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The Man, the Myth, the American Story
Simon & Schuster
April 2011
On Sale: April 12, 2011
356 pages
ISBN: 1439178259
EAN: 9781439178256
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
This portrait of Johnny Appleseed restores the
flesh-and-blood man beneath the many myths. It captures the
boldness of an iconic American life and the sadness of his
last years, as the frontier marched past him, ever westward.
And it shows how death liberated the legend and made of
Johnny a barometer of the nation’s feelings about its own
heroic past and the supposed Eden it once had been. It is a
book that does for America’s inner frontier what Stephen
Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage did for its western one. No American folk hero—not Davy Crockett, not even Daniel
Boone—is better known than Johnny Appleseed, and none has
become more trapped in his own legends. The fact is, John
Chapman—the historical Johnny Appleseed—might well be the
best-known figure from our national past about whom most
people know almost nothing real at all. One early historian called Chapman “the oddest character in
all our history,” and not without cause. Chapman was an
animal whisperer, a vegetarian in a raw country where it was
far easier to kill game than grow a crop, a pacifist in a
place ruled by gun, knife, and fist. Some settlers
considered Chapman a New World saint. Others thought he had
been kicked in the head by a horse. And yet he was welcomed
almost everywhere, and stories about him floated from cabin
to cabin, village to village, just as he did. As eccentric as he was, John Chapman was also very much a
man of his times: a land speculator and pioneer nurseryman
with an uncanny sense for where settlement was moving next,
and an evangelist for the Church of the New Jerusalem on a
frontier alive with religious fervor. His story is equally
America’s story at the birth of the nation. In this tale of the wilderness and its taming, author Howard
Means explores how our national past gets mythologized and
hired out. Mostly, though, this is the story of two men, one
real and one invented; of the times they lived through, the
ties that link them, and the gulf that separates them; of
the uses to which both have been put; and of what that tells
us about ourselves, then and now.
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