By this time I was a frequent user of Jackson Benson’s magisterial biography, The Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer, but I hadn’t read Bill Steigerwald’s exposé, Dogging Steinbeck, and I didn’t become concerned with the choices Steinbeck made in Travels with Charley until I started my own research into the choices he confronted when he undertook the subject of religion in his writing. When I first read Travels with Charley, half a century after it was written, I had my doubts about several episodes in the book-encounters with Sunday preachers, Shakespearean actors, straight fathers and gay sons, Southerners with neatly divided views on race-that seemed uncharacteristically wooden for Steinbeck, too conveniently timed and too clearly contrived to prove the author’s point about the moral condition of America at the tail end of the Eisenhower era.

When I first read Travels with Charley I had my doubts about several episodes in the book.

Did John Steinbeck foreshadow the genre-bending literary movements now known as New Journalism and creative nonfiction when he wrote Travels with Charley, his semi-fictional account of the road trip he and his dog Charley took “In Search of America” in the fall of 1960? Published in 1962 as a book of travel, Steinbeck’s carefully crafted narrative resonated with mid-century readers who may or may not have felt differently if they had known Steinbeck was manipulating chronology and making up characters and conversations, like a novelist, to move his audience and fit his message.

John steinbeck novel travels with