Travels with Charley: In Search of America

By: John Steinbeck

Published February 5th 2002 by Penguin (first published 1962)

Category: Biography

Pages: 214 pages

ISBN: 9780142000700

Description:
A quest across America, from the northernmost tip of Maine to CaliforniaÕs Monterey Peninsula

To hear the speech of the real America, to smell the grass and the trees, to see the colors and the lightÑthese were John Steinbeck's goals as he set out, at the age of fifty-eight, to rediscover the country he had been writing about for so many years.

With Charley, his French poodle, Steinbeck drives the interstates and the country roads, dines with truckers, encounters bears at Yellowstone and old friends in San Francisco. Along the way he reflects on the American character, racial hostility, the particular form of American loneliness he finds almost everywhere, and the unexpected kindness of strangers.