Mary McNamara: The author of 'Blue Highways' on his new novel and the art of traveling in place
A man who knows the road well enough can learn to travel in place. And that can come handy when the road, or the places along it, are denied him by pandemic or the cussed realities of age.
William Least Heat-Moon is just such a traveler. In 1978, he put a general lust for wandering to emotional, existential and then literary use. Relegating a broken marriage and a lost job to the rear-view mirror, he spent three months exploring the continental United States by way of its back roads and the people he encountered upon them. He lived out of his monastically customized Ford van, ate at a lot of local cafes and kept a journal. Four years later, his book "Blue Highways: A Journey Into America" became a massive bestseller, launching a career and reinventing the notions of both travel writing and memoir.
