William Least Heat-Moon (2008)
William Least Heat-Moon, byname of William Trogdon (born August 27, 1939) is an American travel writer of English, Irish and Osage Nation ancestry. He is the author of a bestselling trilogy of topographical U.S. travel writing.
Biography
His pen name came from his father saying, "I call myself Heat Moon, your elder brother is Little Heat Moon. You, coming last, therefore, are Least." Born in Kansas City, Missouri, Least Heat Moon attended the University of Missouri where he joined Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity. He earned bachelor's, master's, and Ph.D. degrees in English, as well as a bachelor's degree in photojournalism. He also served as a professor of English at the university.
Works
Blue Highways, which spent 34 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list in 1982-83, is a chronicle of a three-month-long road trip that Least Heat Moon took throughout the United States in 1978 after losing his teaching job and being left by his first wife. He traveled 13,000 miles, as much as possible on secondary roads (often drawn on maps in blue, especially in the old-style Rand McNally road atlas) and tried to avoid cities. Living out of the back of his van "Ghost Dancing", he visited small towns such as Nameless, Tennessee; Hachita, New Mexico; and Bagley, Minnesota to find places in America untouched by fast food chains and interstate highways. The book chronicles the people he talked to in roadside cafés as well as his personal soul-searching.
PrairyErth is a deep map account of the history and people of Chase County, Kansas.
River Horse is an account of a four-month coast-to-coast boat trip across the U.S., using only the nation's waterways. It explores Least Heat Moon's continuing observation of American culture. River Horse details Least Heat Moon's retracing of Lewis and Clark's frontier exploration in a nation at the end of the twentieth century and only a short time from the shock of the September 11th attacks. River Horse is informed by the search that the writer began with Blue Highways: for an America stripped of the commercial fog and tabloid mentality that often masks the great strengths of her people.
In addition to the trilogy, Least Heat Moon also wrote Columbus in the Americas (2002), a brief history of Christopher Columbus' journeys and Roads to Quoz (2008). The latter is another "road book" like his former trilogy, but it differs in the sense that it is "not one long road trip, but a series of shorter ones"[1] over the years between books. Robert Sullivan of the New York Times Book Review commented that Least Heat Moon had "gone from what feels like a lover of the road to a love-hate of it, or at least an impatience with aspects that are unavoidable."[1]
Bibliography
- Blue Highways: A Journey Into America. Fawcett, 1982. ISBN 0-449-21109-6
- The Red Couch: A Portrait of America. With Kevin Clarke and Horst Wackerbarth. Olympic Marketing Corp, 1984. ISBN 0-912383-05-4
- A Glass of Handmade. The Atlantic, November 1987.
- PrairyErth (A Deep Map): An Epic History of the Tallgrass Prairie Country. Houghton Mifflin, 1991. ISBN 0-395-48602-5
- River Horse: The Logbook of a Boat Across America. Houghton Mifflin, 1999. ISBN 0-395-63626-4
- Columbus in the Americas (Turning Points in History). Wiley, 2002. ISBN 0-471-21189-3
- Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey. Little, Brown and Company, October 2008, ISBN 9780316110259
References
- ^ a b Sullivan, Robert (December 14, 2008), "On the Road Again, Again", New York Times Book Review: 8
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