Title: Travels with Charley in Search of America Pdf
Author: John Steinbeck
Published Date: 1980-01-01
Page: 277
“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 John Steinbeck, born in Salinas, California, in 1902, grew up in a fertile agricultural valley, about twenty-five miles from the Pacific Coast. Both the valley and the coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. In 1919 he went to Stanford University, where he intermittently enrolled in literature and writing courses until he left in 1925 without taking a degree. During the next five years he supported himself as a laborer and journalist in New York City, all the time working on his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929).After marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, he published two California books, The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and To a God Unknown (1933), and worked on short stories later collected in The Long Valley (1938). Popular success and financial security came only with Tortilla Flat (1935), stories about Monterey’s paisanos. A ceaseless experimenter throughout his career, Steinbeck changed courses regularly. Three powerful novels of the late 1930s focused on the California laboring class: In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and the book considered by many his finest, The Grapes of Wrath (1939). The Grapes of Wrath won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1939.Early in the 1940s, Steinbeck became a filmmaker with The Forgotten Village (1941) and a serious student of marine biology with Sea of Cortez (1941). He devoted his services to the war, writing Bombs Away (1942) and the controversial play-novelette The Moon is Down (1942). Cannery Row (1945), The Wayward Bus (1948), another experimental drama, Burning Bright (1950), and The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951) preceded publication of the monumental East of Eden (1952), an ambitious saga of the Salinas Valley and his own family’s history.The last decades of his life were spent in New York City and Sag Harbor with his third wife, with whom he traveled widely. Later books include Sweet Thursday (1954), The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication (1957), Once There Was a War (1958), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962), America and Americans (1966), and the posthumously published Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters (1969), Viva Zapata! (1975), The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976), and Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath (1989).Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962, and, in 1964, he was presented with the United States Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Steinbeck died in New York in 1968. Today, more than thirty years after his death, he remains one of America's greatest writers and cultural figures.
To hear the speech of the real America, to smell the grass and the trees, to see the colors and the light—these were John Steinbeck's goals as he set out, at the age of fifty-eight, to rediscover the country he had been writing about for so many years.
With Charley, his French poodle, Steinbeck drives the interstates and the country roads, dines with truckers, encounters bears at Yellowstone and old friends in San Francisco. Along the way he reflects on the American character, racial hostility, the particular form of American loneliness he finds almost everywhere, and the unexpected kindness of strangers.
Old novel sounds incredibly current. For a travel story written 60 years ago, it is remarkably like road trips in the US today. The story is compelling with a great partner: Charley, the delightful French poodle. Descriptions are inspiring, characters along the way are appealing. It is such a real journey, so fascinating to travel along. The last chapter is so disheartening, it clearly shows this country has made no progress in the dream of democracy.An American Classic - Must Read This has quickly become one of my favorite books. It reads like a novel, despite its classification as nonfiction. This book is charming and fun, yet beautifully written without being overly poetic. His journey and experiences are truthful, playful, and at times, raw and challenging to read. The parallels of Steinbeck's journey throughout the United States in 1960 in comparison to today's challenges in this same country are eye opening. This is a book I already want to read again after just finishing.Some of my favorite quotes from "Travels with Charley":"I am very fortunate in having a wife who likes being a woman, which means that she likes men, not elderly babies.""For how can one know color in perpetual green, and what good is warmth without cold to give it sweetness""We value virtue but do not discuss it.""When I went away I had died and so became fixed and unchangeable. My return caused only confusion and uneasiness. Although they could not say it, my old friends wanted me gone so that I could take my proper place in the pattern of remembrance -- and I wanted to go for the same reason. Tom Wolfe was right. You can't go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory.""I have known desert men who chose their places with quiet and slow passion, rejecting the nervousness of a watered world. These men have not changed with the exploding times except to die and be replaced by others like them. "Steinbeck tours America in his prime What I didn't know about John Steinbeck is that he is always engaging. For twenty years he was the big man writing the Great American Novel: "Tortilla Flat"; "Of Mice and Men"; "The Grapes of Wrath". Then in 1960 he decided he needed to refill his creative tank. He needed to travel across America again (from Maine to California and back home to New York), not as a tourist, not to see the sights--but to engage with people, Americans--see what they were thinking, hear what they were talking about. Steinbeck was the kind of man who could walk into any bar or hardware store or gas station and engage with and maybe even make a friend for a moment or a lifetime of the person he encountered. To be sure, whisky often seemed a catalyst to his socializing. Certainly he was a charming man. To make it even more charming he traveled with this poodle, Charley. Steinbeck didn't give out his name, didn't want to be treated as the big writer. Thus he gathered a very honest, undistorted view of 1960 America. I also didn't know Steinbeck didn't live very long. He died in 1968 at the age of 66.
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