Travels with Charley in Search of America

Author: John Steinbeck
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780140187410
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Book Description
An intimate journey across America, as told by one of its most beloved writers A Penguin Classic In September 1960, John Steinbeck embarked on a journey across America. He felt that he might have lost touch with the country, with its speech, the smell of its grass and trees, its color and quality of light, the pulse of its people. To reassure himself, he set out on a voyage of rediscovery of the American identity, accompanied by a distinguished French poodle named Charley; and riding in a three-quarter-ton pickup truck named Rocinante. His course took him through almost forty states: northward from Long Island to Maine; through the Midwest to Chicago; onward by way of Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana (with which he fell in love), and Idaho to Seattle, south to San Francisco and his birthplace, Salinas; eastward through the Mojave, New Mexico, Arizona, to the vast hospitality of Texas, to New Orleans and a shocking drama of desegregation; finally, on the last leg, through Alabama, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey to New York. Travels with Charley in Search of America is an intimate look at one of America's most beloved writers in the later years of his life—a self-portrait of a man who never wrote an explicit autobiography. Written during a time of upheaval and racial tension in the South—which Steinbeck witnessed firsthand—Travels with Charley is a stunning evocation of America on the eve of a tumultuous decade. This Penguin Classics edition includes an introduction by Jay Parini. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Dogging Steinbeck

Author: Bill Steigerwald
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781481078764
Category : Journalists
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
"Steinbeck falsified his trip. I am delighted that you went deep into this." -- Paul Theroux, Author of "Deep South" and "The Tao of Travel""No book gave me more of a kick this year than Bill Steigerwald's investigative travelogue 'Dogging Steinbeck.'" -- Nick Gillespie, editor-in-chief of Reason.com"... a wry, wistful, but never angry tale about a great literary deception that lasted way too long." -- Pittsburgh Post-Gazette"... an idol-slaying travelogue of truth.' -- Shawn Macomber, The Weekly StandardFirst journalist Bill Steigerwald took John Steinbeck's classic "Travels With Charley" and used it as a map for his own cross-country road trip in search of America. Then he proved Steinbeck's iconic nonfiction book was a 50-year-old literary fraud. A true story about the triumph of truth.Bill Steigerwald had a brilliant plan for showing how much America has changed in the last half century -- or so he thought. He'd simply retrace the 10,000-mile route John Steinbeck took around the USA in 1960 for his beloved bestseller "Travels With Charley." Then he'd compare the America he saw with the country Steinbeck described in his classic road book. But when the intrepid ex-newspaperman from Pittsburgh started researching Steinbeck's trip he uncovered a shocking literary scoop. Steinbeck's iconic nonfiction book was a fraud. "Travels With Charley" was not just full of fiction. It was a deceptive and dishonest account of the great novelist's actual road trip. Steigerwald made his own road trip exactly 50 years after Steinbeck did. Chasing and fact-checking Steinbeck's ghost for 11,276 miles and 43 days, meeting hundreds of ordinary Americans, often sleeping in the back of his car in Wal-Mart parking lots, he drove from Maine to California to Texas. Despite the Great Recession and national headlines dripping with gloom and doom, Steigerwald discovered an America along the Steinbeck Highway that was big, empty, rich, safe, clean, prosperous and friendly. He didn't just reaffirm his faith in America to withstand the long train of abuse from Washington and Wall Street, however. He also exposed the half-century-old myths of "Travels With Charley," ruffled the PhDs of the country's top Steinbeck scholars and forced "Charley's" publisher to finally tell the truth. Steigerwald is a well-traveled journalist and veteran libertarian columnist. With the spirit of a teenage driver, a dogged pursuit of the facts and a refreshing point of view about America proudly located in the heart of Flyover Country not Manhattan, he spins the story of his ride with Steinbeck's ghost into a provocative, news-making and entertaining American road book.('Travels With Charley' timeline and more at www.truthaboutcharley.comMore Praise & Critiques"I still believe John Steinbeck is one of America's greatest writers and I still love 'Travels With Charley, ' be it fact or fiction or, as Bill Steigerwald doggedly proved, both. While I disagree with a number of Steigerwald's conclusions, I don't dispute his facts. He greatly broadened my understanding of Steinbeck the man and the author, particularly during his last years. And, whether Steigerwald intended it or not, in tracking down the original draft of 'Travels With Charley' he made a significant contribution to Steinbeck's legacy. "Dogging Steinbeck" is a good honest book."-- Curt Gentry, Author of "Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders" (with Vincent Bugliosi)I wanted ... first to express my personal admiration for the job you did. Second to tell you that you became a kind of a journalistic hero in my travel-story about Steinbeck, because you did such fantastic detailed research on the subject, and you did it alone, in sometimes-difficult circumstances.- Geert Mak, Dutch journalist/historian and author of "In America: Travels With John Steinbeck"

