Blue Highways: A Journey Into America

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I asked him: “We encounter American religion in many forms throughout Blue Highways. I realize you wrote about the people you met along the way, but you also must have been interested to meet and talk with those who exhibited a religious passion? You must have sought them out, right?” Heat-Moon does spend more time than I would have liked writing about the random people he meets along the way. The interactions some times are only a few minutes while others might be hours. Some are memorable, some are just sad. Here is one of the more memorable interactions with the country bumpkins. The author's love affair with English ensured that this book would become the voice of Americans in literary form. With his Ph.D. in English, and also serving as a professor, he had the knowledge, experience and curiosity to turn an ordinary travelogue into a travel masterpiece. To the Siouan peoples, the Moon of heat was the seventh month, a time also known as the Blood Moon. William Heat-Moon had seen thirty-eight Blood Moons during his lifetime. His age carried its own madness and futility. Govnor comes out and shoots you personally if you say against tobacco in this state. I smoked thirty-odd years. Did my duty and got a right to talk. Truth is you cain’t buy a real, true cigarette anymores. That’s why they name them that way—tryin’ to convince you what ain’t there. Real. True. Nothin’ to it. They cut them long, they cut them skinny, they paint them red and green and stuff them with menthol and camphor and eucalyptus. What the hell, they’s makin’ toys. I’ll lay you one of them bright-leaf boys up in Winston-Salem is drawin’ up a cigarette you gotta plug in the wall. Nosir, your timber’s comin’ down to make toys.”

I grew up in Kansas City, and I had no idea how segregated it was. Every group I was a part of, I didn’t realize how white we all were,” he says. “During the ‘Blue Highways’ trip, I realized there are a lot of people out there who don’t look like me, who don’t think like me, but they still have things to say.”If, at 80, sheltering in place isn’t as disruptive personally, he is concerned about the larger issue of isolation.

Duffy said a lot of things, almost avoiding the question, until coming out with, “I began to want a life—and morality—based not so much on constraint but on aspiration toward a deeper spiritual life.” He had worked with aspiration as a cop in New York, and by helping some Franciscan friars in their ministries. I learned a lot of things about the country that I didn't know before. The author appeared to be in a melancholy state of mind as he did this journey (he had just lost his job and his marriage). Sometimes reading it was relaxing, other times it was disturbing.Though it no longer serves that role, for a while this book was my vade mecum, a term that I incidentally learned while reading this. Robert Penn Warren called the book "a masterpiece," writing that "[Least Heat-Moon] makes America seem new, in a very special way, and its people new." [1] Cultural impact [ edit ]

An Osage Journey to Europe 1827-1830 (2013) was translated and edited by Least Heat-Moon and James K Wallace. It is the account of six Osage people who traveled to Europe in 1827, accompanied by three Americans. Throughout the book, there is a sense of a fading past, of ways of life and modes of thought slowly vanishing from human ken. If one were to attempt a present day retracing of Least Heat Moon's journey, no doubt at least some of these towns would be gone completely, swallowed up either by time or encroaching suburbs.

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a b Ross-Bryant, Lynn (1997). "THE SELF IN NATURE: Four American Autobiographies". Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal. 80 (1): 83–104. JSTOR 41178763. I kept trying: “Have you returned to any reading of Merton, or authors like him, in the 40 years since Blue Highways?”