Isaac Fitzgerald

And now it's time for the introduction.

Isaac Fitzgerald, thank you for coming on the show.

Thank you for coming to me, for coming out here.

You're doing me a favor.

Again, if you're watching this, get your questions in by October 26th.

to jesselnickbookclub at gmail.com. And we will see you at the end of the month with my recap and mailbag for the trees by Percival Everett.

Again, thank you to Isaac Fitzgerald.

Thanks for having me, brother.

Coming into manhood just after the revolution, he's seen as a sort of frontier hero, a mythic representation of the cultivating of the land as a celebration of the indomitable American spirit and the vast freedoms it had won.

But many writers have criticized this portrayal of Johnny Appleseed as a whitewashed version of a much less child-friendly character.

The claim is that Appleseed, whose real name was John Chapman, was a businessman who planted apple trees in order to brew alcoholic cider.

No longer the cheery, baby-faced naturalist of children's books, this version of Chapman's story reveals an opportunistic, booze-fueled entrepreneur.

I put them in a book, and then you guys have them, and you get to build whatever you want.

I remember listening to Isaac Fitzgerald, who's a memoirist, and he was like, we did an event together, and he was like, "I wrote a book, but it didn't become a book until you got it." And I was like, "Oh my God, that's profound." And it's true.

I could have written this in isolation, but it, it might have had a cathartic, cathartic, I don't know what, thing for me, but when I deliver it over to you, you get to build something.

So Cat and Phoebe built Mr.

To be continued.

Next week I will be sitting down with Isaac Fitzgerald to talk about, uh, a lot of different things.

It's a great episode.

We, we pre-taped it before this one.