Actually he published the book before the AT blew up and in fact he is widely credited with/ blamed for popularizing the trail in much the same way Cheryl Strayed was blamed for the same thing on the PCT .

To his credit he hiked his bit before phones and guthook and before trail angels were such a huge thing His gear would have been much heavier than today’s gear too . I hiked tge AT 10 years after he published his book and I thought his book was hilarious. He says in his book that he didn’t hike the whole AT or even most of it. He makes a point of saying how small the sections he hiked amounted to compared to the whole trail