NYT editorial: The Truth About Charley
Bill Steigerwald has made an intriguing, if disheartening, discovery that seems to have eluded admirers and scholars of John Steinbeck for decades. Steinbeck’s “Travels With Charley in Search of America” is shot through with dubious anecdotes and impossible encounters.
Mr. Steigerwald, a former newspaperman, said he was planning to pay respectful tribute last year when he retraced Steinbeck’s 1960 journey — 10,000 miles from Long Island to Maine to California and back. But as he explained in a blog and an article in this month’s Reason magazine, facts got in the way.
He checked the book against Steinbeck’s actual itinerary, letters from the road, the book’s draft and revisions. They convinced him that Steinbeck misrepresented dates and places and had not spent all that time alone with his dog. His wife, Elaine, was along for most of the trip; they often stayed in deluxe hotels and camped hardly at all.
This might not flabbergast anyone who has read the book lately. It is full of improbably colorful characters and hard-to-swallow dialogue straight out of a black-and-white 1960s TV show. “What’s the matter with you, Mac, drunk?” says a red-faced New York cop. “You can just rot here,” says a forlorn young man in the Rockies who wears a polka-dot ascot and dreams of being a beautician in New York. “Flops. Who hasn’t known them hasn’t played,” says a traveling Shakespearean actor in North Dakota.
(More here.)
Mr. Steigerwald, a former newspaperman, said he was planning to pay respectful tribute last year when he retraced Steinbeck’s 1960 journey — 10,000 miles from Long Island to Maine to California and back. But as he explained in a blog and an article in this month’s Reason magazine, facts got in the way.
He checked the book against Steinbeck’s actual itinerary, letters from the road, the book’s draft and revisions. They convinced him that Steinbeck misrepresented dates and places and had not spent all that time alone with his dog. His wife, Elaine, was along for most of the trip; they often stayed in deluxe hotels and camped hardly at all.
This might not flabbergast anyone who has read the book lately. It is full of improbably colorful characters and hard-to-swallow dialogue straight out of a black-and-white 1960s TV show. “What’s the matter with you, Mac, drunk?” says a red-faced New York cop. “You can just rot here,” says a forlorn young man in the Rockies who wears a polka-dot ascot and dreams of being a beautician in New York. “Flops. Who hasn’t known them hasn’t played,” says a traveling Shakespearean actor in North Dakota.
(More here.)
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