Steinbeck’s Uneasy America
Rereading “Travels with Charley”
Steinbeck’s Uneasy America is the first collection of critical scholarship devoted to Travels with Charley in Search of America, John Steinbeck’s best-selling, late-career travel memoir. In 1960, Steinbeck was a renowned man of American letters. Many considered him America’s troubadour of ordinary people, the conscience of the country. But weakened by two small strokes and anxious that he had lost touch with America, he embarked on a cross-country road trip accompanied by his wife’s standard poodle, Charley. Two years later, he published Travels with Charley to popular acclaim and robust sales.
Throughout this narrative, Steinbeck insists that all of our perceptions are “warped” by personality, history, and society. And while this hybrid and experimental book has long been accepted as an accurate account of his journey, journalists and scholars agree that the narrative is part factual, part fiction—America as seen through Steinbeck’s particular “warp.” The work is long overdue for scholarly assessment.
Steinbeck’s Uneasy America explores three main topics. Part 1 explores genre and form to consider the degree to which the work is fiction or nonfiction. Part 2 assesses Steinbeck’s increasingly bleak assessment of America—almost a jeremiad that warns citizens of ecological excess and political apathy. Part 3 focuses on Travels with Charley as a road text, travel adventure, and literary influence.
This volume’s authors offer rich scholarly insights and a wealth of stories, facts, and anecdotes about Steinbeck and the adventures and misadventures he and Charley met on the road. Lively and groundbreaking, the collection both enlightens and enlivens discussions of Steinbeck and of the twentieth-century American book world.
CONTRIBUTORS
Danica Čerče / William P. Childers / Donald V. Coers / Robert DeMott / Cecilia Donohue / Charles Etheridge / Mimi R. Gladstein / Barbara A. Heavilin / Kathleen Hicks / Carter Davis Johnson / Gavin Jones / Sally S. Kleberg / Jay Parini / Brian Railsback / Susan Shillinglaw / Nicholas P. Taylor
Blurring the line between autobiography and fiction is what this book does with a vengeance. . . [Steinbeck’s Uneasy America] brings new light to the question of the author’s presence.’ —Marie-Christine Lemardeley, professor emerita of American literature at Sorbonne Nouvelle University and editor of a collection of four Steinbeck’s novels translated into French
Barbara A. Heavilin is editor-in-chief of the Steinbeck Review. She has written or edited several books on John Steinbeck, most recently Critical Insights: “Of Mice and Men.”
Susan Shillinglawis professor of English emerita at San Jose State University and was director of the university’s Steinbeck Center for eighteen years, as well as director of the National Steinbeck Center from 2015 to 2018. She is author of Carol and John Steinbeck: Portrait of a Marriage and her most current work is On Reading “The Grapes of Wrath.”
