Bruce Feiler has made a career out of joining other people's worlds, then writing books to report to the rest of us on his stints of honorary citizenship. Learning to Bow chronicled his year teaching high school in a small Japanese town in the mid-1980s, at a time when everyone wanted to know how Japan's educational system funneled well-trained workers into its booming economy with such apparent ease. While getting a master's degree at Cambridge, Feiler related his experiences and impressions in Looking for Class, which suggested with characteristic humor (and an edge that startled some reviewers) that England's elite universities were not the intellectual bastions many Americans assumed. He fulfilled a childhood dream and ran away to join the circus (laptop computer in hand) in 1993; Under the Big Top vividly evoked the gossipy, inbred community of clowns, animal trainers, high-wire performers and other circus denizens who "look at America from the edge of town." Then he moved to Nashville to immerse himself in the country music scene for Dreaming Out Loud, which portrayed "New Country" artists like Garth Brooks and Wynonna Judd as emblematic of the social changes that had transformed Feiler's native South from an isolated backwater into a prosperous region of suburbs and malls much like the rest of America.

So it seemed only natural, when Feiler decided after a vacation in the Middle East that he wanted to write about the Bible, that he would approach it, as he explains in the living room of his Manhattan apartment, "not just as a sacred text, but as a time and a place and a community of people that I could enter. I viewed myself as someone who became part of something, left it and described what it was like. I was Everyman who went off and joined the circus; I was in the back of Garth Brooks's bus and can tell you what it's like. It was a big leap to see the Bible in that way, and it's what made me feel comfortable about doing it. Then I could say: this is not about me and religion, this is not about me and my God; this is about me and the story."

In fact, Walking the Bible: A Journey by Land Through the Five Books of Moses (Forecasts, Feb. 12), published by Morrow in April, turns out to be about all those things. Feiler does indeed visit the places where Abraham nearly sacrificed Isaac, Joseph was sold into slavery and Moses parted the Red Sea, then brought the Ten Commandments down from Mount Sinai; he roots those ancient tales in the soil and gives them a palpably physical, human reality. But the notion that he could re-experience and retell those stories without also sharing with readers his own feelings proved to be, the author now admits, "self-protective folly." The seamlessness with which Feiler blends first-person narrative, biblical lore, archeology and history in Walking the Bible will be familiar to readers of his previous books; the intensity with which he chronicles his spiritual journey will not.

Outgoing, talkative, given to making dramatic gestures with his hands, the 36-year-old author doesn't seem like someone who would have a hard time revealing his inner life in print. But, he says, "writing this one was difficult. I've worked really hard on all my books—I work hard on the research, I work 12 hours a day, six days a week when I'm writing—but it hadn't been difficult before. I had never really described my own emotions, and I didn't have the vocabulary to do it. In the context of the book as a whole, I was worried that the writing wouldn't be as assured. You'd have all this writing that I'd worked on through many books, then there'd be this new writing style that would be really wobbly and call attention to itself. Or it would be like heroin, and you'd want more! I wanted to be true to it, but I didn't want it to overwhelm the rest of the material."

Feiler's agent, David Black, encouraged him not to back off. "One of the reasons my relationship with David is so good is that he can be very supportive and he can also pin me up against a wall, which he did at a key stage in Walking the Bible. There were places in which I was saying what I was feeling, but maybe I hadn't gone far enough. David said, 'You know where it's painful right here? Boom! Go for it!' My editor, Trish Grader, had a slightly different reaction. Very early on, Trish got the complexity of what I wanted to do, and I think we instinctively had the same sense of what the balance was. She found the things that were sticking out and said, 'Cut this back, trim this, put this together.' In a couple of places where David had pushed me, she pulled me back a little. She helped me get the mix right."

Writing this book was in some sense a homecoming for Feiler. Growing up in Savannah, Ga., the middle child of a closely knit, highly verbal family, he was "at the nexus of two great storytelling traditions, the Jewish and the Southern. Now I realize that there is this deeper, older, storytelling tradition of the Bible that they both come from." He wasn't especially religious, he says, but "being a Jew in the South, there's always this insider/outsider thing, being a part and being apart at the same time." At Yale, where classmates made jokes like, "So, when they teach the Civil War down there, who wins?" he was goaded to study Southern history, "and when I graduated, I thought, 'Okay, if going to the North made me learn about the South, then it's time to leave America to learn about America.' Japan seemed like what I imagine Russia to have been in the '30s: everybody was drawn to it because it was different and was a way of looking in a mirror back at American life. So off I went to Japan for three years."

