to his story that I want to learn more about, and Fitzgerald's thoughts and ruminations on the subject of history and legend and the often very fine differences between the two are interesting.
I'm only just realizing that "white trash memoir" is a literary subgenre. I'm aware of many of the titles and authors associated with it, but I haven't really read any of the big ones. When I chose this book, I wasn't really aware that it is an example. I was intrigued by the subject matter, the search for the man behind the Johnny Appleseed myth, and the "tracing his footsteps across contemporary America" format. I might not have picked it up had I known more about Fitzgerald. He had a rough childhood, including long homeless stretches and emotional, if not physical, violence. His parents had psychological issues. He is/was a heavy drinker and drug user. At almost 40 years old, he had never owned a car or signed a lease, spending his life sleeping out in the open or on somebody's couch or floor. He freely admits that he has no compunction whatsoever about accepting handouts. And he's not the brightest bulb. For example, he actually planned to float down the Allegheny River on a cheap inflatable raft from Walmart, and, in one episode, he spent half of a baseball game rooting for the wrong team. I wouldn't necessarily want to hang out with him, but that's just me. I'm not typically drawn to Jack Kerouac types. All that being said, I actually enjoyed the book. The meat of the story, of course the myth of Johnny Appleseed, real name John Chapman. In the minds of many, Appleseed is an American legend like Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill, the subject of many fantastic tall tales, but he was very much a real man with an incredible real life. Unfortunately, the myth has become greater than the man, clouding his place in American history. Fitzgerald dispels those myths and does a good job of developing a picture of the real man. Along the way he has great interactions with average Americans and offers great insights into the American psyche. Of the three genres attempted here - history, memoir, and travelogue - history is maybe the least successful, but I did learn a bit more about Appleseed and discovered a few people connected to his story that I want to learn more about, and Fitzgerald's thoughts and ruminations on the subject of history and legend and the often very fine differences between the two are interesting.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
4.5 stars
I originally came by Fitzgerald honestly: through his self proclaimed BFF. As a long-time die hard fan of Saeed Jones, I knew I'd be likely to find something fantastic in Fitzgerald, too, and while their works have wildly different vibes, I found that I also enjoyed Fitzgerald so much. I was especially thrilled to see that his most recent effort was going to combine a dash of memoir with some sort of more traditional quest. It was worth the wait.
Through proximity and various other circumstances, Fitzgerald develops a fascination with, of all characters, Johnny Appleseed. Most of us would maybe do a little Googling. Fitzgerald decides instead to just follow Appleseed's trail, as much as one can, for a year. Of course, he experiences a number of trials on his journey. Some are directly related to his present circumstances, while others are connected to the parts of his life that are still happening in orbit. They're his life, but they're not HIS LIFE with the immediacy that this quest is. I love how Fitzgerald weaves these separate pieces into a cohesive narrative. After all, what is life if not a serious of absolutely wild stuff happening while we are just trying to get from one place to another?
On a related note, there are both memorable scenes AND memorable throughlines. The end? It took me out.
Though I was instantly gripped by the concept and an incoming deep appreciation for the writer, it took me a minute to get into the flow. I'm sharing this because prospective readers who have a similar early experience should really stick it out. If my encounter is any indication, it will be absolutely worth navigating this untraditional content. The payout is exceptional, as is always the case with Fitzgerald.
All BFFs should be as fortunate as these two writers to be able to produce such original and personal content and have each other to hash it out with. What a huge benefit for the rest of us. I will always be looking forward to what Fitzgerald has in store next.
*Special thanks to NetGalley and Knopf for this arc, which I received in exchange for an honest review. The opinions expressed here are my own.
I originally came by Fitzgerald honestly: through his self proclaimed BFF. As a long-time die hard fan of Saeed Jones, I knew I'd be likely to find something fantastic in Fitzgerald, too, and while their works have wildly different vibes, I found that I also enjoyed Fitzgerald so much. I was especially thrilled to see that his most recent effort was going to combine a dash of memoir with some sort of more traditional quest. It was worth the wait.
Through proximity and various other circumstances, Fitzgerald develops a fascination with, of all characters, Johnny Appleseed. Most of us would maybe do a little Googling. Fitzgerald decides instead to just follow Appleseed's trail, as much as one can, for a year. Of course, he experiences a number of trials on his journey. Some are directly related to his present circumstances, while others are connected to the parts of his life that are still happening in orbit. They're his life, but they're not HIS LIFE with the immediacy that this quest is. I love how Fitzgerald weaves these separate pieces into a cohesive narrative. After all, what is life if not a serious of absolutely wild stuff happening while we are just trying to get from one place to another?
