Travels with Charley in Search of America

Make It Yours – See Your Price On Amazon!

Your Sales Price $14.00 - $7.70

A quick rundown of this product’s key features:

An intimate journey across America, as told by one of its most beloved writers
 
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.

Our Top Reviews

Reviewer: Guy W. Wallace
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Better late than never
Review: I wish I’d read this in the late 60s, when I was trying to find me in the writings of others. This would have given me hope, cautious hope, sooner rather than later.

Reviewer: JO
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: An Incredible Ride
Review: I read several Steinbeck books in college, and read Travels With Charley a few years later. It was long enough ago that I decided to read it again, as an older adult. It was fabulous! I could hardly put it down. What a treasure it is!

Reviewer: John P. Jones III
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: An impetus to do it again… much better this time.
Review: I first read “Travels…” in 1962. It is #15 on my list of books that I’ve read, which I commenced in that year. I’ve read a number of other books by Steinbeck, including The Grapes of Wrath, which I’ve read twice. Figured a re-read of “Travels…” was long overdue, since my original reading proved to be the impetus to my pale imitation of Steinbeck’s trip, in August 1968. I took my VW bug, and traveled from Pittsburgh, west, through Wisconsin, and all the way to Montana, before turning south to New Mexico, then looping back home in a rush imposed by “Uncle Sam.” That trip was the commencement to some other serious wanderings during my life.Steinbeck’s trip was much more extensive, yet in the end, attenuated also. It spanned 11 weeks, in the fall of 1960. He left his home on Long Island, NY, and traveled east and north, to Aroostook, Co. Maine, before turning west and going all the way to Seattle. Then he turned south and traveled to his childhood hometowns of Salinas and Monterey CA. Steinbeck references Thomas Wolfe’s classic You Can’t Go Home Again several times, noting that after a certain age many of your old friends are dead. He admits that he will be skipping over much of the rest of the country on the way home (you can’t do it all). He provides two memorable vignettes, among rich Texan friends at Thanksgiving, and then later, the fierce opposition to racial integration in the schools of New Orleans. His particular formulation of the urge to get home has remained with me all these years: “Some people take trips, and some trips take people,” and when the latter is operative, it is time to go home.This edition comes with a lengthy introduction by a biographer, Jay Parini. He admits that Steinbeck, the novelist, played a little loose with the strict facts of the trip, including creating a person who did not exist, and obviously reconstructing the dialogue in a particular fashion. Was he alone the entire trip? No. His wife was with him for portions of it, and I felt Steinbeck fairly admitted it in this work (she joined him in at least Chicago and Texas), and that he also fairly explained why he omitted discussing his interactions with her yet provided many details about his interactions with his dog.Steinbeck states that the country that he had known so well in the 1930’s and 40’s was now unknown to him, due to living in New York and abroad for two decades, and that was the prime motivation to his trip. Yet I felt that he skimmed too much on the surface of things… too much time in the camper, with Charlie. He stated that one way to understand the country is to attend church services, and I agree. He relates his attendance at one such service. But there is so much more that could have been done: attend sporting events, public-service functions by community-based organizations, and going to the working-class bars near factories at quitting time, among many others. He notes that his travels encompass the period when there is campaigning during a critical Presidential election, but not a single person talks politics with him. In fact, he never even mentioned who won!… though in an addendum, he relates how he and his wife were invited to the Inaugural Ball. In terms of not knowing the country, I was stunned when he wrote of the “blast furnaces of Detroit.” He also seemed to think that Filipinos are Maoris and seems to imply that Christ and Caesar lived in vastly different periods. I was bemused when he was complaining how “swollen” Seattle had become and predicted the residents would soon move back to the countryside. What would he think of it, or other American cities, more than half a century later?In terms of comments that are exceedingly topical, one that I fully agree with Steinbeck about, was his observation of the harvest in northern Maine: “It occurs to me that, just as the Carthaginians hired mercenaries to do their fighting for them, we Americans bring in mercenaries to do our hard and humble work. I hope we may not be overwhelmed one day by peoples not too proud or too lazy or too soft to bend to the earth and pick up the things we eat.” Yet within seven years of this insightful observation, he would be writing far less insightful articles in full support of the Vietnam War.I do enjoy reading Steinbeck, who proved to be a “compromise candidate” for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Overall, for his travels with Charley, 4-stars.

Reviewer: Alicia Crumpton
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Travel stories
Review: Steinbeck, J. (2017/1962). Travels with Charley: In search of America. Penguin Books.John Steinbeck (1902-1968), winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote more than twenty-five novels, including The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men.In 1961, Steinbeck decided to travel across America with his French poodle Charley. To prepare for his trip he outfitted a truck that he affectionately called Rocinante after the name of Don Quixote’s horse. This book is a travelogue describing his journey taken in late fall and winter to avoid tourists. He observed how with thruways, “it will be possible to drive from NY to CA without seeing a single thing.” So instead of thru-ways, he took back roads, ate in diners, and took every opportunity to engage with people he met along the way. This book represents his musings along the way about human nature, local sounds, and mobility as an aspect of the American experience. On being a traveler, Steinbeck noted differences saying, “There are map people whose joy is to lavish more attention on the sheets of colored paper than on the colored land rolling by.. . . Another kind of traveler requires to know in terms of maps exactly where he is pin-pointed every moment.” About himself, he noted, “I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found.” The most difficult story occurred in New Orleans while when talking with a man who used the N word, the two exchanged a difficult discussion about race. His final conclusion about humanity: “Charley doesn’t have our problems. He doesn’t belong to a species clever enough to split the atom but not clever enough to live in peace with itself.”This is a wonderful suite of memories about travel, what it means to be a traveler, and the fluid ways topics emerge while on the road.

