Product Description: Today, nearly forty years after his death, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck remains one of America’s greatest writers and cultural figures. Over the next year, his many works published as black-spine Penguin Classics for the first time and will feature eye-catching, newly commissioned art.
Penguin Classics is proud to present these seminal works to a new generation of readers—and to the many who revisit them again and again.
Steinbeck's search for America Travels with Charlie works on many levels. As a result of one of our best writer's decision to go on a road trip with his dog in 1960, he left us with a vivid description of what he saw, as well as a good tale about a man and his dog. It has worn well and is as enjoyable for me now as it was when I read as a teenager.
Pleasant, thoughtful reading Steinbeck seems right at home telling a good traveling story, the pleasure and interest he felt while completing this odyssey comes across in his prose. The book feels like a good story told by a friend over lunch (albeit much longer): a compilation of activities and destinations interspersed with commentary and recollection of individual interactions. This roundabout quality makes it easy to read and absorb, but at times leaves the story without a central driving theme or idea. The beginning and the end are the two sections that seem most coalesced, but at no point does the book drag.
I found Travels with Charley to be a book I could spend five minutes on or an hour on and take something away. Some sections could be read straight through and not feel weary. I doubt many would want to read the book in one sitting, many parts need time to mull over and the style sometimes becomes a bit stale and I found it better to come back later when I found it fresh.
can't get much better than a Steinbeck Steinbeck's Travels with Charley was his last book I believe. This is a memoir of John Steinbeck's drive from Long Island, New York to the tip of Maine to California and back to Long Island. Of course it's well written, as you'd expect from any Nobel Prize winner in Literature, but it also captures that turbulent time in the early 1960s when Martin Luther King Jr. was trying to achieve Civil Rights and Khrushchev was banging his shoe in the United Nations.
State of the Nation In Travels with Charley, Steinbeck is on a journey to discover if he still knows the country he memorializes in almost all of his other works. Steinbeck manages to express in this memoir of his journey through America a whole host of emotions that many of us still feel today, a conflicting love for our country and disgust with our countrymen, appreciation for our past and worries about what we have become. Like all of his best works, the writing is natural, warm, and often funny. This is a beautiful book that captures America, both the good and the bad, in it's pages.
Spending time with Steinbeck TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY gives us a chance to move to an up-close-and-personal position with the aloof, John Steinbeck, At the age of 60 in the fall of 1960. Steinbeck acquired a primitive pickup-style recreational vehicle, packed up a few belongings, and loaded his faithful poodle. He drove throughout the United States to reconnect with the inhabitants of the nation.
Like any other tourist who travels too far too fast, he was unable to see everything, and he skimmed over many details in his tale. He delineated some of his stops in sufficient detail. Most of the travel log is a glazed-over account.
Steinbeck wrote with the voice of a mature senior citizen, who was disappointed with much of what he saw in the nation. When I first read this book, I was in college. Now that I am in the age group of Steinbeck when he wrote it, I wonder what he would think of our nation today. He showed some of the good, such as the idyllic farms with friendly people, and some of the bad, such as people who were prejudiced and unkind. I believe if he could see our country today he would find something positive. He always expressed trust in the underlying goodness of our people.
Anything Goes Trivia
Last Kiss
Megaton Man
Trevor
