Travels with Charley in Search of America
(Centennial Edition)
By John Steinbeck
(Penguin (Non-Classics), Paperback, 9780142000700, 224pp.)
Publication Date: February 5, 2002
Other Editions of This Title: Google eBook, Paperback, Paperback, Compact Disc, Prebound, Prebound, Prebound
Categories: Literary, Essays & Travelogues, United States - General
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In September 1960, John Steinbeck and his poodle, Charley, embarked on a journey across America. A picaresque tale, this chronicle of their trip meanders through scenic backroads and speeds along anonymous superhighways, moving from small towns to growing cities to glorious wilderness oases. Travels with Charley in Search of America 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 cycle 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.
Travels with Charley in Search of America, originally published in 1962, provides an intimate and personal 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. It was written during a time of upheaval and racial tension in the South—which Steinbeck witnessed firsthand—and is a stunning evocation of America on the eve of a tumultuous decade.
“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
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