Did John Steinbeck and His Dog Ever Find America? | Opinion

Rocinante, John Steinbeck’s camper, featured in Travels with Charley in Search of America, preserved at the Steinbeck Center.Photo byAuthor.

A look back at a road trip classic: ‘Travels With Charley in Search of America’

“A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike.”

In the National Steinbeck Center at Cal State, Monterey Bay in Salinas, there sits a pickup truck with a camper attached. This camper is Rocinante.

If you, like John Steinbeck, are a total nerd about literature, you’ll recognize the name — Don Quixote’s skinny and clumsy horse shares the name.

With Steinbeck at the wheel, it traveled some 10,000 miles from his home in Sag Harbor, N.Y. in 1960. An aging, ailing, and fairly out-of-sorts Steinbeck figured that it wasn’t dying that was wrong with him, no. It was that he’d lost touch with America.

And so, he packed up Rocinante, grabbed his best friend (a Standard Poodle named Charley), and the pair hit the road — to find the heart of America. Steinbeck would chronicle this journey in Travels with Charley in Search of America. It would be his next to last work — the final being Winter of Our Discontent (released to such mixed responses he wouldn’t write another one until his death in 1968) in 1961.

So what was Travels with Charley? Was it a nonfiction travelogue? A novel? Something in between?

Yes.

And did they find America?

Map of John and Charley’s route around the U.S., at the National Steinbeck Center. Author.

Map of John and Charley’s route around the U.S., at the National Steinbeck Center.Photo byAuthor.

Stranger than Fiction

“I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found.”

For those of you who don’t exactly follow all the drama in the literary world — this is one of Steinbeck’s most controversial works. He wrote it, purportedly, as a travelogue — which would mean a straight account of his journey.

That’s not what happened.

Nor was Steinbeck truly forthcoming about his reasons for wanting to go on the trip in the first place — to reconnect with the people of America.

According to his son, Thom, Steinbeck knew he was dying, and he wanted to see the country one last time. That wouldn’t be the last time Steinbeck’s relationship with the truth in Travels with Charley became a bit…tumultuous.

You see, Travels with Charley was marketed as nonfiction — it stayed at the top of the New York Times’ nonfiction bestseller list for a solid year. For most of its life, it wasn’t questioned. People assumed Steinbeck had written a pure travelogue. That Steinbeck met all the colorful characters he did — like a wandering Shakespearean actor in the North Dakota boondocks — but, as his son so eloquently put it: “He just sat in his camper and wrote all that [high literature*].”

* This is not, in fact, exactly what he called it.

According to Bill Steigerwald in a piece for Reason back in 2011, Steinbeck didn’t just write all that [bullstuff] in his camper, Rocinante. No, he wrote all that [poppycock and folderol] in some of the finest hotels the country had to offer. Not exactly roughing it.

In Steigerwald’s seminal teardown of Travels with Charley (titled, appropriately enough, “Sorry, Charley”), he began by attempting to recreate Steinbeck’s expedition across and around the U.S., and ended up finding so many holes in the story that he constructed a time-and-place line for the trip. And found that Steinbeck’s story became increasingly implausible.

Travels with Charley remains one of the greatest road trip stories in American literature. It’s a tremendous premise. I mean, Nobel-winning author packs his pooch and hits the road, living like vagabonds, on a soul-deep mission to map the very heart of a nation in flux? How do you top that?

Steigerwald, though, spend nine months between his “11,276 miles of drive-by journalism,” and research, and found that…well, there’s a lot of fiction to the nonfiction classic.

A couple of notable findings:

• He (and Charley, of course) were hardly ever on their own, and hardly ever sleeping in the camper. Out of the 75-day trip, he traveled with, stayed with, and slept next to his wife, Elaine, on 45 of those days. On 17 other days, he stayed at motels, truck stops, and trailer courts — or just parked Rocinante on his friends’ property.
• He wasn’t exactly roughing it. With Elaine, they were put up at some of the country’s finest hospitality destinations — from resorts to a high-dollar Texas dude ranch. They spent two weeks at the Steinbeck family cottage in Pacific Grove, California. But, even in Travels with Charley, he admits to staying in luxury motels.

