Retracing Steinbeck’s ‘Travels With Charley’
Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 09.20.10 | 3:50 PM ET
Fifty years ago this week—on Sept. 23, 1960—John Steinbeck set out on the 10,000-mile road trip that would inspire the classic American memoir, “Travels With Charley.”
This Thursday, writer Bill Steigerwald will set out to retrace Steinbeck’s journey. He plans to write about it, using the trip as “the frame for a book that compares simple, poor, square 1960 America with 2010 America.”
He admits the two journeys will be very different.
Steinbeck camped out under the stars a bunch of times. I won’t. He drove a clunky uncomfortable truck with a Spartan camper shell on its back. I’ll stay at pre-1960 motels when I can and drive a 2010 Rav4 I can sleep in when I must. When Steinbeck was on the road he had only an AM radio and pay phones to keep him tethered to the world. I’ll have enough communication gear for a trip to the moon.
The book “Travels With Charley” will be my map/guide/timeline to the places Steinbeck went and the things he mused, complained or fretted about. Unfortunately, “Charley” is not a travelogue and wasn’t meant to be. It’s often vague and confusing about where Steinbeck actually was on any given date, and Steinbeck, who died in 1968, left no notes, no journal, no expense records.
There’s more information and an interactive map here.
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Jim Benning is the editor and co-founder of World Hum.
Boris Borissov 11.19.10 | 1:59 PM ET
This is an excellent idea.I am photographer and I always have been interested in capture the moments of today’s daily people life and compare it to the past. I want to do a similar trip, but I am planning to be more as a photo book with more pictures than text. I have been very long fan of Steinbeck and love his books. I was born anr raised in Bulgaria,when Steinbeck was very popular. I believe together with Jack London he is the face of America for European people.Unfortunately I feel America has change a lot since then and now the system is much more oppressive and politicians are even greedier than at Stenbeck’s time. I would like to show how the ordinary people feel about everything happening around them, even now they are not isolated from the world as they have been 50 years ago. My feeling is that even with surrounding technology people are much less active right now and they simple can not take their own destiny in their hands. I would try to represent every body opinion and less of mine own and to leave to the reader to make his own conclusions.