Travels with Charley: In Search of America (Centennial Edition)

published	February 5th 2002 by Penguin (Non-Classics)
binding	Paperback
isbn	0142000701 (isbn13: 9780142000700)
pages	224
description	Today, nearly forty years after his death, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck remains one of America's greatest writers and cultural figures. Over the ...more [close] Today, nearly forty years after his death, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck remains one of America's greatest writers and cultural figures. Over the next year, his many works published as black-spine Penguin Classics for the first time and will feature eye-catching, newly commissioned art. Penguin Classics is proud to present these seminal works to a new generation of readers—and to the many who revisit them again and again. [close]
date added	12-07-06 edit book

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Steinbeck	1	06/12/2007 08:52AM

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Ginnie rated it:

(review of isbn 0140053204)

12/25/07

bookshelves: culture, memoirs

I think high school curriculum planners might be better served by using this John Steinbeck book rather than The Pearl or Grapes of Wrath to introduce young people to this Nobel Prize winner for the first time. Yes, yes, I know - this isn't a novel - but Steinbeck's distinctive American vernacular is just as fine here, his delineation of people is just as nuanced. Ah well, nobody asked me - but I still like the idea.

In 1960 John Steinbeck decided to reacquaint himself with A...more I think high school curriculum planners might be better served by using this John Steinbeck book rather than The Pearl or Grapes of Wrath to introduce young people to this Nobel Prize winner for the first time. Yes, yes, I know - this isn't a novel - but Steinbeck's distinctive American vernacular is just as fine here, his delineation of people is just as nuanced. Ah well, nobody asked me - but I still like the idea.

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." To facilitate his investigation, Steinbeck brought along his standard size 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. Much of what Steinbeck wrote then is still very valid today - 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."

In 1960, Steinbeck stood on a cusp of history and what he reveals, especially as regarded 47 years later, is the country coming and going on itself. He finds cities ringed by huge garbage piles created by the rise of a disposable culture that had yet to discover recycling. He uses the new highway system as well as the old back roads, encountering a country adapting to a new mobility. The people he met were timeless characters, though many were in age-old circumstances that have since passed. Despite the Pulitzer Prize, bestselling books and media coverage, he is never recognized and finds people at their most candid. His accounts on the road are episodic, some comic, some fodder for philosophical rumination. When he hits the Deep South, however, he collides with the opening salvos of the modern Civil Rights movement and tangles with racists as he watches "The Cheerleaders," the gang of middle-aged "respectable" white women obscenely haranguing a tiny black child being escorted to school. He is sickened. It is time to go home.

The insights to the human condition and what it means to be American as divulged by the journey are priceless. The beautiful thing about Steinbeck is his persistent curiosity in life outside of himself. Though he comes to realize the journey is as much internal as it is external, his inspiration was not to find himself but to connect with others. He was a most generous soul. Travels With Charley is a most beautiful book.

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Shellie rated it:

03/24/08

bookshelves: austin-book-group-selection

Read in March, 2008

recommended to Shellie by: book group
recommends it for: people who don't like "classics"

I have a feeling that if I had read Travels with Charley back in high school instead of The Grapes of Wrath or even Of Mice and Men, I would have actually liked Steinbeck rather than merely appreciated him.

Part of my Steinbeck indifference was obviously influenced by my teenage attitude. At 15 there were other things I'd much rather have been doing than reading novels about the great depression. Also, I had that "what does this have to do with me" attitude I saw so frequently whil...more

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Travels with Charley: In Search of America (Centennial Edition)

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