Steinbeck's Travels with Charley was his last book I believe. This is a memoir of John Steinbeck's drive from Long Island, New York to the tip of Maine to California and back to Long Island. Of course it's well written, as you'd expect from any Nobel Prize winner in Literature, but it also captures that turbulent time in the early 1960s when Martin Luther King Jr. was trying to achieve Civil Rights and Khrushchev was banging his shoe in the United Nations.

In Travels with Charley, Steinbeck is on a journey to discover if he still knows the country he memorializes in almost all of his other works. Steinbeck manages to express in this memoir of his journey through America a whole host of emotions that many of us still feel today, a conflicting love for our country and disgust with our countrymen, appreciation for our past and worries about what we have become. Like all of his best works, the writing is natural, warm, and often funny. This is a beautiful book that captures America, both the good and the bad, in it's pages.

TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY gives us a chance to move to an up-close-and-personal position with the aloof, John Steinbeck, At the age of 60 in the fall of 1960. Steinbeck acquired a primitive pickup-style recreational vehicle, packed up a few belongings, and loaded his faithful poodle. He drove throughout the United States to reconnect with the inhabitants of the nation.

Like any other tourist who travels too far too fast, he was unable to see everything, and he skimmed over many details in his tale. He delineated some of his stops in sufficient detail. Most of the travel log is a glazed-over account.

Steinbeck wrote with the voice of a mature senior citizen, who was disappointed with much of what he saw in the nation. When I first read this book, I was in college. Now that I am in the age group of Steinbeck when he wrote it, I wonder what he would think of our nation today. He showed some of the good, such as the idyllic farms with friendly people, and some of the bad, such as people who were prejudiced and unkind. I believe if he could see our country today he would find something positive. He always expressed trust in the underlying goodness of our people.

In this book, John Steinbeck shows patriotism at its best. He travels through the United States, and experiences all the beauties of this nation in a marvellous way. He shows no arrogance as he appreciates his homeland. Instead, he shows this nation's beauty and riches in an amicable way, and invites others to travel and experience the beauty of this nation. The hymn "America The Beautiful" comes to the reader's mind.

(4.5 stars) When John Steinbeck obeys a life-long urge to drive from coast to coast in 1960, he little anticipates the variety of the "American experience." Beginning in Maine and traveling along the northern states through Wisconsin, the Badlands, Montana, and all places in between, to Washington and Oregon, Steinbeck then decides to visit his childhood community of Salinas, in northern California. After meeting with friends there, though many have died, he then drives southward through the length of California and then eastward through the southwest desert to Texas, Louisiana, and eventually up to Virginia before returning to New York.

Carrying the reader along with him as he reconstructs this journey for publication in 1962, Steinbeck observes people and human nature, being careful not to draw conclusions about an entire area based on the individuals he meets along the way. Often it is their reactions to Charley, his aging standard poodle, which stimulates their conversations and allows Steinbeck glimpses of their thinking and ways of life. From the terminally gloomy waitress in Maine to the evil-looking mechanic in Oregon (who turns out to be the kindest and most generous of men), Steinbeck explores attitudes toward life (and strangers). Steinbeck's high school buddy (who almost comes to blows with him) shows him that you really can't go home again, and "the cheerleaders" of New Orleans, a group of white-supremacist women who taunt and scream obscenities at a tiny black girl integrating one of their schools, shows him how much work the human race still has left to do.

As he travels in his truck with a house attached to its bed (a pre-camper invention), he notes the changing landscape, the disappearance of treasured aspects of the environment, and the growth of new trends--including the increasing popularity of the mobile home and the contemporary loss of "roots." He is genuinely frightened by the Badlands, until night falls, when it becomes beautiful. He adores Montana, and he hurries through the almost blank southwestern desert where he learns something new about shooting. Though Steinbeck gets tired of travel before the end of the trip, he still manages to record signal moments which resonate with the reader.

