This website is dedicated to the memory of my father, Dan McCall (January 14, 1940- June 17, 2012).  My Dad was a professor of American Literature at Cornell University for forty years, and was also the author of three books of non–fiction and seven books of fiction, including the acclaimed novel Jack the Bear, which was translated into numerous foreign languages and made into a 20th-Century Fox feature film.

 

After my father’s passing, I found no less than ten unpublished manuscripts in the family house in Ithaca, NY.  My Dad steadfastly maintained his distaste for computers, and had stored giant stacks of tens of thousands of pages, all written on his beloved 1953 Royal manual typewriter.  My father was most passionate about his memoir — the book he HAD to write — and he had revised it at least a dozen times over the course of his lifetime.

 

This memoir, entitled The Confessions of Johnny Appleseed, chronicles my Dad’s teenage years in the 1950s and the profound ambivalence he felt about his outrageous success in various nation-wide speech contests.  I imagine my father’s dreams for this book echo those of one of his heroes, James Agee, who wrote the following about the autobiographical quest: “Is the world out there in the present always some talisman of the world inside me, in my past? ... Do I dare to hope that my own story could become an emblem, some statement in the idiom of personality for a cultural experience?”

 

My father’s works have been compared to those of J.D. Salinger, Mark Twain, and James Baldwin, and this memoir includes some of the most powerful and moving writing of his career.  In it, he is brutally honest about the narcotic of public adulation — and the irresistible allure of the lies told by himself, his family and 1950s America.  

 

 -- Steven McCall