You can talk to somebody for 60 seconds and you may be hearing about a divorce.' In the South, anything can be upfront immediately. 'Politeness, for a stranger coming in to find a conversation, can be difficult. 'They're polite,' he says of Northerners. Moreso, he believes, than if he'd started in a colder climate. He started there because of the weather, but the culture around storytelling in that part of the country helped him get off on the right foot. His stroke of luck, as he now sees it, was starting in the South. The trip itself was invigorating, and the book's enormous success reset his life completely. He remembers waking up every morning for the entire three months thinking not only I can't believe I'm really doing this, but also I can't believe that it's working, that I can just walk into these places and people just start talking about their lives.īy 1982, the resulting book, Blue Highways, hit the top of the New York Times best-seller list and stayed there for 42 weeks. Presented by Town Hall Seattle and The Bushwick Book Club Seattle.'What an exciting thing it was,' he says, now a wizened 77-year-old man with a full head of gray hair. Please consider buying your Bushwick choices with their local bookstore partner, Third Place Books. Heads up: Blue Highways travels deep into many rural parts of America in the politically charged post-Vietnam era of the late-1970s, capturing dialects, attitudes, and customs - warts and all.Ĭheck it out at Seattle Public Library. “Though the events take place more than 40 years ago, the book reads like a search for what currently ails us, because what ailed us then ails us now.” - New York Times

Part memoir and part travelogue, Blue Highways is an exploration of self and community, an enduring reminder that a country isn’t just a place - it’s people. (“A man who couldn’t make things go right could at least go.”) Without a destination, Least Heat-Moon traveled the country on America’s “blue highways”- rural, two-lane roads so-called because of their color in the road atlas. Decades before #vanlife would trend, William Least Heat-Moon responded to upheaval in his life by hitting the road in a 1975 Ford Econoline and chronicling the journey.

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