What elevates this book especially is the glimpses it gives of Steinbeck himself, a far more upbeat man than one would expect from novels like Cannery Row, Of Mice and Men, and Grapes of Wrath. His observations of life in the early 1960s capture the country at pivotal moments of history--the time of Sen. John Kennedy and freedom rides. In this respect, Steinbeck creates a time capsule for future generations and a picture of himself that lovers of his writing will treasure. n Mary Whipple

I just finished the book and it was a fantastic read. It was a fairly "light" book, considering the author; it was genuinely hilarious at times, and, as always, Steinbeck created an incredibly vivid, personal, and accurate portrait of the relationships between nature and society. Shades of his earlier can be seen in the prose style, and his unconditional devotion to the creation and development of images and characters can't be matched by anyone from any time.

As far as a "Travel-style" novel is concerned, I think I liked this one more than Kerouac's On the Road...but, then again, Steinbeck was far more talented than any of the Beats -except Ginsberg (who might've been in his league, but in a junior-varsity-type capacity) and maybe Neal Cassidy.

If you like Steinbeck, you will really enjoy reading this book.

traveling across america in 1960 with a man and his dog. awww, for the wanderlust in all of us and too live it via john steinbeck. each turn more exciting than the other......yet was 3 months enough time? i think not!

A wonderful read..a glimpse of America through the eyes of Steinbeck while driving his pick-up/camper with his dog.

Travels with Charley was one of the inspirational books that lead me to write "Hobo-ing America". I had always read travel books. Everybody from Mark Twain to George Orwell. But Travels with Charley (his dog) ranks right up there in the inspiration category for me. I had always longed to travel America but I could never afford to do it. Finally my wife Carol and I took off with about $2,400 and a van with a homemade bed in the rear and hit the road. We paid our way by picking fruits and vegetables and we stayed on the road living under bridges and equipment shelters for a number of years. Carol says that it was the best time of her life. I am still hoping that the best time hasn't come yet. Though my time is running low.
I guess that the whole point of this review is that it was books like Travels with Charley that made our adventure a reality. I still have a tattered copy of Travels with Charley on my library shelf.

In the autumn of 1960, author John Steinbeck (1902 - 1968) felt that he was writing on the fumes of experience. That and the wanderlust that usually passes with youth still itched at age 58. He bought a camper truck he christened "Rocinante" after Don Quixote's horse and with his 10-year-old poodle named Charley he set off to find America. His route largely rimmed the 48 contiguous states: from his summer home on Long Island, he headed up to Maine, across to upstate New York and down US Route 90, out to Chicago, through the Badlands to Montana, over to Spokane, down the Oregon coast, to his native Salinas in Central California, cutting across the Mojave to Texas, onward into the Deep South and then a straight shot home to New York City.

In 1960, Steinbeck stood on a cusp of history and what he reveals, especially as regarded 47 years later, is the country coming and going on itself. He finds cities ringed by huge garbage piles created by the rise of a disposable culture that had yet to discover recycling. He uses the new highway system as well as the old back roads, encountering a country adapting to a new mobility. The people he met were timeless characters, though many were in age-old circumstances that have since passed. Despite the Pulitzer Prize, bestselling books and media coverage, he is never recognized and finds people at their most candid. His accounts on the road are episodic, some comic, some fodder for philosophical rumination. When he hits the Deep South, however, he collides with the opening salvos of the modern Civil Rights movement and tangles with racists as he watches "The Cheerleaders," the gang of middle-aged "respectable" white women obscenely haranguing a tiny black child being escorted to school. He is sickened. It is time to go home.

The insights to the human condition and what it means to be American as divulged by the journey are priceless. The beautiful thing about Steinbeck is his persistent curiosity in life outside of himself. Though he comes to realize the journey is as much internal as it is external, his inspiration was not to find himself but to connect with others. He was a most generous soul.

Had a problem with this low cost used copy... not as described
BUT vendor 100% honest ---
No problem FIX.. they stood 100% behind what they sell.
Tks!

Travels with Charley to me is first of all a perfect story of a man and his dog.

One of the best stories, I have ever read.

I would SO MUCH love to take this trip with my poodle "Apu" ! A must read for America lovers, for Road Trip lovers, and for dog lovers!