["Blue Highways"] has been launched toward success by kind words [on the book's dust jacket] from Annie Dillard, Farley Mowat, and Robert Penn Warren. Mr. Warren not only has obliged with an ideal puff for the front of the jacket—"A masterpiece"—but has written the front-flap copy as well. It is he, and not the author, who tells us that William Least Heat Moon "set out to … write a book about America."

Heat Moon's own explanation is

With a nearly desperate sense of isolation and a growing suspicion that I lived in an alien land, I took to the open road in search of places where change did not mean ruin and where time and men and deeds connected.

This seems disingenuously highminded—self-dramatizing but not self-revealing. The author could, I think, have confided a bit more of his curriculum vitae to the reader in the course...