On a related note, there are both memorable scenes AND memorable throughlines. The end? It took me out.
Though I was instantly gripped by the concept and an incoming deep appreciation for the writer, it took me a minute to get into the flow. I'm sharing this because prospective readers who have a similar early experience should really stick it out. If my encounter is any indication, it will be absolutely worth navigating this untraditional content. The payout is exceptional, as is always the case with Fitzgerald.
All BFFs should be as fortunate as these two writers to be able to produce such original and personal content and have each other to hash it out with. What a huge benefit for the rest of us. I will always be looking forward to what Fitzgerald has in store next.
*Special thanks to NetGalley and Knopf for this arc, which I received in exchange for an honest review. The opinions expressed here are my own.
May 27, 2026
I am halfway through this amazing book. It's taking so long because I literally feel like I am traveling with Isaac as he makes his way along places through which Johnny Appleseed traveled. Please don't be tripped up by any review saying that the book starts out good and then descends when Isaac is quite vulnerable about his use of alcohol, or say, joints or mushrooms or what-not with a friend. One of the beautiful things about this book is his vulnerability (and his big heart). How many people can say they feel comfortable enough to share their longtime pain and attempts to address it via, among other things, a long walk a la Johnny Appleseed and substances to which many turned - even some of the earliest Americans who could down some hard cider with the quickness - as Isaac shares? I feel like I am watching something cinematic as I listen to his ups and downs on the road. The way in which he presents a town bar as a very complicated space really resonated for me. The meals he ate including the clam chowder made me hungry for what he was eating. And how many times did I laugh or say a prayer (the latter is something Isaac likes to do, by the way) as he had one near accident after another and in one case, a Poo-kepsie accident outright? Spoiler: he doesn't do the entire trip on foot, which made me feel sad for a bit but when he began to cleverly weave his Jeep named Rabbit into the story, I cheered up. Okay. I look forward to reading the rest and by the way, if you have not read his Dirtbag, Massachusetts, get thee to it right away. More lessons from a man who knows the value of being outdoors and walking out a lot of the stuff far too many of us hold in. Good on you, Isaac! PS The historical writing that comes in and out of view is a treat for anyone who likes history but not the way many historians write. This is a book worth assigning in a college classroom if one signals some of the more PG moments. PS I often wondered about his hygiene when he was outdoors for quite a while. Yep, he addresses that. I wonder the same when I watch Bonanza. So there.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Leave Bill Bryson on your parent's dusty bookshelf and pull up a stool at the bar to listen to Fitzgerald share his own travelogue over a half dozen boozy ciders.
Anyone that's met, read, or experienced Isaac Fitzgerald in any form knows that he could charm anyone into joining him on an impromptu adventure and reading this book feels like walking alongside him as he sets off on a long walk to better understand (ostensibly) Johnny (Chapman) Appleseed, Rural America, and himself.
But those who have read his first book (memoir/collection), Dirtbag Massachusetts, will not be disappointed to learn that even though this might look like a firsthand historical investigation, it's still Isaac spilling his proverbial guts (and literal guts in a scene or two here, with humor as always) on the page.
And yet I did learn quite a bit about Appleseed aka John Chapman, as well as the coming of age of the (still young!) America we all know (and maybe don't love as much as we used to). Isaac does indeed love his country as well as every stranger he encounters in it, and will share personal stories of his own in exchange for your secrets, tips, and history of this place.
So put on your hiking shoes, even if they don't fit quite like they used to, and stumble through these adventures with Isaac as your guide, docent, historian, and comedian. It's more MOTH story than TED Talk and yet you'll learn a lot more than you might have expected in the process.
Let's hope Fitzgerald keeps walking... and writing... for as long as he can stay awake on the beaten path - this book is a gem of self discovery, personal growth, and our collective history. Love it.
Anyone that's met, read, or experienced Isaac Fitzgerald in any form knows that he could charm anyone into joining him on an impromptu adventure and reading this book feels like walking alongside him as he sets off on a long walk to better understand (ostensibly) Johnny (Chapman) Appleseed, Rural America, and himself.
But those who have read his first book (memoir/collection), Dirtbag Massachusetts, will not be disappointed to learn that even though this might look like a firsthand historical investigation, it's still Isaac spilling his proverbial guts (and literal guts in a scene or two here, with humor as always) on the page.
