BootsnAll Travel Community

I just got finished reading John Steinbeck's book- Travels with Charley: In search of America.

The book, which was published in '62, is fresh and still relevent. Several chapters caught my attention, though none as much as the opening chapter. I think he nailed the typical traveler and the urges that some people have on traveling.

If you get the chance, read it. It does remind me of another book by John Graves "Goodbye to a River" which was written a few years before.

If I get the chance, I'll type up the opening. It is not too long.

I read that recently too and thought about posting about it, but I didn't know who would know what I was talking about, since it was published a while back. I guess you!

I found a lot of the front matter kind of boring, actually, because I felt like he had this idea to travel the U.S. and then write about that travel, but by the nature of his car travels, a lot of it spent in the car and spent talking with whoever he found to chat with at campgrounds and such, it felt like he was perpetually on the outside of things, and didn't really have a lot to write about, but he had to write something...

I felt it started to get interesting when he went to Texas, where he had a lot of family and therefore an intuitive look at Texas ranch-money culture of the time. LOL. Timeless indeed, especially in speaking of what it takes to be a politician in Texas, and the need to play cowboy if you wanted anyone to vote for you, even if you were filthy rich and didn't know the first thing about herding cattle. And whooooo does that sound like...... hmmm (very telling it was written in 1962!)

It got really interesting when he went to see desegregation in process in ... was it New Orleans? That was intense. Reading his account of watching people screaming at one tiny little black girl going to a formerly all-white school, wow. Especially the middle-aged moms who had dubbed themselves "The Cheerleaders" to yell at her in shifts, with people egging them on.

Altogether a neat picture of some of the US during that time by a major American writer.

I agree with most of what you said, though I am not sure if it was because he had to write something or because he just did not know what to write. What I mean is, and he mentions it in the book at some point, that he did not know the american population, yet he is world famous as the voice of America. He received the Nobel price because he had the ability to show the world America. By the time he wrote this, he has so out of touch with the general population that he could not give a real picture of it if he wanted to.

I agree with the start (other then the opening chapter), travels through Maine and upstate New York, were very long and did not go anywhere. The New Orleans section was intense to say the least. I just can not understand people like the cheerleaders, how sad of a life they must have had that they did that to a little girl.

The Texas part was the best, and he nailed it. I grew up in Texas and the people have not changed (and I have some of the same thoughts in my head as well, though I do not come from the money that he was talking about). When he goes back to his family and old friends in California was good and insightful as well. Not so much about the area as it was about going back "home" after a long period of time.

For sure not the best travel book I have ever read, but a good read with some interesting points and things that are still relevent today.

Certainly not the best Steinbeck joint, but not a bad one either.

Personally I go for "Cannery Row" or "Of Mice and Men" when I feel like reading some Steinbeck.

I said a while ago that I was going to post this, just have not done it. So here it is:


-When I was very you and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured hat greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ship’s whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, I don’t improve; in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear disease is incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself.
When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find in himself a good and sufficient reason for going. This to the practical bum is not difficult. He has a built-in garden of reasons to choose from. Next he must plan his trip in time and space, choose a direction and a destination. And last he must implement the journey. How to go, what to take, how long to stay. This pat of the process is invariable and immortal. I set it down only so that newcomers to bumdom, like teen-agers in new hatched sin, will not think that they invented it.
Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; not two are alike. And al plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. Tour masters, schedules, reservations, brass-bound and inevitable, dash themselves to wreckage on the personality of the trip. Only when this is recognized can the blow-in-the-glass bum relax and go along with it. Only when do the frustrations fall away. In this a journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it. I feel better now, having said this, although only those who have experienced it will understand.

Damn you Otter, now I have to go and find this book..... Great passage.

For those who might otherwise be put off by the prospect of reading a "scholarly" author like Steinbeck, please check out "Travels With Charley". It is a wonderful book, very "accessible" and it is a hoot, not an "assignment".

Go grab a cheap, used, paperback copy and stuff it into your pack for your next trip.

I read this book ages ago and really liked it. May be time for a second go round...

One of my fav's of his... the part when he gets to the Redwoods is my personal favorite.

For what its worth, I loved 'Travels with Charley'...