He stopped frequently in Wal-Mart parking lots, and once he parked in a car dealer’s lot, impersonating a used car. And he did sleep in the car, he pointed out in a recent phone interview. Steigerwald wrote for The Post-Gazette for several weeks in 2010 while retracing Steinbeck’s journey in a leased Toyota Rav4. The Reason article is a distillation of a blog Mr. Steigerwald estimates that Steinbeck spent no more than a couple of nights in the camper itself, and says, “Virtually nothing he wrote in ‘Charley’ about where he slept and whom he met on his dash across America can be trusted.” On more than half of his trip he was accompanied by his wife, Elaine. On a night when he supposedly camped out on a farm near Lancaster, N.H., Steinbeck was actually at the Spalding Inn, a hotel so fancy that he had to borrow a coat and tie to eat in the dining room. Steigerwald, Steinbeck stayed in motels a lot - when he wasn’t at luxury hotels. He was in Beach, N.D., more than 300 miles to the west, staying not in the camper but in a motel.Īccording to Mr. 12, Steinbeck wasn’t anywhere near Alice. In the current issue of the libertarian monthly Reason, Bill Steigerwald, a former journalist for The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, writes that not only is the meeting with the actor made up, but on the evening in question, Oct. A particularly unlikely encounter occurs at a campsite near Alice, N.D., where a Shakespearean actor, mistaking Steinbeck for a fellow thespian, greets him with a sweeping bow, saying, “I see you are of the profession,” and then proceeds to talk about John Gielgud. Khrushchev’s shoe-pounding (or -brandishing, depending on whom you ask) speech at the United Nations weeks before Khrushchev actually visited the United Nations. Almost from the beginning, though, a few readers pointed out that many of the conversations in the book had a stagey, wooden quality, not unlike the dialogue in Steinbeck’s fiction.Įarly on in the book, for example, Steinbeck has a New England farmer talking in folksy terms about Nikita S. It remains in print, regarded by some as a classic of American travel writing. Steinbeck’s book-length account of his journey, “Travels With Charley: In Search of America,” published in 1962, was generally well reviewed and became a best-seller. The idea was that he would travel alone, stay at campgrounds and reconnect himself with the country by talking to the locals he met along the way.
He outfitted a three-quarter-ton pickup truck as a sort of land yacht and set off from his home in Sag Harbor, N.Y., with his French poodle, Charley, to drive cross-country. In the fall of 1960 an ailing, out-of-sorts John Steinbeck, pretty much depleted as a novelist, decided that his problem was he had lost touch with America.
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