This Literary Road Leads Author Back to Kansas Heartland : Books: William Least-Heat Moon follows his 'Blue Highways' success with epic 'PrairyErth.'

By PATRICIA WARD BIEDERMAN

Nov. 21, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

William Trogdon isn’t in Kansas anymore.

On a recent morning, the author, better known as William Least-Heat Moon, is in the dining room of the lush Bel-Air Hotel. While nearby power brokers pick at their bran muffins and speak in reverential tones about episodic TV, Trogdon digs into eggs and talks about his first best-seller, “Blue Highways,” and his second one, “PrairyErth,” his new nonfiction epic about Chase County, Kan.

If the Westside scene isn’t strictly breakfast in Oz, it is nonetheless light years away from the tiny Kansas towns and rippling grasslands that Trogdon has immersed himself in for the last eight years. Trogdon looks the part of a man who has given elegant shape to the heartland experience. Unlike the silk suits all around him, he is dressed for two-stepping with his best girl--or reading from his new work at a Venice bookstore--in a cream-colored brushed denim shirt with a turquoise belt buckle to die for.

Somebody once said you can make a killing as a writer in America, but you can’t make a living. In 1983, Trogdon published “Blue Highways,” an account of his 13,000-mile trek on the country’s back roads in a 1975 Ford Econoline van he called “Ghost Dancing,” like his pen name, a tribute to his Osage Indian heritage.

That book, his first, sold more than 200,000 copies in hardcover alone. The success of “Blue Highways” was a publishing miracle, a friend told Trogdon, to which he replied, “If miracles take that much hard work, we need another name for them.”

Whatever you call it, “Blue Highways” allowed him to quit his $2,000-a-year job working a couple of nights a week on a loading dock to write full time. It also paid for 52 acres outside of Columbia, Mo., a large enough patch so he and second wife Linda “can’t see any neighbors.”

Although he still has Ghost Dancing (people always ask about the vehicle, which is holding up fine, except for a dead battery), Trogdon can now travel first-class when he chooses. On his current cross-country trek, underwritten by publisher Houghton Mifflin, he is stopping in 41 cities in what he describes as “the longest tour the escorts and the people who hustle books have ever seen before.”

At first, “PrairyErth” looks like a tough hustle. The book, whose title is an old geological term, is a compendium of all anyone could ever want to know about 744 square miles of central Kansas, an area with a population of 3,000 where nothing much has happened since Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne died there in a plane crash in 1931.

A less imaginative person might see Chase County as a wasteland, its quotable residents and tall grass notwithstanding. Trogdon’s view appears to be that where there is nearly nothing, everything is precious, from the six full-blooded survivors of the once-powerful Kaw Indians to the habits of the wood rat to the observation of a Cottonwood Falls restaurateur that “We never did get the farmers to eat alfalfa sprouts. They know silage when they see it.”

“PrairyErth” was already 13th on the New York Times best-seller list when it was released a few weeks ago. Among those who bought it: fully half the residents of Chase County.

As Trogdon, who has a doctorate in English literature, well knows, “Blue Highways” was a wildly popular variation on one of the most venerable of literary forms, the road book. You can argue that the first one was either “The Odyssey” or the Book of Exodus. “This is a travel book, too, but people don’t see it,” says Trogdon, who believes the search for the authentic can be vertical, deep into a single county’s soul, as well as horizontal. Truth isn’t a matter of mileage.

Although Trogdon understands the interior nature of travel as well as anyone, he doesn’t spend a lot of his road time riffling through his own psychic photo album. Trogdon, the traveler, observes more than he meditates. In his view, one of the limitations of John Steinbeck’s road book, “Travels with Charley,” is that Steinbeck spends too much time cooped up with his canine companion. “Forget the dog, John, and get out and talk to somebody,” Trogdon counsels. “Explore the land.”

“I think Steinbeck’s truly great road book is ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’ ” Trogdon adds.

The 52-year-old writer, who also has a degree in photojournalism, says he had the ideas for both books in 1974. “I was going to do both of them as articles for National Geographic that I would write and photograph.”

Trogdon says his only fear in embarking on the second book was that he would repeat himself and write “Blue Highways II.” The new book is more like the first than he had intended, but he’s no longer worried. Originally planned as a short study, “PrairyErth” swelled to 999 pages of manuscript.

“I dropped the damned thing on my foot, and that’s when I realized what eight years meant,” he says.

After he finished “PrairyErth,” Trogdon confessed to his wife that he thought he might be a two-book author. But he is beginning to see the beginning of the next book, the theme “that stands up and says, ‘I’m your topic. Take me.’ ” He thinks the organizing principle next time around could be something almost as compelling as the land that has been his essential theme so far. “I’m thinking about water,” he says.

Trogdon’s first book may have followed a well-worn literary track, but he was a genuine ground-breaker in celebrating his American Indian heritage long before the current era of indigenous-people chic. Trogdon is part Osage on his father’s side, less than the 25% by blood that some tribes require for membership but considerably more than that in spirit. He never presumes to describe himself as an Indian. He says he is a person with some Indian ancestry. But there is a self-containment about him, a quiet weight, that can best be described as Indian. And at 14, he undertook what he now realizes was a traditional vision quest. It was only then that his father, whose Osage name is Heat Moon, allowed the young Trogdon to call himself Least-Heat Moon (his older brother is Little-Heat Moon).

Trogdon has a photo of himself as a teen-ager wearing Indian dress and saddle Oxfords. He sees both strands of his heritage in his work as well. “The person who makes the books, the carpenter of the books, is William Trogdon, this Anglo-Irish fellow. The architect of the books, the person who impels them, is William Least-Heat Moon.” Trogdon is the wordsmith. Least-Heat Moon supplies the urge to create and the urgency of the work, “which are not the same thing.”

“PrairyErth” is also Indian in narrative form, Trogdon says. The tale is structured as an Indian storyteller might tell it or as it might appear on a buffalo-skin painting--more like a spider web than like a conventional story with a beginning, middle and end. The book isn’t meant to be read in a single forced march from Page 1 to Page 624, he says, something that troubles readers who are very “goal-oriented” (men seem to have more trouble with it than women, he says).

“You don’t proceed 1-2-3, A-B-C,” Trogdon advises. “You proceed intuitively.”

Trogdon says he wants readers to become “co-creators” of the book, which is best experienced slowly, picked up, put down and picked up again.

“I want the reader to assemble this particular place,” he says. “The book isn’t really about Chase County. It’s about the reader’s dream time.”