Travels with Charley in Search of America

Author: John Steinbeck
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0140053204
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Book Description
An intimate journey across America, as told by one of its most beloved writers 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.

Travels with Charley in Search of America

Author: John Steinbeck
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143107003
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Book Description
A collectible 50th anniversary deluxe edition featuring an updated introduction by Jay Parini and first edition cover art and illustrated maps of Steinbeck’s route by Don Freeman A Penguin Classic In September 1960, John Steinbeck embarked on a journey across America. He felt that he might have lost touch with the country, with its speech, the smell of its grass and trees, its color and quality of light, the pulse of its people. To reassure himself, he set out on a voyage of rediscovery of the American identity, accompanied by a distinguished French poodle named Charley; and riding in a three-quarter-ton pickup truck named Rocinante. His course took him through almost forty states: northward from Long Island to Maine; through the Midwest to Chicago; onward by way of Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana (with which he fell in love), and Idaho to Seattle, south to San Francisco and his birthplace, Salinas; eastward through the Mojave, New Mexico, Arizona, to the vast hospitality of Texas, to New Orleans and a shocking drama of desegregation; finally, on the last leg, through Alabama, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey to New York. Travels with Charley in Search of America is an intimate look at one of America's most beloved writers in the later years of his life—a self-portrait of a man who never wrote an explicit autobiography. Written during a time of upheaval and racial tension in the South—which Steinbeck witnessed firsthand—Travels with Charley is a stunning evocation of America on the eve of a tumultuous decade. This Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition also features French flaps and deckle-edged paper. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Quicklet on John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley in Search of America (CliffNotes-like Summary)

Author: David Shook
Publisher: Hyperink Inc
ISBN: 1614641595
Category : Study Aids
Languages : en
Pages : 43

