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Trogden claims his father said, "I call myself Heat Moon, your elder brother is Little Heat Moon. You, coming last, therefore, are Least," providing him with his pen name. Born in Kansas City, Missouri, Least Heat Moon attended the University of Missouri where he joined Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity. He earned bachelor's, master's, and Ph.D. degrees in English, as well as a bachelor's degree in photojournalism. He also served as a professor of English at the university.

Blue Highways, which spent 34 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list in 1982-83, is a chronicle of a three-month-long road trip that Least Heat Moon took throughout the United States in 1978 after losing his teaching job and separating from his first wife. He traveled 13,000 miles, as much as possible on secondary roads (often drawn on maps in blue, especially in the old-style Rand McNally road atlas) and tried to avoid cities. Living out of the back of his van "Ghost Dancing", he visited small towns such as Nameless, Tennessee; Hachita, New Mexico; and Bagley, Minnesota to find places in America untouched by fast food chains and interstate highways. The book records encounters in roadside cafés as well as his personal soul-searching.

PrairyErth is a deep map account of the history and people of Chase County, Kansas.

River Horse is an account of a four-month coast-to-coast boat trip across the U.S., using the nation's waterways almost exclusively, and retraces of Lewis and Clark's frontier exploration.

In addition to the trilogy, Moon also wrote Columbus in the Americas (2002), a brief history of Christopher Columbus' journeys and Roads to Quoz (2008). The latter is another "road book" like his former trilogy, but it differs in the sense that it is "not one long road trip, but a series of shorter ones" over the years between books. Robert Sullivan of the New York Times Book Review commented that Least Heat Moon had "gone from what feels like a lover of the road to a love-hate of it, or at least an impatience with aspects that are unavoidable."