With the arrival of the first hints of spring a few years back, a 38-year-old man named William Least Heat Moon, a.k.a. William Trogdon, decided to "chuck routine" and "live the real jeopardy of circumstance." His job teaching English at the University of Missouri had vanished and his marriage was in a state of terminal disrepair. A person of mixed blood—part Anglo, part Sioux—he decided to set out on an uncharted journey through America, a journey that he hoped would tell him important things about himself, his heritage and the country in which he lived; he decided also to follow what he calls the "blue highways," the smaller roads that used to be colored blue on gas-station roadmaps.

His vehicle was a van that he nicknamed Ghost Dancing, "a heavy-handed symbol alluding to ceremonies of the 1890s in which the Plains Indians, wearing cloth...