5/30/2023 0 Comments John steinbeck charley![]() ![]() ![]() No one could hear me talking to Steinbeck's ghost that October afternoon. But I had come to realize that the iconic American road book was not only heavily fictionalized it was something of a fraud. For five decades Steinbeck scholars and others who should know better have not questioned the book's honesty. It stayed on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list for a year, and its commercial and cultural tail-like those of Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath-has been long and fat. ![]() But I couldn't stop from laughing at the joke Steinbeck had played on everyone in the pages of his subsequent travelog, released in 1962 to general acclaim and still revered as a mid-century document of the American soul.Ī huge commercial success from the day it hit bookstands, Travels With Charley in Search of America was touted and marketed as the true account of Steinbeck's solo journey. I wasn't in the habit of speaking directly to his ghost. "Who were you trying to kid, John? Who'd you think would ever believe you met a Shakespearean actor out here?"įor three weeks I had been retracing the 10,000-mile road trip John Steinbeck made around America in 1960. "Hah!" I shouted as a million North Dakota cornstalks rattled in the October wind. ![]()
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