Reviewer: A.Booker
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Read,remember,appreciate
Review: Steinbeck may be gone but will never be forgotten. Social commentary on an America that has largely disappeared but shaped so many of us. None of his books is trivial.

Reviewer: Highlander
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Worth the read, even the second time around.
Review: Read this book decades ago and thoroughly enjoying it again. Wonderfully descriptive, folksy, insightful. A pleasant change from high drama books about wars, murder, politics and assassinations.

Reviewer: Rodeoclimber
Rating: 3.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Narrow margins (gutter) make reading difficult
Review: This review is about the physical book quality -not the contents. This book published by Penguin is like too many paperbacks where they try to cram the narrative into the smallest number of pages by using very narrow margins – especially along the “gutter” (center) of the book. In order to read it you have to force the book open, which in this case meant that the spine broke apart. I should have just gone to the library and checked out a hardback copy. I’m sure Steinbeck’s story will be stellar.

Reviewer: Andrew R
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: I first read TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY forty years ago. I loved it then and I enjoyed it even more the second time around.I have wanted to reread this book for years, and very pleased to obtain a brand new copy of the book at a ridiculously low price. The online experience of purchasing a book of this kind, which I was unable to obtain from local used bookstores, was rewarding because I did not expect an uncirculated book when I opened the parcel.TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY is as poignant and moving today as it was the first time I read it. Of course, when I read it the first time, I didn’t think twice about the author’s comments about his concerns about growing old because as far as I was concerned at the time, he was over the hill – except for his writing. My second reading brought home to me that Steinbeck was still a relatively young man when he travelled across America with Charley. His discerning eye and his candid comments about America and Americans are as fresh now as they were then.This time, I had the good fortune to read extensive excerpts from Jay Perini’s JOHN STEINBECK: A BIOGRAPHY, 1996(?), after reading CHARLEY – an excellent companion piece that points out a number of variances or discrepancies between some of the politically correct commentary in the book and the letters home and the notes he made from which the book evolved. As I read Perini’s reference to Steinbeck’s lament of some of the short-comings of America and Americans -for instance, the great “distraction” of professional sports, I heard the echo of my father’s voice who decried the lack of attention to and focus on the real priorities in our World. I suppose that both Steinbeck and my father were on to something, namely the need to develop and to refine the resources between our ears rather than running rough shod over people and places to develop and to refine the resources below the ground – in America and elsewhere. Much has changed in America – in the once bustling centres of Ohio and New England, and elsewhere – and I am not sure that America and Americans – and the World are better off for it.For bibliophiles, and anyone who is new to Steinbeck, I highly recommend reading others of his books – THE GRAPES OF WRATH, THE RED PONY and EAST OF EDEN, OF MICE AND MEN AND THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT. These titles are all available on amazon.ca at reasonable prices.

Reviewer: Nuria
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: A Wonderful book to discover Steinbeck’s work. It’s a quite honest book. His point of view are quite accurate and objective. If you are familiar with The States, you’ll love Steinbeck’s journey. If you’re not, you’ll discover a different approach to the USA. Even if this travelogue was written in the early 60’s, his opinions and appreciations are quite updated with current times.

Reviewer: Sarugumo
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: I love `Travels with Charley: In Search of America’, maybe that’s because I like travelogues or maybe it’s because I love Steinbeck’s sublime eloquence, but whatever the reason, this made for one beautiful and captivating read. Travelling with Steinbeck and his poodle Charley you get to experience a slice of American life that is sadly no more. You get his usual rich imagery and ability to conjure up a scene in blazing brilliance as he travels across America from New York to California and back again. I find his style to be immediately comfortable and evocative to read and his descriptions are simple, yet wonderful. For example, when describing autumn leaves he writes `The climate changed quickly to cold and the trees burst into colour, the reds and yellows you can’t believe. It isn’t only colour but a glowing, as though the leaves gobbled the light of the autumn sun and then released it slowly’, simply breath taking writing. This story is all the more endearing as it is mixed in with tales of his relationship with Charley and how they interact together out on the road. I am a huge fan of Steinbeck and I have to say this sits highly in his body of work. It is concise, eloquent, descriptive, engaging and a whole host of other words that escape my vocabulary to describe his incredible writing style! This is a departure from his earlier works, which are based around depression era America and the Salinas valley, but that takes nothing away from the style, skill and story on offer and this comes highly recommended indeed.Feel free to check out my blog which can be found on my profile page.

Reviewer: Arupratan
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: A classic travelogue about an unforgettable road trip. A thoughtful reprise of author’s experience of wanderings and imagination in the land of prosperity and cultural diversity. Don’t forget to read Geert Mak’s “In America: Travels with John Steinbeck” after completing this book to get a contemporary idea about the situation of the places where Steinbeck visited back in 1960s.

Reviewer: john plymin
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: The items are as described and in perfect condition

Price effective as of Jun 26, 2025 00:08:29 UTC

As an Amazon Associate Dealors may receive a commission for purchases made through these links.