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.

On the Road AgainThere's no shortage of 20th-century literature about traveling across America in a car. Even William Least Heat-Moon, author of River Horse, wrote a nonfiction work about his search in a beat-up Ford for himself and America (Blue Highways). But not since the 19th-century adventures of Mark Twain, as told in Life on the Mississippi, have readers had the chance to vicariously take a journey across America by water rather than by road. River Horse, a voyage across America's waterways, is a return to a bygone literary tradition. Following in the footsteps of America's greatest explorers, from Henry Hudson to Lewis and Clark, Heat-Moon traveled around the waterways of America in a 22-foot cruiser boat called Nikawa (Osage for "river horse"). Heat-Moon covers 5,000-plus miles in four months, departing from Astoria, New York, and completing his journey in Astoria, Oregon. River Horse completes Heat-Moon's trilogy of explorations of America and the American people, which he began with Blue Highways and Prairyerth.

Robert Penn Warren pronounced Heat-Moon's Blue Highways "a masterpiece." Now Heat-Moon has pulled to the side of the road and set off on foot to take readers on an exploration of time and space, landscape and history in the Flint Hills of central Kansas.

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.

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.

A stirring tale of adventure and tragedy"They brought balls of spun cotton and parrots and javelins and other little things that it would be tiresome to write down, and they gave everything for anything that was given to them. I was attentive and labored to find out if there was any gold."With these portentous words, Christopher Columbus described one of his first encounters with Native Americans on the island of Guanahani, which he had named San Salvador and claimed for Spain the day before. In Columbus in the Americas, bestselling author William Least Heat-Moon reveals that Columbus's subsequent dealings with the cultures he encountered not only did considerable immediate harm, but also set the pattern of behavior for those who followed him.Based on the logbook of Columbus and numerous other firsthand accounts of his four voyages to the New World, this vividly detailed history also examines the strengths and weaknesses of Columbus as a navigator, explorer, and leader. It recounts dramatic events such as the destruction of Fortress Navidad, the very first European settlement in the New World; a pitched battle in northern Panama with the native Guaymi people; and an agonizing year Columbus and his men spent marooned on a narrow spit of land in southern Jamaica.Filled with stories of triumph and tragedy, courage and villainy, Columbus in the Americas offers a balanced yet unflinching portrait of the most famous and controversial explorer in history.

Winner, Distinguished Literary Achievement, Missouri Humanities Council, 2015The 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 Happened is 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.

CELESTIAL MECHANICS: A Tale for a Mid-Winter Night, the debut novel of famed Blue Highways author William Least Heat-Moon has received rave critical praise since its recent release in hardcover. Publishers Weekly “An elegant story of one man’s search for meaning in the cosmos. . . . This thought-provoking novel is rife with relatable and complex musings.” ALA Booklist calls it "An elegant story of one man’s search for meaning in the cosmos. . . . This thought-provoking novel is rife with relatable and complex musings.” And The Proximal Eye raves, "William Least-Heat Moon has taken a story of people making choices incompatible with their own desires and natures and given us a travelogue of the spirit. . . . a map of roads oft-traveled and too little remarked on the journey to hope.” CELESTIAL MECHANICS embarks on a journey through the mind and wrestles with life’s major questions, like the nature of the Cosmos, the value of knowledge, and the essence of truly being alive. Heat-Moon has already proven he is a master at taking readers on powerful journeys as shown in his initial release Blue Highways, which spent 42 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list. Think of CELESTIAL MECHANICS as a Blue Highways of the soul, in which the author leads readers on a path unlike any other, offering new insight into finding one’s place in this universe we struggle to understand. In this novel of haunted love, the protagonist, an amateur astronomer, finds himself in a marriage descending toward darkness until the arrival of his sister-in-law and soon thereafter the appearance of a witching neighbor. In ways enigmatic, ghostly, and funny, the three women draw him into the equivocal nature of reality and dreams, leading him on a journey toward something vastly beyond himself.Just as Heat-Moon’s nonfiction employs many fictional narrative techniques, CELESTIAL MECHANICS draws upon nonfictional practices to build a story that crosses traditional boundaries between the two genres. It is a call of a generation to a generation wanting to believe rationality and spirituality can fruitfully coexist in a culture threatened by divisions. In a disaffected, disconnected nation that widely ignores the deep implications of both what is within and beyond us—the cosmic worlds revealed by the telescope and the realms opened by the microscope-—this tale is a quest for humanity’s deepest links with the universe and the ways those ties shape love and meaning. In CELESTIAL MECHANICS, the reader takes a journey into ways we behave with each other and how humans relate to the ultimate source of our being.

In 1848 an English physician, Nathaniel Trennant, accepts an offer to serve as doctor on a ship carrying immigrants to America. When arriving in Baltimore, Trennant stumbles onto its slave market and 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 fugitive slave and physician into flight from both the law and opportunistic slave hunters. Traveling by foot, horse, stage, canal boat, and steamer, Nathaniel and Nicodemus explore the backcountry and forge a deep friendship as they encounter a host of memorable characters who reveal the nature of the American experiment, one still in its early stages but already under the stress of social injustices and economic inequities.

In this paperback masterpiece of American travel writing, William Least Heat-Moon embarks on an unforgettable journey along the nation's backroads. Driven by a desire to leave home and curiosity about lesser-known towns, he traverses places like Remote, Oregon, Simplicity, Virginia, and Why, Arizona. His experiences, discoveries, and encounters with remarkable people offer a profound insight into the true American experience. The author, also known for 'Roads to Quoz', 'River Horse', and 'PrairyEarth', resides in Columbia, Missouri.