William Least Heat-Moon

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William Least Heat-Moon, byname of William Trogdon (born 1940) is an American travel writer of English, Irish and Osage Nation ancestry.

[edit] Biography

He created his pen name by a quote that his father had once said, "I call myself heat moon, your elder brother is little heat moon. You, coming last, therefore you are least." Born in Kansas City, Missouri, he attended the University of Missouri-Columbia where he joined Tau Kappa Epsilon Fraternity and received a 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.

He is a contemporary Missouri travel writer, and author of a bestselling trilogy of topographical U.S. travel writing.

Blue Highways, a cult classic, is a chronicle of a three-month-long road trip that Heat-Moon took throughout the United States in 1978, after losing his teaching job and being left by his wife. He travelled 13,000 miles, as much as possible on secondary roads (often drawn on maps in blue) and tried to avoid cities, living out of the back of his van "Ghost Dancing" and visiting small towns such as Nameless, Tennessee; Hachita, New Mexico; and Bagley, Minnesota in an attempt to find places in America that were 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 Chase County, Kansas, and River Horse is an account of a four-month coast-to-coast boat trip across the U.S., using only the nation's waterways, and explores Heat-Moon's continuing observation of American culture. River Horse details Heat-Moon's retracing of Lewis and Clark's exploration of the American frontier in a nation at the end of the Twentieth century and only a short time from the rude awaking of September 11th. The reader can sense the same internal search through River Horse 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.

Besides the trilogy, he also wrote Columbus in the Americas, a brief historical book about Christopher Columbus.

[edit] 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
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