Encouraged by the enthusiastic response of his family and friends to the letters he wrote home ("of the You're Not Going to Believe What Happened to Me variety"), Feiler began writing a book. He got the agent Jane Dystel's name "from someone my mother met in the grocery store who had written a book about how to be a temp," wrote her a letter and to his astonishment had literary representation and a contract in a matter of months. "I was 24 years old! It doesn't happen that way, but it happened to me because you couldn't pick up a newspaper at that time without reading an article about Japan or education, and this was a book about Japanese education."

Jane von Mehren bought the proposal for Crown, took it with her to Ticknor & Fields and cured its author of some bad habits. "I'm mostly self-taught. I only took one writing course at Yale, and I wrote the first draft of Learning to Bow the way you'd write a high school essay: (1) I'm about to tell you a story; if you're paying attention you'll get the following points. (2) Here's the story. (3) I've just told you a story; if you'd been paying attention, you would have gotten the following points. Jane von Mehren went through, this is not an exaggeration, and lopped off the first and last paragraph of every chapter. She said, 'Trust yourself to tell the story and make the points.' It's still the most valuable thing any editor has ever said to me."

Although von Mehren remains a personal friend, Feiler felt Ticknor & Fields hadn't given Learning to Bow the publishing support its excellent reviews merited, and Dystel sold his next project to Random House. Looking for Class had a much sharper tone than its predecessor; Feiler didn't warm up to the English as he had to the Japanese, and he found the Cambridge method of instruction narrow. "I think the sharpness comes from being around the verbal jousting that goes on in England," he says. "Depending on the vernacular of where I'm hanging out, my writing changes; my personality is slightly malleable in that way, too. And after making a connection between the 'success' of Japanese culture and its school system, in which I deeply believe, it seemed only fair, insofar as England had been going through a couple of bad decades, to consider whether the educational system was responsible for those failures. I have complicated feelings about the book, but I think it was an advance in my writing in terms of technique. I was good at describing places and experiences, but I was not so good at dialogue. I worked a lot to improve it and to make people sound like themselves."

Feiler has a special fondness for Under the Big Top, published by Scribner in 1995, mostly because of the subject matter. He'd juggled and done mime in high school, and he even thought about attending clown school before he went to Yale. Getting the chance to perform as a clown with the Clyde Beatty—Cole Bros. Circus was literally a dream come true. "My mother asked me afterward if I'd want to do it again, and I said, 'No, this was my dream, and it's been fulfilled.' I had to prove myself—they took bets I'd last two weeks—and the satisfaction of becoming a member was richer because it was so unexpected. In some ways it's the defining thing I've done."

Having seen America "from the edge of town" with the circus, Feiler thought it was time to explore his native turf. "I wanted to write a book about the death of the South and the Southification of America; it was going to be about stock car racing and country music and barbecue, all these things in one huge, undoable book. I went to Nashville on a scouting trip, and everyone was so welcoming that, in the way I live my life, I just up and moved there." His initial research led to an article in the New Republic, "Gone Country," which won a 1997 ASCAP—Deems Taylor Award for music journalism. By the time it grew into a book, with Black as Feiler's new agent and Grader editing it for Avon, stock car racing and barbecue were gone. Feiler focused on the changes in country music as a paradigm for the changes he saw in the South. "One of the things I like about the book is that if you're interested in the celebrities, you can read it just for the stories, but if you don't care about the stories, you can read it for what it says about the South. The most satisfying responses I got were from people who didn't even like country music."

After years of being a wandering observer into other people's worlds, Feiler is comfortably settled in Manhattan. "For a long time I defined myself as someone who went out, got some kind of experience, then wrote about it. New York was fun to visit, get a free lunch and free books. It was where the publishing industry was, but I saw no reason to be here. But after a while, I wanted to be around people who do what I do, to be in a community rather than being an isolated satellite in Nashville or the circus." His brother Andrew is still an important early reader of each manuscript, "but I know a lot of people in the business now, and I show it around a lot. People read for different things, and it's helpful to me to get feedback. I'm very interactive." He's working on a new book (topic off the record), but he also writes more articles and has just become a contributing editor at Gourmet: "It's nice to have an outlet for an idea that's not 110,000 words. My books can be meat and potatoes; journalism can be dessert. I feel like I've got the balance right, financially and emotionally."