And yet I did learn quite a bit about Appleseed aka John Chapman, as well as the coming of age of the (still young!) America we all know (and maybe don't love as much as we used to). Isaac does indeed love his country as well as every stranger he encounters in it, and will share personal stories of his own in exchange for your secrets, tips, and history of this place.
So put on your hiking shoes, even if they don't fit quite like they used to, and stumble through these adventures with Isaac as your guide, docent, historian, and comedian. It's more MOTH story than TED Talk and yet you'll learn a lot more than you might have expected in the process.
Let's hope Fitzgerald keeps walking... and writing... for as long as he can stay awake on the beaten path - this book is a gem of self discovery, personal growth, and our collective history. Love it.
May 14, 2026
To live in America is to live within a legend. from American Rambler by Isaac Fitzgerald
Yes, this book is about Johnny Appleseed. But mostly it is about a man who loves walking, solitude, and freedom. On his rambles, he considers his life, this America and it’s people, and the stories we tell (true and false).
He decided to follow in the footsteps of his childhood hero John Chapman, a great walker himself. Underprepared, Fitzgerald goes on a ‘ramble’ that begins at the Johnny Appleseed Center in Massachusetts, close to his childhood home; his ramble evolved into a year long quest across states.
We do learn about Chapman, both facts and legend. Chapman was a Swedenborgian who proselytized while planting his apple orchards across the Midwest to provide apple jack to the frontier settlers.
And we meet people from across small town America. Fitzgerald is adept at making strangers into friends.
He also is vulnerably open about his personal struggles and the more unsavory aspects of the journey—like bedbugs and bears.
Which stories get remembered, whose stories get sweetened for easy swallowing, and whose get forgotten? from American Rambler
Entertaining and often funny, the memoir is also thoughtful and deep. I chose my Sunday Sentence from it: “Capitalism seems especially adept at taking a complex issues–often one with underlying brutality–and turning it into a T-shirt. Or a park.”
Sometimes we must leave home and wander into the unknown in order to grow into the future, and return home.
Thanks to Knopf for a free book.
Yes, this book is about Johnny Appleseed. But mostly it is about a man who loves walking, solitude, and freedom. On his rambles, he considers his life, this America and it’s people, and the stories we tell (true and false).
He decided to follow in the footsteps of his childhood hero John Chapman, a great walker himself. Underprepared, Fitzgerald goes on a ‘ramble’ that begins at the Johnny Appleseed Center in Massachusetts, close to his childhood home; his ramble evolved into a year long quest across states.
We do learn about Chapman, both facts and legend. Chapman was a Swedenborgian who proselytized while planting his apple orchards across the Midwest to provide apple jack to the frontier settlers.
And we meet people from across small town America. Fitzgerald is adept at making strangers into friends.
He also is vulnerably open about his personal struggles and the more unsavory aspects of the journey—like bedbugs and bears.
Which stories get remembered, whose stories get sweetened for easy swallowing, and whose get forgotten? from American Rambler
Entertaining and often funny, the memoir is also thoughtful and deep. I chose my Sunday Sentence from it: “Capitalism seems especially adept at taking a complex issues–often one with underlying brutality–and turning it into a T-shirt. Or a park.”
Sometimes we must leave home and wander into the unknown in order to grow into the future, and return home.
Thanks to Knopf for a free book.
May 17, 2026
📚 American Rambler by Isaac Fitzgerald 📚
Thank you Knopf for the advance copy.
When I heard about this book, my interest was piqued, even though I rarely read nonfiction. Maybe it's because, though I grew up in Oregon, Johnny Appleseed was somehow a big part of my childhood. My mom taught me the song, and my dad was constantly grafting apple trees. I learned recently that he once even planned to start a nursery (how did I not know this?).
When you have rambler parents, a book like this calls to you before you even know what it's truly about. And you understand why the author needs to get up and go.
It's somewhat about Johnny Appleseed, as you learn interesting things about him along the journey, but it's also a true ramble - physically, as Isaac walks and drives to Johnny Appleseed points of interest, and also in the writing, as many tangents related to the locale or a part of John Chapman's life lead off into at least a few paragraphs about that person or place. But to me, it was never too rambly.
