Works
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 Least Heat Moon took throughout the United States in 1978 after losing his teaching job and separating from 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, 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 records encounters in roadside cafés as well as his search for something greater than himself.
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 the nation's waterways almost exclusively, and retraces of Lewis and Clark's frontier exploration.
In addition to the trilogy, 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" over the years between books. Robert Sullivan of the New York Times Book Review commented that Heat-Moon's point "is serendipity and joyous disorder."
Read more about this topic: William Least Heat-Moon
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“All his works might well enough be embraced under the title of one of them, a good specimen brick, “On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History.” Of this department he is the Chief Professor in the World’s University, and even leaves Plutarch behind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners; yet we know that a person is justified not by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ. And we have come to believe in Christ Jesus, so that we might be justified by faith in Christ, and not by doing the works of the law, because no one will be justified by the works of the law.”
—Bible: New Testament, Galatians 2:15-16.
“It [Egypt] has more wonders in it than any other country in the world and provides more works that defy description than any other place.”
—Herodotus (c. 484–424 B.C.)