Trennant to comment boldly on the chasm between the ideals and the reality of American democracy. Written in the form of a journal, “O America” allows Trogdon’s Dr. These people, incidents, attitudes and details include, indeed highlight, the many manifestations of early democracy’s struggles and often brutal failings.

(In tailoring one such event, which I will not spoil here, he drew upon the film “Psycho.”) The people, incidents, attitudes and historic details are largely drawn from his extensive collection of travel accounts, though often modified to fit the narrative. “It’s fiction with history in it,” he says, “but there’s very little that I made up.” Although the main characters and their journey are the products of his imagination, most of what they encounter during their travels across America is not. Although Missouri has a relatively low number of COVID-19 patients, Boone County, where he and his wife, Jan, live, was put under stay-at-home orders on March 25. When at home, he is William Trogdon (Heat-Moon is his father’s Osage name), and he, like millions of Americans, is always at home, at least for the next few weeks. “PrairyErth: A Deep Map,” which followed “Blue Highways,” is an mile-by-mile exploration of Chase County, Kansas for “River Horse” he traversed the country by water. Since then he has written eight nonfiction books that chronicle journeys of one sort or another. 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. He lived out of his monastically customized Ford van, ate at a lot of local cafes and kept a journal. 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. In 1978, he put a general lust for wandering to emotional, existential and then literary use.

William Least Heat-Moon is just such a traveler. And that can come in handy when the road, or the places along it, are denied him by pandemic or the cussed realities of age. A man who knows the road well enough can learn to travel in place.

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