William Least Heat-Moon

Hailed as a masterpiece of American travel writing, Blue Highways is an unforgettable journey along our nation's backroads. William Least Heat-Moon set out with little more than the need to put home behind him and a sense of curiosity about "those little towns that get on the map -- if they get on at all -- only because some cartographer has a blank space to fill: Remote, Oregon; Simplicity, Virginia; New Freedom, Pennsylvania; New Hope, Tennessee; Why, Arizona; Whynot, Mississippi." His adventures, his discoveries, and his recollections of the extraordinary people he encountered along the way amount to a revelation of the true American experience.

A Journey into America

Blue Highways

From the acclaimed author of Blue Highways, PrairyErth, and Roads to Quoz, a dazzling collection of travel tales from the road. Here, There, Elsewhere draws together for the first time William Least Heat-Moon's greatest short-form travel writing. Personally selected by the writer, these pieces take us from Japan, England, Italy, and Mexico to Long Island, Oregon, Arizona, from small towns to big cities, ocean shores and inland mysteries. Including Heat-Moon's reflections on writing these pieces, Here, There, Elsewhere is much more than the usual collection of amber; it is a coupled summation of craft and memory. A perfect treasury of prose and provocation for readers old and new, Heat-Moon's most recent work reveals his absolute mastery across pages many and few.

Stories from the Road

Here, There, Elsewhere

The author chronicles his journey across America's waterways in his dory Nikawa (River Horse), encountering strange people, hostile cities, and hair-raising dangers.

The Logbook of a Boat Across America

River-horse

New York Times bestseller: “A coast-to-coast journey by way of great rivers, conducted by a contemporary master of travel writing” (Kirkus Reviews). In this memoir brimming with history, humor, and wisdom, the author of Blue Highways and PrairyErth “voyages across the country, from Atlantic to Pacific, almost entirely by its rivers, lakes and canals in a small outboard-powered boat” (San Francisco Chronicle). Setting off from New York Harbor aboard the boat he named Nikawa (“river horse” in Osage), in hopes of entering the Pacific near Astoria, Oregon, William Least Heat-Moon and his companion, Pilotis, struggle to cover some five thousand watery miles—more than any other cross-country river traveler has ever managed—often following in the wakes of our most famous explorers, from Henry Hudson to Lewis and Clark. En route, the voyagers confront massive floods, submerged rocks, dangerous weather, and their own doubts about whether they can complete the trip. But the hard days yield incomparable pleasures: strangers generous with help and eccentric tales, landscapes unchanged since Sacagawea saw them, riverscapes flowing with a lively past, and the growing belief that efforts to protect our lands and waters are beginning to pay off. “Fizzes with intelligence and high spirits.” —Outside “Propels the reader with historical vignettes, ecological and geological detail, and often hilarious encounters with local eccentrics.” —Time

A Voyage Across America

River-Horse

Winner, Distinguished Literary Achievement, Missouri Humanities Council, 2015 The story behind the writing of the best-selling Blue Highways is as fascinating as the epic trip itself. More than thirty years after his 14,000-mile, 38-state journey, William Least Heat-Moon reflects on the four years he spent capturing the lessons of the road trip on paper—the stops and starts in his composition process, the numerous drafts and painstaking revisions, the depressing string of rejections by publishers, the strains on his personal relationships, and many other aspects of the toil that went into writing his first book. Along the way, he traces the hard lessons learned and offers guidance to aspiring and experienced writers alike. Far from being a technical manual, Writing Blue Highways: The Story of How a Book Happenedis an adventure story of its own, a journey of “exploration into the myriad routes of heart and mind that led to the making of a book from the first sorry and now vanished paragraph to the last words that came not from a graphite pencil but from a letterpress in Tennessee.” Readers will not find a collection of abstract formulations and rules for writing; rather, this book gracefully incorporates examples from Heat-Moon’s own experience. As he explains, “This story might be termed an inadvertent autobiography written not by the traveler who took Ghost Dancing in 1978 over the byroads of America but by a man only listening to him. That blue-roadman hasn’t been seen in more than a third of a century, and over the last many weeks as I sketched in these pages, I’ve regretted his inevitable departure.” Filtered as the struggles of the “blue-roadman” are through the awareness of someone more than thirty years older with a half dozen subsequent books to his credit, the story of how his first book “happened” is all the more resonant for readers who may not themselves be writers but who are interested in the tricky balance of intuitive creation and self-discipline required for any artistic endeavor.

The Story of How a Book Happened

Writing BLUE HIGHWAYS

This New York Times bestseller by the author of Blue Highways is “a majestic survey of land and time and people in a single county of the Kansas plains” (Hungry Mind Review). William Least Heat-Moon travels by car and on foot into the core of our continent, focusing on the landscape and history of Chase County—a sparsely populated tallgrass prairie in the Flint Hills of central Kansas—exploring its land, plants, animals, and people until this small place feels as large as the universe. Called a “modern-day Walden” by the Chicago Sun-Times, PrairyErth is a journey through a place, through time, and into the human mind from the acclaimed author of Here, There, Elsewhere: Stories from the Road. “A sense of the American grain that will give [PrairyErth] a permanent place in the literature of our country.” —Paul Theroux, The New York Times

A Deep Map

PrairyErth

As word of the discovery of gold in northern California spreads, an English physician, Nathaniel Trennant, accepts an offer to serve as doctor on a ship carrying immigrants to America. Alongside some two hundred emigres from northern Europe is a contingent of wealthy British people who call themselves not immigrants, but colonists. With this imported cultural divide, Nathaniel begins a long journey into what he terms the American experiment, one already under the stress of social injustices and economic inequities. Trennant arrives in Baltimore and stumbles onto its slave market, where he witnesses the horrors of human bondage. One night in a boardinghouse he discovers under his bed a runaway slave. Disturbed and angered by the selling of human lives, he offers to help the young man escape, a criminal action that will put the slave and physician into flight from both the law and opportunistic slave hunters. Traveling by foot, horse, stage, canal boat, and steamer, the two men gradually form a bond as they explore the backcountry and forge a deep friendship as they encounter the land and a host of memorable characters who reveal the nature of the American experiment.

Discovery in a New Land

O America

Lois Wallace

Revisits the controversy surrounding the arrival of Columbus in the New World, offering a new perspective on this pivotal historical event.

Columbus in the Americas

About a quarter century ago, a previously unknown writer named William Least Heat-Moon wrote a book called Blue Highways. Acclaimed as a classic, it was a travel book like no other. Quirky, discursive, endlessly curious, Heat-Moon had embarked on an American journey off the beaten path. Sticking to the small places via the small roads--those colored blue on maps--he uncovered a nation deep in character, story, and charm. Now, for the first time since Blue Highways, Heat-Moon is back on the backroads. ROADS TO QUOZ is his lyrical, funny, and touching account of a series of American journeys into small-town America.

An American Mosey

Roads to Quoz

From the acclaimed author of Blue Highways, PrairyErth, and Roads to Quoz, a dazzling collection of travel tales from the road. HERE, THERE, ELSEWHERE draws together for the first time William Least Heat-Moon's greatest short-form travel writing. Personally selected by the writer, these pieces take us from Japan, England, Italy, and Mexico to Long Island, Oregon, Arizona, from small towns to big cities, ocean shores and inland mysteries. Including Heat-Moon's reflections on writing these pieces, HERE, THERE, ELSEWHERE is much more than the usual collection of amber; it is a coupled summation of craft and memory. A perfect treasury of prose and provocation for readers old and new, Heat-Moon's most recent work reveals his absolute mastery across pages many and few.

William Least Heat-Moon

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