Travels with Charley in Search of America: (Centennial Edition)
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.81 (805 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0142000701 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 224 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-05-12 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Spot On In 1960, at the age of fifty-eight, John Steinbeck decides to search for America’s identity. What unfolds in his travels across the United States at that particular time in space is so indicative to the present dayactually for the majority of times past, present and future.While not in the same vein as a Bill Bryson, Tony Horwitz and other travel writers, it does depict how times change over the years and y. Good read, but also overrated This was a reread for me. I read it first thirty years ago. I loved it then.With the perspective of age, experience, and having done this sort of trip a few times, I can more fully appreciate his perspective now. But there were also annoying gaps in the narrative, and characters he obviously fabricated, that I didn't see on the first read. Guess I've become jaded. But I can't help but feel Steinbeck could have ma. "Good but not great" according to Jeff C*. The book definitely had its moments where the writing was both capitaving and amazing, in true Steinbeck style. Then there were other parts of the book where things dragged and got off on a tangent from the stated premise of the book. Overall I enjoyed it since I am a huge fan of Steinbeck, but I don't think I would read it again in the future.
“Pure delight, a pungent potpourri of places and people interspersed with bittersweet essays on everything from the emotional difficulties of growing old to the reasons why giant sequoias arouse such awe.” The New York Times Book Review“Profound, sympathetic, often angry an honest moving book by one of our great writers.” The San Francisco Examiner“This is superior Steinbecka muscular, evocative report of a journey of rediscovery.” John Barkham, Saturday Review Syndicate“The eager, sensuous pages in which he writes about what he found and whom he encountered frame a picture of our human nature in the twentieth century which will not soon be surpassed.” Edward Weeks, The Atlantic Monthly
Travels with Charley in Search of America is an intimate look at one of America's most beloved writers in the later years of his life—a self-portrait of a man who never wrote an explicit autobiography. He felt that he might have lost touch with the country, with its speech, the smell of its grass and trees, its color and quality of light, the pulse of its people. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.. His course took him through almost forty states: northward from Long Island to Maine; through the Midwest to Chicago; onward by way of Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana (with which he fell in love), and Idaho to Seattle, south to San Francisco and his birthplace, Salinas; eastward through the Mojave, New Mexico, Arizona, to the vast hospitality of Texas, to New Orleans
No writer is more quintessentially American than John Steinbeck. Born in 1902 in Salinas, California, Steinbeck attended Stanford University before working at a series of mostly blue-collar jobs and embarking on his literary career. . Profoundly committed to social progress, he used his writing to raise issues of labor exploitation and the plight of the common man, penning some of the greatest American novels of the twentieth century and winning such pres