After leaving the South, he feels his journey has reached its limit and quickly makes his way back to New York, the place that truly feels like home.Īlthough Steinbeck never reaches any deep conclusions about America, Travels With Charley gives an overview of what life in the mid-20th-century US was like. He comes face to face with the grisly reality of anti-civil rights movement protests in New Orleans, which make him despair about the future of the South. Steinbeck then treks eastward across the Southwest and South, stopping in his wife’s native Texas for Thanksgiving. He reconnects with family and old friends, some of whom beg him to return home permanently, but he doesn’t consider the area home any longer it has changed too much. Upon arriving in his hometown, Salinas, he’s disappointed to see that, like most of the country, it has become a large, manicured town, much different from the rural frontier outpost where he grew up. He writes in depth about the majesty and permanence of the redwood forests.
He touches on various subjects, including progress, old age, politics, and what it means to be American.Īfter crossing the northern part of the country, Steinbeck turns south from Seattle and drives down the coast toward his home state, California. Resuming his journey, he covers the rest of the Midwest in much the same way as New England, interspersing evocative descriptions of landscapes and towns with transcripts of conversations with locals and his impressions of his experiences. Having spent more time in New England than he intended, Steinbeck hightails it to Chicago to meet his wife, a side trip that he notes the book doesn’t detail because he didn’t think it fit the story’s structure. He plans to travel through a bit of Canada north of New York but is turned away because he doesn’t have Charley’s vaccination records. Next, he heads back across Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, where he and Charley meet several local New Englanders, though Steinbeck finds the people of the area particularly hard to engage since they aren’t accustomed to small talk. When he leaves on the trip, he first travels north to New England and spends much time on a side trip toward the coast of Maine to visit a friend of a friend in Deer Isle.
His start is delayed by Hurricane Donna, an event that frames the book’s first dramatic action, in which Steinbeck embarks on a dangerous swim to save his boat. Steinbeck sets out on the journey in the fall of 1959 and drives a route that essentially outlines the US. While the book only touches on Indigenous issues, certain scenes could be viewed as minimizing the impact of white settlement in the West, which some may find upsetting. The book uses outdated language to refer to Black and Indigenous Americans and includes the N-word when quoting white locals Steinbeck interacted with in the South the guide doesn’t reproduce this language, however. This guide is based on the 2012 Penguin Classics 50th-Anniversary Edition of the book.Ĭontent Warning: This guide references the book’s depictions of anti-Black racism and the Southern white response to the civil rights movement.
Like most of Steinbeck’s books, Travels With Charley was immensely popular. As a nonfiction travelogue, the book’s authenticity has been questioned, but nevertheless, Travels With Charley is a classic piece of American literature by one of the country’s most celebrated authors. His skill in describing landscapes and the emotions they evoke is particularly valuable in this context. Thus, while he isn’t known as a nonfiction writer, his ability to synthesize complex topics into thought-provoking prose makes Travels With Charley a valuable look into the mid-20th-century American milieu. Steinbeck became famous for writing about the experience of average Americans, particularly during the Great Depression.
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