Professor Hardcore’s Learning Curve: Back to the Wild from 2025 (4 vols.) is more than an Appalachian Trail hiking story. It is about the subject’s whole life and why it took him sixty-three years to complete the trail. How does a naive, spoiled, nerdy, pretentious Lutheran minister’s son come to be Professor Hardcore? Worsening post-polio scoliosis (up to 110 degrees) and the manifold responsibilities of an English professor/outdoor educator married with two children are the physical challenges. But these are nothing compared to the slow learning curve of this escapist dreamer. For reasons to be revealed, his story has a meta-dystopian framing with three narrators, each with his own font color. His chief editor, Overton, is an android with learning capabilities. His AI learning curve mirrors the subject’s and addresses the threat of climate change, of nuclear holocaust, of reoccurring pandemics, of out-of-control artificial intelligence, and the value of wilderness.

Volume 1 has three parts: I. Hornè ancestry and early childhood (up to 1950), II. Norristown (1950-1960), III. G’burg and Penn (1960-68). Part I introduces the ancestry overcharged Horne libido and the subject’s conflicts with his Philadelphia-born father and subsequent male authority figures. It also begins the theme of his love for Nature inspired by his mother who was raised in Gettysburg with is bucolic battlefield which he visited often. In Part II, leaving rural Sellersville, “Untrammeled wilderness” was not to be found in congested downtown Norristown where new parsonage was located. Polio at ten and it physical, psychological, and social consequences carry us through to Part III. Breaking loose from his father’s control, he begins to find himself in the College Choir, creative writing, and romance on the Choir tour to Europe. Right after the tour, marriage and parenthood provide focus for this callow young man who next must next jump multiple hurdles as student of English literature and Teaching Fellow at Penn in Philadelphia, his father’s home town. With a second child on the way, he leaves Philadelphia without his dissertation complete to take his first teaching job at University of Michigan-Flint, in Vehicle City, Michael Moore’s hometown.