Travels with Charley: In Search of America is a travelogue by American author John Steinbeck. It documents the road trip he took with his poodle Charley around the United States in 1960. He wrote that he was moved by a desire to see his country on a personal level, since he made his living writing about it. He had many questions going into his journey, the main one being "What are Americans like today". However, he found that the "new America" did not live up to his expectations.
According to Thom Steinbeck, the author's older son, the real reason for the trip was that Steinbeck knew he was dying and wanted to see his country one last time. He was surprised that his stepmother allowed Steinbeck to make the trip.
Steinbeck traveled throughout the United States in a specially made camper which he named "Rocinante" after the horse of Don Quixote. He started his travels in Long Island, New York roughly following the outer border of the United States, from Maine to the Pacific Northwest, down into his native Salinas Valley in California, across to Texas, up through the Deep South, and then back to New York, a trip encompassing nearly 10,000 miles.
John Steinbeck (1902 – 1968) was unarguably one of the best American writers of the 20th century. A winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, he is best known for his novella “Of Mice and Men” (1937) and his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Grapes of Wrath” (1939), both of which examine the lives of the working class and the migrant worker during the Great Depression. Steinbeck wrote in the naturalist style, portraying people as the center of his stories. His characters and his stories were taken from real life struggles in the first half of the 20th century. His body of work reflects his wide range of interests, including marine biology, jazz, politics, philosophy, history, and myth. Seventeen of his works, including “Cannery Row” and “The Pearl”, went on to become Hollywood films, and Steinbeck himself succeeded as a Hollywood writer, garnering an Academy Award nomination for Best Writing for Alfred Hitchcock's “Lifeboat”, in 1945. Steinbeck is also known as a regionalist, naturalist, mystic, proletarian writer, moved to anger by the brutality of the Depression.
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