Late in Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck, outside a newly desegregated school in New Orleans, a group of white women gathers every morning to scream at small Black children walking in. The newspapers call them the Cheerleaders. A fifty-eight-year-old novelist drives down to watch, and when he writes it up he does not pretend his motive was noble. He compares the pull to a sideshow, the two-headed calf you pay to see so you can check your own count.
That chapter is the reason Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck survives. Everything around it is in question.
The Shape of Travels with Charley
In September 1960 Steinbeck fitted out a truck with a camper, named it Rocinante after Don Quixote’s horse, and left Long Island with a ten-year-old poodle for company. The route ran north into New England, west along the top of the country, down the Pacific coast to the valley he grew up in, then east through Texas and into the South.
He reports ten thousand miles, thirty-four states, and not one occasion on which anybody recognised him. That last detail is load-bearing. The book only works if its author is an anonymous man in a truck, and every encounter in it depends on strangers talking without knowing who is writing it down.
The chapters are not stages of a journey so much as set pieces: an actor touring Shakespeare, Canadian families picking potatoes in Maine, two days spent among the redwoods in a silence the prose calls cathedral-like. Charley is the thread, and he is excellent company. A blue standard poodle born near Paris, he takes orders in French and has to translate anything else, which slows him down.
Then the Problem
For half a century Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck was shelved as non-fiction. It is not.
Bill Steigerwald, a former Pittsburgh reporter, drove the route himself and checked the book against Steinbeck’s letters and his manuscript. The chronology does not hold. Several of the conversations could not have happened where or when they are placed. Elaine Steinbeck travelled with her husband for long stretches that the book presents as solitary, and comfortable hotels appear in the record far more often than the camper does.
Penguin accepted the substance of this. Its fiftieth-anniversary edition, published in 2012, added a note warning readers that Steinbeck took liberties with the facts and invented freely where it suited his purposes.
Groups should know that most copies in circulation, including the Penguin Classics edition carrying Jay Parini’s introduction, predate that note and contain no such warning at all.
What a Group Will Argue About in Travels with Charley
Not whether he invented things. He plainly did. The argument worth having is what that costs.
One position: a travelogue is a promise. Readers gave this book their trust because it said these were real people really met, and a composed conversation presented as a recorded one is a breach, however beautiful the prose. On this reading the pleasure was obtained dishonestly and the New Orleans chapter does not buy absolution for the rest.
The other position: Steinbeck was a novelist, the book never claims to be journalism, nobody was defamed or harmed, and the thing he was trying to report, what the country felt like in 1960, is not the sort of fact a timetable can verify. Compressed and composed scenes are how a novelist tells that kind of truth.
Both hold. What has gone for good is the third option, reading it as a straight record, and Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck is more interesting once that is off the table.
Charley Earns His Billing
It is worth saying plainly that the dog at the centre of Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck is not a gimmick, because the title invites the suspicion.
Charley is a blue standard poodle of ten, raised outside Paris and trained there, who understands only a little English and has to translate anything said to him in it, which slows his responses noticeably. He negotiates rather than fights, being poor at fighting, and carries a damaged ear from the one occasion an opposing dog declined to discuss matters.
Functionally he is the book’s door-opener. A man alone in a camper is a stranger to be left alone; a man with a conspicuous dog is approached, and most of the conversations in the book begin with somebody speaking to the animal first. Steinbeck is candid that he knew this when he chose to bring him.
He does something less calculated too. A travelogue narrated by a solitary man risks becoming a monologue, and Charley gives Steinbeck somebody to address. The result is the loosest, least performed prose of his final decade. When the dog falls seriously ill partway through the trip, the anxiety in those pages is the most unguarded writing in the book, and it is the one stretch nobody has ever suggested was invented.
Where It Is Genuinely Weak
Set the honesty question aside and Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck still has soft places:
- The state-of-the-nation verdicts are thin. Chain motels, plastic-wrapped food and homogenised towns were tired observations in 1962 and have not improved with age.
- Almost everyone he meets talks in the same cadence, which is his, and the ventriloquism becomes audible once you are looking for it.
- The middle third sags. Between the northern states and the South there is a long stretch where little is at stake.
- Charley carries more of the book than a dog should have to.
The Chapter That Justifies Travels with Charley
What makes the New Orleans chapter of Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck different is that its author refuses himself the comfortable position.
He writes about a city where fear had become ordinary, something everybody of every colour and class breathed without remarking on it, pressure building like a boil. He admits that he wanted to leave, calls that cowardly, and then says that denying it would be more cowardly still. And he does not offer a solution, does not place himself among the righteous, and does not let the reader do it either.
Nothing in the surrounding three hundred pages has that weight, and nothing in it reads as invented.
Reading It With Others
Pair it with our review of The Winter of Our Discontent, written immediately before this trip and asking the same question about what the country had become, or with the analysis of The Grapes of Wrath for the version of that question he asked at thirty-seven with no doubt in his voice at all. Cannery Row is the closest thing in his fiction to this book’s register.
After the Last Page
The ending has Steinbeck back in New York and comprehensively lost a few streets from his own front door, until a policeman cheerfully tells him not to worry, he got lost in Brooklyn himself on Saturday, and where was it he wanted to go.
It is a lovely close and it is very likely made up. That is the condition of the whole book. Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck gives a reader a marvellous voice, a genuinely good dog, one piece of writing that matters, and a narrator who cannot be trusted on the details. A group can decide whether that is a swindle or simply what a novelist does when handed a road and a deadline, and the decision will say more about the readers than about Steinbeck.