Blue Highways

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Blue Highways

William Least Heat-Moon

Travel & Adventure

Aug 7, 2018

One wintry day in 1978, thirty-eight-year-old English professor William Least Heat-Moon learned that neither his employer nor his wife would be needing him anymore. Lying awake that night, he was struck by an idea, and a quintessentially American idea it was: “A man who couldn’t make things go right could at least go.” A month later, off he went, embarking upon a journey along the back roads of the United States, the two-lane highways marked in blue on old road maps. Deciding to travel in a circle instead of a straight line (to provide himself the promise of coming round again), Heat-Moon left his native Missouri for a three-month, thirteen-thousand-mile journey “in search of places where change did not mean ruin.” Pick up Blue Highways when you have the urge to read and nothing particular on the top of your list: Before Heat-Moon hits Kentucky, you’ll be hooked and eager to relish his wanderings from Nameless, Tennessee, to Remote, Oregon, from Why, Arizona, to Whynot, Mississippi.

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Dan Cooper

Sep 23, 2020

When this came out my mom would read to me from it. I remembered some of those moments as I read it, so I'm not an objective reviewer. Sometimes it drags a little, but WLHM is every once in awhile a really special writer who will forever change a reader's understanding of the things around her, and anyone who can do that deserves to be read. I have found myself with insights about so many places since I read this, and can't imagine him assembling all these interpretations without the internet! It's been said the last third is trying, and that the narrator comes off as a little mean or intolerant in places. I agree, but in a way that's the magic of it - this book is really the experience of taking the trip with him. You think after three months in a van with ANYONE you wouldn't be getting on each other's nerves?

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