


With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Written during a time of upheaval and racial tension in the South-which Steinbeck witnessed firsthand- Travels with Charley is a stunning evocation of America on the eve of a tumultuous decade. This Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition also features French flaps and deckle-edged paper.įor more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. 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. 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 and a shocking drama of desegregation finally, on the last leg, through Alabama, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey to New York.


To reassure himself, he set out on a voyage of rediscovery of the American identity, accompanied by a distinguished French poodle named Charley and riding in a three-quarter-ton pickup truck named Rocinante. 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. In September 1960, John Steinbeck embarked on a journey across America. An intimate journey across and in search of America, as told by one of its most beloved writers, in a deluxe centennial edition
