关于作者
William Kerrigan spent his earliest years in the midwest, where he tasted bitter disappointment when he lost the role of "Johnny Appleseed" in the first grade pageant to a boy named Hal. After spending decades in the wilderness of the American West and South, he returned to Ohio to take a position as a professor of History at a small liberal arts college. That relocation renewed his interest in the legendary apple tree planter, and his book, Johnny Appleseed and the American Orchard (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), is the culmination of fifteen years of research in libraries and local historical societies from Massachusetts to Indiana. At times he followed Chapman's path across the landscape by foot, bike, and kayak.
Johnny Appleseed and the American Orchard is more than a biography of John Chapman and the story of the Johnny Appleseed legend. It is also a history of the Old World apple in the New World, from the Puritans to the present.
When he is not writing and thinking about apples, he teaches American History and directs his students in local history projects. The results of those efforts have included several museum quality exhibitions, an archive of oral histories, and three student-authored local pictorial histories.
He also likes to plant apple trees and explore the hills of southeastern Ohio by foot, bike, and kayak.
