[Oct. 15, 2026]–Famed golf writer James Dodson is returning to the Brattleboro Literary Festival for this, its 25th year. Dodson will kick things off Friday evening at 7:30 at 118 Elliot, talking about his book The Road That Made America: A Modern Pilgrim’s Journey on the Great Wagon Road. I’m happy to be introducing him and his book, a rarity for him in that it’s not about golf.
Dodson joined us in 2017 to speak about his The Range Bucket List, alongside Tom Callahan who had just published Arnie: The Life of Arnold Palmer. A felicitous pairing, since Dodson had earlier helped Palmer write his memoir, A Golfer’s Life. He secured that assignment because of his debut volume, Final Rounds, arguably one of the most poignant golf books ever written, about a trip to the great courses of England and Scotland with his terminally ill father. Final Rounds marks its 30th anniversary this year, still in print.
Golf makes a few brief appearances in Dodson’s latest—the Brattleboro Country Club course even gets a mention, as does a round of Woodrow Wilson’s, who once dragged an aging U.S. Grant out to a course as a spectator, much to the former President’s bafflement. (After Wilson whiffed on a swing Grant supposedly conceded the game might lend itself to exercise but wondered, “What is the ball for?”)
But The Road That Made America is a road trip of a different order, a journey along a byway critical in American history, especially as it pertained to early settlers from abroad moving south and west. The Great Wagon Road began near Philadelphia and wended its way down through to Georgia.
Since his teens Dodson had wanted to follow what remained of the road because his ancestors had done the same—different strands of the family taking the Wagon Road to, eventually, North Carolina, where Dodson now lives.
It takes him close to six years of repeated journeys to complete the task, but it was clearly worth it. Dodson’s report is wondrously stuffed with tasty historical morsels particularly from pre-Revolutionary days through the Civil War years, the cast including William Penn, Daniel Boone, George Washington. James Buchanan, Thaddeus Stevens, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and many other lesser-known lights who had passed along or lived on the road.
But it’s Dodson’s meetings, many planned, others random and serendipitous, that bring the book to further life. He runs into historians, museum directors, librarians, docents, war reenactors, hobbyists, collectors, mayors and ministers, poets and painters, a Thomas Jefferson descendant and just plain folks with an interest in the old highway.
“All history is personal to someone,” Dodson tells one historian who asks him what he’s learned from his pilgrimage. And what is personal, almost spiritual in the journey for him, he’s generous enough to share with readers.
Hope to see you at this year’s festival, all events free and open to the public, as always. The full schedule is available at the link above.
First published on my Substack, Tom’s Bedellicatessan
