Travels with Charley: In Search of America

In 1960, John Steinbeck — then nearing sixty and famous for writing about America — loaded a custom camper truck named Rocinante with his standard poodle Charley and drove 10,000 miles through nearly forty states. The trip was an attempt to reconnect with the country he had spent his career writing about, at a moment when postwar prosperity, interstates, and television were reshaping national life. The book records what he found: a country more homogenized and less certain than the one he remembered, filtered through Steinbeck's own aging, illness, and ambivalence about what he was seeing.