Pretty amazing bit of literary investigation, here. Bill Steigerwald set off to retrace the trip John Steinbeck recounted in Travels with Charley, and discovered that the trip was largely fictionalized.
My initial motives for digging into Travels With Charley were totally innocent. I simply wanted to go exactly where Steinbeck went in 1960, to see what he saw on the Steinbeck Highway, and then to write a book about the way America has and has not changed in the last 50 years.
But when Steigerwald started cross-referencing events Steinbeck recounts in the book against other evidence — letters, hotel records, etc. — he discovered so many discrepancies that, he concludes, “virtually nothing [Steinbeck] wrote in Charley about where he slept and whom he met on his dash across America can be trusted.”
Steigerwald’s piece isn’t an attack. He personally believes that Steinbeck didn’t set out to deceive anyone. He was, at the time, 58 years old, in poor health, and had promised to produce book for which “he had taken virtually no notes.”
Whoops.
Still, it’s interesting that for 50 years the book was trusted as a nonfiction account of what one man discovered when he crossed our continent, when in fact it’s fiction.
Good thing Steinbeck never appeared on Oprah ;-)
in hardcover right now — a gift from another of the sweet guys in my life — which is an amazing book btw). I don’t want to own everything in electronic form. I guess, for me, there are books I want to own as books, and books I purely for the experience of reading them . . . it dovetails with something I’m doing in general in my life, which is trying to shed stuff — I’m selling things, giving things away, anything to reduce my possessions to the bare minimum, to lighten my footprint, to make myself more mobile, more flexible. I’m comfortable that certain experiences are supposed to be ephemeral. I’m okay with experiencing some books as experiences rather than things.
. ‘Nuff said.