Book Description
ABOUT THE BOOK I came to John Steinbeck’s work through his novella The Pearl, a diminutive but dark allegory about a Native American pearl diver whose discovery of an enormous pearl hurls him and his family into a world of greed and its disastrous consequences. From The Pearl, I found Cannery Row, my favorite Steinbeck novel. From its first sentence, Steinbeck’s descriptions vibrate with the same energy and poetry that his eclectic cast of outcasts embody as they throw unauthorized parties and philosophize with Doc, based on Steinbeck’s real-life friend Ed Ricketts, on 1920s Monterey Bay, the American sardine capital at that time. “Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.” I turned next to Steinbeck’s nonfiction, attracted to Travels with Charley: In Search of America because of my own experiences on Routes 10 and 40, mostly heading west towards California, or back to Oklahoma or Texas to wait until I could go again. Like Steinbeck with his standard poodle Charley, I drove with my steadfast companion, Okie Doke, a considerably smaller pooch. MEET THE AUTHOR David Shook studied endangered languages in Oklahoma and poetry at Oxford. He's published essays about dancing with the President of Burundi and being detained in Equatorial Guinea, and his poetry, translations, and book reviews regularly appear in magazines like Ambit, Poetry, and World Literature Today. His most recent translations include Mario Bellatin’s novella Shiki Nagaoka: A Nose for Fiction, Roberto Bolano’s 1976 manifesto “Leave Everything, Again,” and the selected love poems of Isthmus Zapotec poet Victor Teran. His current writing projects include Kilometer Zero, a covertly filmed documentary about lost Equatoguinean poets, a miniature encyclopedia, and a collection of travel essays. Shook lives with his wife and chihuahua in Los Angeles, where he edits Molossus. He’s a competitive foosballer, miniature book collector, banjolele picker, and aspiring rapper. His moustache is sponsored by Oregon Wild Hair Moustache Wax, the most literary moustache wax in the world. EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, two years after his driving tour across the continent and just months after the publication of Travels with Charley. His winning propelled Travels with Charley to the number one spot on the New York Times Best Seller List. In his acceptance speech he lauded “man’s proven capacity for greatness,” and challenged all writers to celebrate that greatness in their written work. For Steinbeck, that was literature’s ultimate purpose, and he compellingly articulated his opinion throughout his speech: “I hold that the writer who does not believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.” Born in Salinas, California on 27 February 1902, John Steinbeck witnessed man’s capacity for greatness in the fertile farmlands surrounding the agricultural hub town. While working those fields himself—notably in the company town of Spreckels, which boasted the world’s largest beet sugar processing plant—he witnessed many of man’s less noble attributes, including corporate and individual greed, the poor treatment of migrant workers, and the degradation of the physical environment, all themes he explored in his work. Buy a copy to keep reading!

Travels with Charley in Search of America by John Steinbeck

Author: John Steinbeck
Publisher:
ISBN: 9782382264409
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Travels with Charley: In Search of America is a 1962 travelogue written by American author John Steinbeck. It depicts a 1960 road trip around the United States made by Steinbeck, in the company of his standard poodle Charley. Steinbeck wrote that he was moved by a desire to see his country on a personal level because he made his living writing about it. He wrote of having many questions going into his journey, the main one being "What are Americans like today?" However, he found that he had concerns about much of the "new America" he witnessed. Steinbeck tells of traveling throughout the United States in a specially made camper he named Rocinante, after Don Quixote's horse. His travels start in Long Island, New York, and roughly follow the outer border of the United States, from Maine to the Pacific Northwest, down into his native Salinas Valley in California across to Texas, through the Deep South, and then back to New York. Such a trip encompassed nearly 10,000 miles. According to Thom Steinbeck, the author's oldest son, the reason for the trip was that Steinbeck knew he was dying and wanted to see his country one last time. The younger Steinbeck has said he was surprised that his stepmother allowed his father to make the trip; his heart condition meant he could have died at any time. Part One Steinbeck opened the book by describing his lifelong wanderlust and his preparations to rediscover the country he felt he had lost touch with after living in New York City and traveling in Europe for 20 years. He was 58 years old in 1960 and nearing the end of his career, but he felt that when he was writing about America and its people he "was writing of something [he] did not know about, and it seemed to [him] that in a so-called writer this is criminal" (p. 6). He bought a new GMC pickup truck, which he named Rocinante, and had it fitted with a custom camper-shell for his journey. At the last minute, he decided to take his wife's 10-year-old French Poodle Charley, with whom he has many mental conversations as a device for exploring his thoughts. He planned on leaving after Labor Day from his summer home in Sag Harbor on the eastern end of Long Island, but his trip was delayed about two weeks due to Hurricane Donna, which made a direct hit on Long Island. Steinbeck's exploits in saving his boat during the middle of the hurricane, which he details, foreshadow his fearless, or even reckless, state of mind and his courage in undertaking a long, arduous and ambitious cross-country road trip by himself. Part Two Steinbeck began his trip by traveling by ferry from Long Island to Connecticut, passing the U.S. Navy submarine base at New London where many of the new nuclear submarines were stationed. He talked to a sailor stationed on a sub who enjoyed being on them because "they offer all kinds of - future". Steinbeck credited uncertainty about the future to rapid technological and political changes. He mentioned the wastefulness of American cities and society and lamented the large amount of waste that resulted from everything being "packaged." Later he had a conversation with a New England farmer. The two concluded that a combination of fear and uncertainty about the future limited their discussion of the coming election between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy. Steinbeck enjoyed learning about people by eating breakfast in roadside restaurants and listening to morning radio programs, though he noted that, "If 'Teen-Age Angel' [sic] is top of the list in Maine, it is the top of the list in Montana" (35), showing the ubiquity of pop culture brought on by Top 40 radio and mass media technologies.