Steinbeck and his wife Elaine in 1950.Photo byWikimedia Commons/UPI.

Steinbeck and his wife Elaine in 1950. Wikimedia Commons/UPI.

Creatively, Nonfiction

Steinbeck’s work falls squarely into the genre of “creative nonfiction.”

Which doesn’t always mean inventing things. It’s as often very-long-form books of investigative journalism as it is memoirs. It’s sometimes considered the “fourth genre,” of literature — alongside fiction, poetry, and drama.

Creative nonfiction’s roots lie in journalism, in fact. More specifically, it was born in the New Journalism of Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote (the southern-fried, grand old queen of true crime), Gay Talese, and the gonzo journalism of Hunter S. Thompson.

Steinbeck’s work doesn’t quite fall into that.

I’ve made the argument that the best travel writing today is just grown-up gonzo journalism. Bill Bryson’s work follows most of the conventions of the genre. A lot of the travelogue greats, like Paul Theroux, did, too.

But what Travels with Charley is, is something that breaks the rules of journalism — where you can write whatever you want, however you want, as long as it’s true.

And what Charley is, is something between literature (in the sense of being literary fiction — fiction without a special genre) and a memoir. It’s not exactly New Journalism — but there’s an argument to be made that it existed right on the edge of it.

After all, Charley only beat Capote’s In Cold Blood (considered one of the foundational works of New Journalism) to shelves by a few years (1965). Thompson’s Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga that would begin his gonzo career in earnest, would hit late that decade, in 1967.

You can think of Travels with Charley like a Van Gogh painting. It’s an expressionistic memoir. It’s not a true-life chronicle of events, but it is more than likely a true-life account of what Steinbeck felt about the things he experienced and saw — and while reflecting on his own life.

Looked at that way, Travels with Charley is as much a travel into the heart of John Steinbeck as into the heart of America. But he maps the changes occurring in the early 60s in America with the same eye and lyricism he wrote The Grapes of Wrath (his “other” road novel) with.

Travels with Charley, featuring the traveler himself (left) with Charley. Penguin paperback edition.Photo byScan from author’s collection.

The Long Road Home

So, did he find America? You can decide for yourself — and the ghost of Steinbeck would probably want you to.

At the end of his and Charley’s (and, of course, Elaine’s) journey, (spoiler alert for an early 60’s novel) he finds himself back in New York where — ironically — he has to ask for directions to get home.

He reflects on that, and how he spent a good chunk of his epic road trip lost. Steinbeck felt that was a good metaphor for America, and how it had changed in his lifetime.

Steinbeck explained that he found America, in a way, rudderless. It was a wild, directionless country, moving forward into an uncertain future. That future, he said, would be marked by huge population shifts, racial tensions, sweeping technological and industrial changes — and unprecedented environmental destruction.

For all the fictitious nature of Charley, Steinbeck wasn’t too far off the mark.

It’s generally agreed that the beginning of the end of the Civil Rights Era was the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. outside the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, on April 4, 1968.

Steinbeck would live to see that, but barely. He died that December.

Publicly and privately, Steinbeck railed against materialism, chain stores, the increased use of plastics, and the decline of what he saw as the American spirit.

And maybe he was right.

But maybe the greatest gift Steinbeck had to give to America was the westerner’s take on one of the hallmarks of West in fiction — the tall tale. His account of his travels with his furry best friend (and that much is true — they were well-known to be inseparable) is much more a literary love letter to Steinbeck’s ideal of America. To put what he felt the country was losing onto paper — its very soul.

It remains one of my own favorites — because expressionistic as it is, it cuts to the heart of what America both never was and what it could be. And that precipice, at least to me — and it very much seems to be for Steinbeck — is the real soul of America. Teetering between fact and fiction, the past and the future, and never quite living up to its expectations of itself; despite the heartbreaking vision of what it could be, if it were willing to explore its own heart.

Like this piece? You can check out more of my writing about things like this on Medium, or come say hi on Substack.