But while the mood is generally cheerful - and much of Charley finds Steinbeck at his funniest - there’s also a slow-growing tension in the book. He wrote about meeting potato pickers in Maine, waitresses in Minnesota, ranchers in Texas. Steinbeck’s two-and-a-half-month circumnavigation of the country - a 10,000-mile counterclockwise circuit, accompanied by his poodle, Charley - introduced him to a host of salt-of-the-earth types. Charley would be proof that he could stave off literary and physical decline. He’d suffered what was likely a stroke in late 1959. The novels he finished instead - The Wayward Bus, The Winter of Our Discontent - were decidedly minor. He’d spent years working on a novel based on one of his favorite childhood books, Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, but the project defeated him. He had reasons to feel frustrated and eager to escape. He had an instinctive resistance to being pushed around by anybody.” And of course, Steinbeck always pushed back against anybody who told him that he couldn’t do something. Those close to him, Souder adds, “thought he wasn’t physically or emotionally up to it.
“I think one reason that he went is because a bunch of people tried to talk him out of it,” says Souder, whose previous books include biographies of John James Audubon and Rachel Carson. (“When his curtain goes up, he always puts on a different kind of show,” the critic Edmund Wilson wrote.) As William Souder writes in his fine new biography of Steinbeck, Mad at the World, the novelist was a born contrarian.
For both better and worse, he never wrote the same book twice.
The impetus for Wrath was similar, but drawing connections between experiences is a tricky business with Steinbeck. “I had not heard the speech of America, smelled the grass and trees and sewage, seen its hills and water, its color and quality of light,” he wrote.
The second would lead to one of his last - 1962’s charming, angry and (in time) controversial Travels With Charley in Search of America.Īs Steinbeck writes in the opening pages of Charley, he missed the hands-on experience of witnessing the diversity of the country for himself. That first road trip resulted in his first major book, 1939’s The Grapes of Wrath. As he prepped his RV - nicknamed Rocinante, after Don Quixote’s horse - he recalled a similar trip he had taken in 1936, when he rigged a used bakery delivery truck, left his home near Monterey, California, and headed to the San Joaquin Valley to report on the desperate migrant farm workers flooding the region. In September 1960, John Steinbeck decided to hitch a trailer to a pickup truck, leave his home in New York, and take a road trip around the United States.
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