Travels With Charley

In 1960 John Steinbeck, nearly sixty and in poor health, fitted out a camper truck he named Rocinante and drove around the United States with his standard poodle Charley for company. The book that came out of it is part travelogue, part elegy, and increasingly uneasy as it moves south and he watches a mob scream at schoolchildren in New Orleans. Later scholarship established how much he compressed and invented, which has not much dented it.