Travels With Charley

Author: John Steinbeck
Publisher: Turtleback
ISBN: 9780606033251
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 277

Book Description
Steinbeck records his emotions and experiences during a journey of rediscovery in his native land

Critical Companion to John Steinbeck

Author: Jeffrey D. Schultz
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 1438108508
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages : 417

Book Description
Celebrates the American writer who in his works confronted and explored the social fabric of the United States in the early 20th century. More than 500 entries include synopses of his novels, short stories, and nonfiction; descriptions of his characters, details about family, friends, and associates.

Steinbeck's Uneasy America

Author: Barbara A. Heavilin
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817361812
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Book Description
The first scholarly assessment of Steinbeck's bestselling travelogue Travels with Charley, published in 1962, a narrative that blurs the lines between nonfiction and fiction Steinbeck's Uneasy America is the first collection of critical scholarship devoted to Travels with Charley in Search of America, John Steinbeck's best-selling, late-career travel memoir. In 1960, Steinbeck was a renowned man of American letters. Many considered him America's troubadour of ordinary people, the conscience of the country. But weakened by two small strokes and anxious that he had lost touch with America, he embarked on a cross-country road trip accompanied by his wife's standard poodle, Charley. Two years later, he published Travels with Charley to popular acclaim and robust sales. Throughout this narrative, Steinbeck insists that all of our perceptions are "warped" by personality, history, and society. And while this hybrid and experimental book has long been accepted as an accurate account of his journey, journalists and scholars agree that the narrative is part factual, part fiction--America as seen through Steinbeck's particular "warp." The work is long overdue for scholarly assessment. Steinbeck's Uneasy America explores three main topics. Part 1 explores genre and form to consider the degree to which the work is fiction or nonfiction. Part 2 assesses Steinbeck's increasingly bleak assessment of America--almost a jeremiad that warns citizens of ecological excess and political apathy. Part 3 focuses on Travels with Charley as a road text, travel adventure, and literary influence. This volume's authors offer rich scholarly insights and a wealth of stories, facts, and anecdotes about Steinbeck and the adventures and misadventures he and Charley met on the road. Lively and groundbreaking, the collection both enlightens and enlivens discussions of Steinbeck and of the twentieth-century American book world. CONTRIBUTORS Danica Čerče / William P. Childers / Donald V. Coers / Robert DeMott / Cecilia Donohue / Charles Etheridge / Mimi R. Gladstein / Barbara A. Heavilin / Kathleen Hicks / Carter Davis Johnson / Gavin Jones / Sally S. Kleberg / Jay Parini / Brian Railsback / Susan Shillinglaw / Nicholas P. Taylor

Summary of John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley in Search of America

Author: Everest Media,
Publisher: Everest Media LLC
ISBN: 166935587X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 29

Book Description
Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight, he must first find a good and sufficient reason for going. Then he must plan his trip in time and space, choose a direction and a destination. #2 I wanted to travel and see the country again, so I wrote to the head office of a great corporation that manufacture trucks. I wanted a three-quarter-ton pick-up truck, capable of going anywhere under possibly rigorous conditions, and I wanted a little house built like the cabin of a small boat. #3 The best way to attract attention, help, and conversation is to be lost. A man who sees his mother starving to death on a path will cheerfully give wrong directions to a stranger who claims to be lost. #4 I knew that I would not be able to write hot on an event, so I prepared for a week of emergency. I took writing material and dictionaries, encyclopedias, and reference books. I knew I would never get around to reading them.