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Travels with Charley in Search of America, by John Steinbeck
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An intimate journey across America, as told by one of its most beloved writers
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To hear the speech of the real America, to smell the grass and the trees, to see the colors and the light—these were John Steinbeck's goals as he set out, at the age of fifty-eight, to rediscover the country he had been writing about for so many years.
With Charley, his French poodle, Steinbeck drives the interstates and the country roads, dines with truckers, encounters bears at Yellowstone and old friends in San Francisco. Along the way he reflects on the American character, racial hostility, the particular form of American loneliness he finds almost everywhere, and �the unexpected kindness of strangers.�
- Sales Rank: #4794 in Books
- Color: Multicolor
- Published on: 1980-01-31
- Released on: 1980-01-31
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.50" h x .75" w x 4.23" l, .42 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 288 pages
Review
“Pure delight, a pungent potpourri of places and people interspersed with bittersweet essays on everything from the emotional difficulties of growing old to the reasons why giant sequoias arouse such awe.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Profound, sympathetic, often angry . . . an honest moving book by one of our great writers.” —The San Francisco Examiner
“This is superior Steinbeck—a muscular, evocative report of a journey of rediscovery.” —John Barkham, Saturday Review Syndicate
“The eager, sensuous pages in which he writes about what he found and whom he encountered frame a picture of our human nature in the twentieth century which will not soon be surpassed.” —Edward Weeks, The Atlantic Monthly
From the Back Cover
In September 1960, John Steinbeck and his poodle, Charley, embarked on a journey across America. A picaresque tale, this chronicle of their trip meanders along scenic backroads and speeds along anonymous superhighways, moving from small towns to growing cities to glorious wilderness oases. Travels with Charley is animated by Steinbeck's attention to the specific details of the natural world and his sense of how the lives of people are intimately connected to the rhythms of nature - to weather, geography, the cycles of the seasons. His keen ear for the transactions among people is evident, too, as he records the interests and obsessions that preoccupy the Americans he encounters along the way.
About the Author
John Steinbeck, born in Salinas, California, in 1902, grew up in a fertile agricultural valley, about twenty-five miles from the Pacific Coast. Both the valley and the coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. In 1919 he went to Stanford University, where he intermittently enrolled in literature and writing courses until he left in 1925 without taking a degree. During the next five years he supported himself as a laborer and journalist in New York City, all the time working on his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929).
After marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, he published two California books, The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and To a God Unknown (1933), and worked on short stories later collected in The Long Valley (1938). Popular success and financial security came only with Tortilla Flat (1935), stories about Monterey’s paisanos. A ceaseless experimenter throughout his career, Steinbeck changed courses regularly. Three powerful novels of the late 1930s focused on the California laboring class: In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and the book considered by many his finest, The Grapes of Wrath (1939). The Grapes of Wrath won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1939.
Early in the 1940s, Steinbeck became a filmmaker with The Forgotten Village (1941) and a serious student of marine biology with Sea of Cortez (1941). He devoted his services to the war, writing Bombs Away (1942) and the controversial play-novelette The Moon is Down (1942). Cannery Row (1945), The Wayward Bus (1948), another experimental drama, Burning Bright (1950), and The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951) preceded publication of the monumental East of Eden (1952), an ambitious saga of the Salinas Valley and his own family’s history.
The last decades of his life were spent in New York City and Sag Harbor with his third wife, with whom he traveled widely. Later books include Sweet Thursday (1954), The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication (1957), Once There Was a War (1958), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962), America and Americans (1966), and the posthumously published Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters (1969), Viva Zapata! (1975), The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976), and Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath (1989).
Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962, and, in 1964, he was presented with the United States Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Steinbeck died in New York in 1968. Today, more than thirty years after his death, he remains one of America's greatest writers and cultural figures.
Most helpful customer reviews
84 of 88 people found the following review helpful.
Still very fresh
By Edward Bosnar
It's amazing how relevant Steinbeck's observations of America are forty years after he wrote this book. In fact, much of what he says seems to apply even more now than when he first wrote it, such as when he observes: "the mountain of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use. In this, if in no other way, we can see the wild and wreckless exuberance of our production, and waste seems to be the index." In a similar vein, he wonders, when considering the expansion of large cities, "why progress looks so much like destruction." Steinbeck's sarcasm also comes to the surface when he notes some of the many odd habits and leisure activities of Americans, such as antique-hunting in omnipresent antique shops, which he felt were "bulging with authentic and attested trash from an earlier time." He was also quite impressed with the country's intrepid hunters, to whom he feared his poodle Charley would look like a buck deer. After spending an evening in Maine with some migrant farms workers from Quebec, he expressed (rather vainly, in retrospect) his hope that the country would not some day be overwhelmed "by people not too proud or too lazy or too soft to bend to the earth and pick up the things we eat." Far from being simply critical though, what comes out of this book is Steinbeck's great love for the country. His view that the "American identity is an exact and provable thing" still rings true today. "Travels with Charley" is not just classic travel literature, it is also a very readable and informative set of observations on America in the mid-20th century and beyond.
