Apples, America, and Adulthood
American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed by Isaac Fitzgerald (Knopf, 2026).
Reviewed by Elizabeth Stice
American Rambler is a book about Isaac Fitzgerald’s quest to better understand freedom and solitude and Johnny Appleseed. Fitzgerald is genuinely a cool guy. He is a tattooed writer with a very interesting and dramatic backstory. He has a sense of humor. He has McSweeney’s cred and you may have seen him on television. He has cool friends. As a writer, he is capable of some great lines, like “the masculine urge to go out for a pack of cigarettes and never come back.” Isaac Fitzgerald is also interested in Johnny Appleseed, legally known as John Chapman.
Johnny Appleseed is a tricky subject. We just don’t know that much about him beyond the classic introduction, “the man, the myth, the legend.” Fitzgerald “walks the trail” of Johnny Appleseed and offers us scenes from places we know Appleseed visited and he shares what he has learned from existing biographies. This book is not an attempt to overtake those existing biographies, but Fitzgerald adds information about apples and cider in American history, some frontier history, and some reflections on Appleseed’s interesting and not entirely uncomplicated legacy. We even get some Swedenborgianism thrown in. If all you know is the bare feet and the tin hat, you will certainly learn something new. All of this is interspersed with Fitzgerald’s own journey, physical and metaphorical.
You could do worse than walk the Appleseed trail when trying to figure things out. Johnny Appleseed can be an inspiring figure. He was also an unconventional man who traveled long distances, never really settled down, and often stayed with friends. He spread cider apples across America and made a lot of money doing it, which he did not enjoy or keep, because he was a committed, evangelical Swedenborgian. Very interestingly, he never grafted apple trees, only planted seeds, which meant he never knew exactly what apple he would get (apple seeds are weird that way). So, John Chapman is a fascinating combination of entrepreneur, adventurer, evangelist, and experimental radical. He lived on all kinds of frontiers. He is altogether iconic, though there is no evidence he ever wore a tin hat and he probably did wear shoes.
As a memoir, American Rambler fits into the category “middle-aged man figuring out life.” In many ways it is similar to other recent books, including The Essential Book of Pickup Trucks (review here). A man has been at times innocent and optimistic, at times foolish and careless. He’s not out here doing wrong, but he often fails to get things quite right. His family of origin is complicated and his adult existence has been peripatetic. In this book, the protagonist has never signed a lease, but will he finally figure things out, settle in a location, and marry his really nice girlfriend? How will Fitzgerald’s year of following in Johnny Appleseed’s footsteps change him?
Fitzgerald is on Chapman’s trail, but he isn’t really trying to model his life after him. The places and the stories provide opportunities for Fitzgerald to reflect and consider. We learn about Fitzgerald’s early childhood, which included some homelessness, some time at the Catholic Worker, and religious but very complicated parents. In a conversation with a new friend, he discusses his “difficult childhood and mental instability. The choices in my life—or the things I didn’t choose at all—that have led to me being a person approaching forty who spends his time sleeping outdoors while chasing an American myth.” Fitzgerald’s adulthood hasn’t been entirely misspent, but he has avoided many conventional markers of adult existence and still sometimes has one drink too many. As the book goes on, narration and his own story seem to overtake the more general philosophic and Appleseed-induced reflections on life and existence.
In some ways, American Rambler drifts from the promise of its title. The book begins with Fitzgerald doing a multi-day hike, unprepared and experiencing America anew. But this is not Walk Across America by Peter Jenkins. Fitzgerald drives to many of his hikes and his Jeep is a main character. Fitzgerald sees himself as partaking in “that grand tradition: trying to figure myself out while traveling this big country of ours, out on the road.” He does camp quite a bit and endure some long slogs on foot, but compared to other books about self-discovery journeys on foot, this book does not keep up. He doesn’t end the year with his body physically hardened and heart softened by the trail. He is not on the edge of becoming Cheryl Strayed or another Eustace Conway. Fitzgerald’s Jeep, Rabbit, is a nice character, but probably not quite on the level of Steinbeck’s Rocinante.
Yet it would be unfair to say Fitzgerald does not embody an American Rambler in many very good ways. In his pursuit of John Chapman, Fitzgerald finds himself in many small, American towns. He drinks at local bars, talks to Army veterans, old guys and young dudes, sees minor league baseball, visits a mall, canoes a river, gets really good clam chowder, and witnesses the economic hardships facing isolated communities. His observations are thoroughly engaging. You also cannot help but think he is a great person to sit next to at a bar as you read through his encounters with all kinds of people. Fitzgerald should be commended for not making this book any kind of attempted map of a political landscape. Yes, we get the occasional general lament about capitalism, but he mainly keeps the focus on the people and he never pretends superiority toward anyone he writes about.
This book has already generated quite a bit of buzz, even though it’s not out yet. (You can preorder here and it will be released May 12, 2026.) Apparently Ethan Hawke is a fan. It’s not hard to see why. Fitzgerald is a good writer who tells a good story. And this is a good moment for self-reflection and some national reflection.
Johnny Appleseed was a uniquely American individual who grew up after the American Revolution. We are now in the 250th anniversary of that Revolution and still we all grow up in its shadow. And generations of Americans, like Chapman and like Fitzgerald, continue to take to the road to figure things out. Whether the frontiers are political or personal, walking them seems to be a key American trait. American Rambler brings all of this to the fore. The book always holds your attention and is often entertaining. It is insightful, if not enlightening. Reading American Rambler will not resolve your own mid-life muddles, but it will make you want to pick up a Rambo apple and a hard cider and have a conversation with the author.
Elizabeth Stice is a professor of history and assistant director of the honors program at Palm Beach Atlantic University. When she can, she reads and writes about World War I and she is the author of Empire Between the Lines: Imperial Culture in British and French Trench Newspapers of the Great War (2023).
