William Least Heat Moon Biography
(1939– ), Blue Highways: A Journey into America, PrairyErth
American author, born in Kansas City, Missouri, educated at the University of Missouri. Originally named William Trogdon, he adopted his Native American name, which translates as ‘Least Heat Moon’. He taught in Columbia, Missouri, from 1965 to 1978, when, reacting against the uniform materialism of modern American life, he embarked on a three-month journey around the USA in a van; the widely popular Blue Highways: A Journey into America (1982) forms an abundantly detailed record of the landscapes and societies he passed through. In 1991 Heat Moon published PrairyErth, his attempt to construct a ‘deep map’ of Chase County, Kansas, through the collation of an extraordinary range of information on the human and natural characters of the area.
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Literature Reference: American Literature, English Literature, Classics & Modern FictionEncyclopedia of Literature: William Hart-Smith Biography to Sir John [Frederick William] Herschel Biography