Steinbeck's account of driving across America with his standard poodle Charley in a custom pickup camper — elegiac, quietly political, full of American loneliness and open-road mythology. One of the great road-trip books: honest about age and uncertainty, clear-eyed about a country in transition.
Steinbeck drove across America in 1960 in a custom pickup camper with his standard poodle Charley, and he came back with a book that has been read by every American road-tripper since, not because it is his best work but because it is the book nobody else quite wrote. Travels with Charley is a loose, elegiac, occasionally cranky account of the country Steinbeck was trying to reacquaint himself with late in his career — and what he found, in town after town, was an America that had changed faster than his sense of it had kept up with.
The book's central mood is a specific kind of melancholy. Steinbeck is genuinely sad about what highways and franchising have done to the country, and also about the fact that his own aging body and mind no longer meet the journey the way they would have met it twenty years earlier. Both disappointments are in the book at once, and he does not always separate them. The parts where he is grumbling about modernization are sometimes really about something he is losing inside himself. That double register is one of the book's real gifts, if you are reading it at a certain age.
I bring this up on long shuttle drives. Charley is the right companion for the kind of multi-day drive where you are mostly in your own head. Steinbeck's observations — a specific waitress in Maine, a conversation with an itinerant theater actor, a morning looking at the North Dakota badlands — are calibrated for that kind of reading. You finish a chapter, look out the truck window, and the country you are driving through picks up some of his texture. It is a useful layering.
The book has been criticized in recent years for its factual reliability. Some scholars have shown that Steinbeck almost certainly compressed timelines, invented some of the conversations, and in places fictionalized more than the cover copy admits. Those criticisms are probably fair. They do not, for my money, damage the book. Travels with Charley is not claiming to be reporting. It is a late-career writer using the armature of a road trip to work through the country and himself at the same time, and reading it with full knowledge that the dog is sometimes doing narrative work does not thin the pleasure.
Read it on a road trip. Read it in pieces. Let Steinbeck's mood filter into your own. The book is good company for the specific loneliness of driving through empty country, and it is especially good company at the specific late-afternoon hour when you are starting to think about where you will sleep.
