Title: Travels with Charley
Author: Steinbeck, John
Published by: Penguin
Year: 1986
First published: Viking Penguin, 1962
Date reviewed: 05.11
ISBN: 978-0-14-005320-3

John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California and grew up near the Pacific coast where many of his earlier successful novels and stories are based. He later moved to New York and by 1960 had been living there for some time when wanderlust gripped him. He felt he had lost touch with the America and Americans whose lives he had written about in earlier times and wanted to reconnect with them. He had a truck converted to a camper and set out on a road trip with just his ‘blue’ standard poodle Charley for company.

He doesn’t have any great adventures and this is certainly not an odyssey of rediscovery, either of himself or others. It is just a simple account of his travels and the people he meets, written in the sharp spare style for which he is admired. Fifty years on it’s more social history than travelogue. The section that will stick in the mind, though, is near the end of the book when Steinbeck travels through the southern states. 1960 was the time when the protests over desegregation and civil rights were at their height as America struggled towards racial integration. Those old enough to remember will recall the way black children were ‘bussed’ into all-white schools (Martin Luther King led the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, and the March on Washington was in 1963). Steinbeck’s account of the vitriolic and obscene behaviour of a group of women in New Orleans known as the Cheerleaders, who mounted daily protests outside white schools being forced by the Federal government to take black children, is equal to any of his earlier powerful prose.