Novelist, English teacher, and book reviewer Richard Horan is a reverse Johnny Appleseed.
He has travelled the country and gathered tree seeds from homes of famous writers, looking for the trees that were silent witnesses to their childhood or adult lives, and may have influenced their work.
In front of L. Frank Baum's childhood home was a wood road made of yellow hemlock. He goes to Kerouac's home in Lowell, MA and scooped up some silver maple seeds, met some local people and found passages in Kerouac's work that show he was the most at peace when in the presence of trees.
He may not find connections between trees and writers at each stop - the tree from Mockingbird was cut down two years ago, for instance - but Rick is a manic player in the journey, relating his own passions for certain writers, as well almost getting arrested several times.
Here is his itinerary:
Jack Kerouac
Rachel Carson
Willa Cather
Edith Wharton
Mount Vernon and Monticello
Henry Miller
Krishnamurti
Ken Kesey
John Muir
Gettysburg
Thomas Wolfe
Flannery O'Connor
Carson McCullers
F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald
Harper Lee
Truman Capote
Thoreau and Emerson
Robert Frost
Herman Melville
Pearl S. Buck
Shirley Jackson
L. Frank Baum
Esther Forbes
Helen Keller
Tennessee Williams
Sherwood Anderson
Louis Armstrong
William S. Burroughs
Eudora Welty
Willie Morris
William Faulkner