I grew up in a rural area and then moved to the city. There are wonderful things about the country, but you also find some ugliness, in terms of racism, xenophobia, and rewritten history (I guess you can say that about anywhere in our country anyway). I was so curious about how the Johnny Appleseed story would be dealt with in terms of how it represents colonial expansion and Indigenous erasure. I'm happy to report that that Isaac Fitzgerald did not shy away from addressing that contradiction, which I really appreciated.
It's also very personal, so I thank the author for sharing some of those difficult things with us.
#AmericanRambler
Thank you Knopf for the advance copy.
When I heard about this book, my interest was piqued, even though I rarely read nonfiction. Maybe it's because, though I grew up in Oregon, Johnny Appleseed was somehow a big part of my childhood. My mom taught me the song, and my dad was constantly grafting apple trees. I learned recently that he once even planned to start a nursery (how did I not know this?).
When you have rambler parents, a book like this calls to you before you even know what it's truly about. And you understand why the author needs to get up and go.
It's somewhat about Johnny Appleseed, as you learn interesting things about him along the journey, but it's also a true ramble - physically, as Isaac walks and drives to Johnny Appleseed points of interest, and also in the writing, as many tangents related to the locale or a part of John Chapman's life lead off into at least a few paragraphs about that person or place. But to me, it was never too rambly.
I grew up in a rural area and then moved to the city. There are wonderful things about the country, but you also find some ugliness, in terms of racism, xenophobia, and rewritten history (I guess you can say that about anywhere in our country anyway). I was so curious about how the Johnny Appleseed story would be dealt with in terms of how it represents colonial expansion and Indigenous erasure. I'm happy to report that that Isaac Fitzgerald did not shy away from addressing that contradiction, which I really appreciated.
It's also very personal, so I thank the author for sharing some of those difficult things with us.
#AmericanRambler
May 17, 2026
Only got 1.5 hours into the audiobook, and that was after skipping thru woke upon woke parts/comments. Didn’t care to spend more time with the author.
Miscellaneous thoughts:
He starts on a long walking trip/hike, but then didn’t do any research besides “it starts at the visitor center”?
He makes a “cracker” joke about the people living in a Massachusetts small town?
He keeps informing the reader that he recently left (a year or 2 ago) a high paying job. But didn’t tell us what this high paying job was, or how much he made or why.
He’s walking on a long hike and doesn’t bring gloves? Then happy he remembered to bring a winter hat (NO mention of summer hat)?
He doesn’t dress/pack properly so when it starts to snow, he buys a cotton (!) sweatshirt from goodwill. Then doesn’t know goodwill doesn’t wash the clothes, so just takes it off and donates it back in?
Drama Queen. He walks into a nice restaurant, and thinks everyone is scared of him. He has a beard! He says he’s tattooed all over, but it’s snowing, so he’s very clothed. He did take off a sweatshirt nearby, and assumes everyone in the restaurant watched him do this out of the window and saw some of his stomach. Yeah, you wish everyone was enthralled with you as much as you are.
Miscellaneous thoughts:
He starts on a long walking trip/hike, but then didn’t do any research besides “it starts at the visitor center”?
He makes a “cracker” joke about the people living in a Massachusetts small town?
He keeps informing the reader that he recently left (a year or 2 ago) a high paying job. But didn’t tell us what this high paying job was, or how much he made or why.
He’s walking on a long hike and doesn’t bring gloves? Then happy he remembered to bring a winter hat (NO mention of summer hat)?
He doesn’t dress/pack properly so when it starts to snow, he buys a cotton (!) sweatshirt from goodwill. Then doesn’t know goodwill doesn’t wash the clothes, so just takes it off and donates it back in?
Drama Queen. He walks into a nice restaurant, and thinks everyone is scared of him. He has a beard! He says he’s tattooed all over, but it’s snowing, so he’s very clothed. He did take off a sweatshirt nearby, and assumes everyone in the restaurant watched him do this out of the window and saw some of his stomach. Yeah, you wish everyone was enthralled with you as much as you are.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Much of what I thought I knew as fact can't be verified but I did learn a lot about the time period John Chapman lived and how it seems he honored the spaces, and animals and humans living around him.
I do think the subtitle is a little misleading. I expected a well thought out, prepared plan would be in place for the journey Isaac Fitzgerald would embark on in this book. Instead, there are dozens of hikes and journeys and lots of sleeping outside fractured by miles in a Jeep at 90 mph.
