"Travels with Charley"

An early example of the Great
American Roadtrip genre

"Travels with Charley" would be John Steinbeck's Great American Roadtrip novel, except that it's nonfiction. It recounts Steinbeck's adventures driving Rocinante, a pick-up-truck-camper-van hybrid named after Don Quixote's horse, around the country with his poodle Charley. His objective was simply to observe people living their lives and ruminate on what makes America tick.

I've included a few passages that struck me below.

Communications must destroy localness, by a slow, inevitable process. I can remember a time when I could almost pinpoint a man's place of origin by his speech. That is growing more difficult now and will in some foreseeable future become impossible. It is a rare house or building that is not rigged with spiky combers of the air. Radio and television speech becomes standardized, perhaps better English than we have ever used. Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident or human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech. (106)

I am happy to report that in the war between reality and romance, reality is not the stronger. (136)

I must confess to a laxness in the matter of National Parks. I haven't visited many of them. Perhaps this is because they enclose the unique, the spectacular, the astounding—the greatest waterfall, the deepest canyon, the highest cliff, the most stupendous works of man or nature. And I would rather see a good Brady photograph than Mount Rushmore. For it is my opinion that we enclose and celebrate the freaks of our nation and of our civilization. Yellowstone National Park is no more representative of America than is Disneyland. (161)

For me, the book's highlight was the last section's affecting account of segregation. He records conversations with many different people in Louisiana and it paints a more compelling and provocative picture than I've read elsewhere.

Verdict: "Travels with Charley" captures the essence of a road trip: sometimes striking, sometimes amusing, and sometimes boring. The last chapters on segregation are well worth reading.