I'm a former schoolteacher (Deerfield Academy, St. Albans School) who segued into journalism (The Chronicle of Higher Education, Washingtonian Magazine as senior writer, the Orlando Sentinel and King Features Syndicate, and back to the Washingtonian as senior editor) and from there into books as editor, collaborator, and author. My interests are broad, but increasingly, they seem to be focusing on a constellation of interrelated subjects: American eccentricity and self-reliance, the Civil War as the primal act of American history (an event we are still not over), religious fundamentalism and utopianism, and Manifest Destiny as the great engine of our national story. In my new biography, JOHNNY APPLESEED, all those forces except the Civil War (and that, too, if we project forward) come together in, I hope, fascinating ways. Born and raised in Lancaster, PA, I live now in Millwood, VA, in the northern Shenandoah Valley.