I live within spitting distance to Fort Wayne, Indiana and have been to Mount Vernon Ariel Foundation Park, and the Shawshank Trail and many of the other towns and locations the author finds himself in as he's chasing apple seeds, so it was fun to read those parts but I didn't connect much to the authors story as much. He writes well and makes the connections for the narrative, it just wasn't quite what I was expecting.
I do think the subtitle is a little misleading. I expected a well thought out, prepared plan would be in place for the journey Isaac Fitzgerald would embark on in this book. Instead, there are dozens of hikes and journeys and lots of sleeping outside fractured by miles in a Jeep at 90 mph.
I live within spitting distance to Fort Wayne, Indiana and have been to Mount Vernon Ariel Foundation Park, and the Shawshank Trail and many of the other towns and locations the author finds himself in as he's chasing apple seeds, so it was fun to read those parts but I didn't connect much to the authors story as much. He writes well and makes the connections for the narrative, it just wasn't quite what I was expecting.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
3.5 stars, rounded up to 4 stars.
I enjoyed this, a mash-up of history, Americana, travelogue and personal memoir, even when it got a little preachy and full of itself. Like most of us, I'd heard of Johnny Appleseed but knew next-to-nothing about his actual life. Having grown up in Ohio and having spent most of my adult life in New England, the various settings of the book felt very familiar.
I appreciated the author's candor and honesty, and his sharp eye made his observations of his journey quite interesting.
My biggest complaint would be the use of "Walking" in the title; yes, there was some walking, but there was an awful lot of not-walking.
All in all, this was compelling, and I'm glad I read it.
I received a complimentary e-copy of the book from the publisher and NetGalley, and my review is being left freely.
I enjoyed this, a mash-up of history, Americana, travelogue and personal memoir, even when it got a little preachy and full of itself. Like most of us, I'd heard of Johnny Appleseed but knew next-to-nothing about his actual life. Having grown up in Ohio and having spent most of my adult life in New England, the various settings of the book felt very familiar.
I appreciated the author's candor and honesty, and his sharp eye made his observations of his journey quite interesting.
My biggest complaint would be the use of "Walking" in the title; yes, there was some walking, but there was an awful lot of not-walking.
All in all, this was compelling, and I'm glad I read it.
I received a complimentary e-copy of the book from the publisher and NetGalley, and my review is being left freely.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
A blend of memoir, history, and travelogue, with echoes of the Beat Generation, the author describes his odyssey across a region of the USA most Americans don't consider interesting, let alone think about visiting. Meandering through Massachusetts, Ohio, and Indiana, he wanders through woods, drifts down rivers, drinks a lot of hard cider, drives a jeep, and meets numerous eccentric locals. In the picaresque style, commenting on America past and present, he revives the myth and history of John Chapman (aka Johnny Appleseed), an era of frontiersmen in a region steeped in legend, and waiting for rediscovery.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Grab yourself a beer from a dive bar and belly up to read AMERICAN RAMBLER: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed.
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As someone who doesn't usually gravitate towards nonfiction, I was intrigued by this part-memoir, part-travel, part-historical tale.
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Isaac walks the trails that Johnny Appleseed did, sharing history and humanity along the way. What I loved most about this book were a few things: I didn't know much about Isaac's upbringing and I appreciate his raw and honest stories that shaped the man he is today. I also found Isaac's writing made me feel like I was sitting next to a friend. He invites the reader to look inward, to meditate and listen, and to feel the gift of our natural landscape.
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I will be better about meditating and taking my time when walking Martha moving forward, that's for sure.
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As someone who doesn't usually gravitate towards nonfiction, I was intrigued by this part-memoir, part-travel, part-historical tale.
.
Isaac walks the trails that Johnny Appleseed did, sharing history and humanity along the way. What I loved most about this book were a few things: I didn't know much about Isaac's upbringing and I appreciate his raw and honest stories that shaped the man he is today. I also found Isaac's writing made me feel like I was sitting next to a friend. He invites the reader to look inward, to meditate and listen, and to feel the gift of our natural landscape.
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I will be better about meditating and taking my time when walking Martha moving forward, that's for sure.
May 14, 2026
Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for letting me review this book. The author traverses the country going to the places John Chapman was along with places that celebrate him. The book also tells a bit about the author’s life as well. He starts out walking like John Chapman does but realizes at the end of the first day; that’s not doable. He buys a Jeep and travels to various places.He learns fact from fiction about John Chapman and I think finds himself along the way as well. I think walking with no distractions gives one perspective about yourself and life.
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