Travels With Charley

Travels With Charley came at the end of Steinbeck’s career; it was his second-to-last book published before his death in 1968. Therefore, the context for Travels With Charley differs from that of his earlier works. Steinbeck prided himself on being a strong, masculine individual, able to overcome any obstacle he faced in his “long and unprotected life” (187). Unlike many of his literary contemporaries, who grew up with privileged backgrounds, he didn’t find financial success until well into adulthood and worked in many physically rigorous, working-class jobs before making a living as a writer. His life experience is evident in works like The Grapes of Wrath, in which the Joad family perseveres despite endless hardships, and in his other novels like Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row, Of Mice and Men, and East of Eden. The enormous underlying strength guiding most working-class American people permeates Steinbeck’s earlier works, and many characters reflect his vision of his young self. In Travels With Charley, however, his assessment of the average American takes a different turn. He depicts many characters as weak and hopeless, even though they live in conditions much better than most of Steinbeck’s fictional characters. This reflects Steinbeck’s view of his own situation, particularly his declining health, which in reality was more dire than the book reveals.

In the book, he alludes to a health scare, writing about the illness as if it’s in the past, but in fact he was recently diagnosed with a fatal heart condition that ultimately took his life—and could have killed him at any point on his journey. According to his son, despite what he says on paper about the motivations for the trip, in reality he knew he was terminally ill and set out to say goodbye to the country that he spent a lifetime writing about. He was reportedly depressed and already skeptical about American progress when he began his journey. His wife and friends were adamantly opposed to the trip, but Steinbeck was stubborn and went anyway. This context sheds light on the book’s sometimes overtly cynical outlook and the sentimentality surrounding descriptions of places Steinbeck knew and loved, such as the redwood forests of California. Although he doesn’t directly state it in the book, he likely knew he’d never see those forests again or live to see the eventual outcome of the rapid changes that concerned him so much.