William Least Heat-Moon
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'''William Least Heat-Moon''', byname of William Trogdon (born [[1940]]) is an [[United States|American]] [[travel literature|travel writer]] of [[England|English]], [[Irish people|Irish]] and [[Osage Nation]] ancestry.
==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]], 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.
He is a contemporary [[Missouri]] travel writer, and author of a [[bestselling]] [[trilogy]] of topographical U.S. travel writing.
''[[Blue Highways]]'', which spent 42 weeks on the [[New York Times]] bestseller list in 1982-83, 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 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 dance|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 [[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 Heat-Moon's continuing observation of American culture. ''River Horse'' details 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. 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, Heat-Moon also wrote ''Columbus in the Americas'', a brief [[history]] of [[Christopher Columbus]]' journeys.
==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
==External links==
* [http://wiredforbooks.org/williamleast/ 1983, 1984, 1991 Real Audio interviews with William Least Heat-Moon at Wired for Books.org] by [[Don Swaim]]
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[[Category:1940 births]]
[[Category:Living people]]
[[Category:American travel writers]]
[[Category:American historians]]
[[Category:Native American writers]]
[[Category:People from Kansas City]]
[[Category:Missouri writers]]
[[Category:University of Missouri–Columbia faculty]]
[[Category:University of Missouri–Columbia alumni]]
[[Category:People from Columbia, Missouri]]
[[ca:William Least Heat-Moon]]