215 of 235 people found the following review helpful.
"Travels" Delights and Disturbs
By J. S. Kaminski
In 1960 John Steinbeck decided to reacquaint himself with America after being away because, in his own words, "I've lost the flavor and taste and sound of it. I'm going to learn about my own country." So he set out on a 3+ month journey with his dog to do just that. Along the way, he met people and made conversation, observed the state of the country, and let his mind wander as he made his journey. Then he returned to his mobile cabin at night and recorded the day's events. These journal entries became "Travels with Charley."
Overall, Steinbeck seems to paint a pretty picture. While driving through New England in the fall, he is taken with the brilliant foliage on display. He is much impressed with Wisconsin, and says about Montana, "I am in love. For other states I have admiration, respect, recognition, even some affection, but with Montana it is love." Later, Steinbeck also speaks glowingly of the California Redwoods.
Steinbeck also has nice things to say about the American people - sometimes. He notes that midwesterners are openly friendly, and again praises Montana, for its inhabitants "had time...to undertake the passing art of neighborliness." However, interspersed throughout his journey, Steinbeck encounters many things which are not so delightful. In fact, some were quite upsetting. He talks of waste - "American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash" - and of miserable people - "(some people) can drain off energy and joy, can suck pleasure dry and get no sustenance from it. (They) spread a grayness in the air about them." (This was his opinion of a waitress Steinbeck had just met in Maine.) And the waitress wasn't the only one.
Along his journey, he met many close-minded, opinionated, bigoted and rascist Americans, and it made for depressing reading. I don't think Steinbeck was quite prepared for it. I believe he had an idealized vision of a great trip, but in reality, it wasn't, and it took a lot out of him. By the end Steinbeck was burned out and wanted nothing more than to get back home. After California he went straight through to Texas, and then to New Orleans, where he encountered rascism at its worst. That seemed to be the last straw for him. After that, he blew off the rest of the southeast US and went back to New York. He had had enough.
Jay Parini, who wrote the introduction, notes this ominous feeling. He states that the book is filled with "whimsical vignettes, charm, etc., but beneath its surface there is a sense of disenchantment that turns to anger." He goes on to say that Steinbeck "is never quite able to bring himself to say that he was often disgusted by what he saw." But there's no question that he was.
Still, this was a very good book. And it's not demoralizing from start to finish. There are many humors adventures as well - his discussions with border guards near Canada being the most memorable. But one can't help but feel that Steinbeck was sorry he'd gone. He had a pre-conceived notion of what America was, and when it didn't meet his expectations, he was crushed. "Travels with Charley" brilliantly captures what Steinbeck reluctantly learned - that you can't go home again.
Four stars.
43 of 46 people found the following review helpful.
"Fttt" and the Comments of his Human Companion
By Patrick Shepherd
Steinbeck clearly thought at the time he was writing The Winter of Our Discontent (1961) that America was in the middle of a serious moral and ethical crises, that the traditions and values this country was founded upon were no longer looked upon as serious guidelines for American behavior. The trip across America detailed in this book was undertaken at least in part as an attempt by Steinbeck to determine if this evaluation of the state of America was valid, if when Americans were approached as individuals, face-to-face, some other picture might emerge.
To facilitate his investigation, Steinbeck brought along his poodle Charley, as companion and ice-breaker, and packed up a camper truck with everything he thought he might need in his travels (probably too much, as he ruefully admits at one point), and proceed to travel across the states in a large circle, from New York to Maine to Illinois to Washington, California, Texas, and the Deep South. As we travel along with him, we are treated to a rather incredible display of the sheer writing talent that Steinbeck possessed, as the people he meets along the way are described accurately and so very concisely, sometimes in just a couple of paragraphs, to where these people come alive to the reader, to where the reader can say "I know someone just like that".
But perhaps more importantly, the book is spattered throughout with Steinbeck's acute observations and opinions on everything from antiques, the virtues of small towns, the value of manual labor, the homogenizing of American language and cuisine due to the influence of radio and television, the beginnings of the interstate system and its influence on everything along its routes, hunters, trash, and many other items, all carefully supported by his actual observations along the road. There are a few comments expressed by Charley here, too (typically a "Fttt" and a sniff). And although this book was written forty years ago, much of what Steinbeck wrote then is still very valid today. Whether this represents a good thing or not, that there has been so little change in some very basic elements of American society in the intervening years, must be decided and thought upon by the reader.
It seems that many writers of stature eventually write some form of 'travel' book. This is one of the best of this genre, due to both Steinbeck's great powers of observation and his ability to distill what he sees to something that is recognizable, distinctive, that resonates with the reader's own experiences. This is not his greatest book - that distinction belongs to his great fiction works of The Grapes of Wrath, The Pearl, East of Eden, The Winter of Our Discontent. But it is a very satisfying look at a great writer and his outlook on the America of his day.
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