Product Description

Today, nearly forty years after his death, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck remains one of America’s greatest writers and cultural figures. Over the next year, his many works published as black-spine Penguin Classics for the first time and will feature eye-catching, newly commissioned art.

Penguin Classics is proud to present these seminal works to a new generation of readers—and to the many who revisit them again and again.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12734 in Books
• Published on: 2002-02-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

From AudioFile
At age 58 John Steinbeck and his venerable standard poodle, Charley, set out on a journey across America in a camper. For three months these companions traveled the nation, meeting friends, strangers, relatives and immersing themselves in the fabric of the country as it was at that time. Gary Sinise does a grand job giving life to Steinbeck's words. While his regional accents don't always hit the mark, the listener is happy to forgive because of the love and respect Sinise accords the Steinbeck story. Eight hours is a lot of listening time, but it passes all too quickly with this wonderful version of an American treasure. S.G. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

About the Author
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 prestigious awards as the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He received the Nobel Prize in 1962, "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception." Today, more than thirty years after his death, he remains one of America's greatest writers and cultural figures.

Customer Reviews

Steinbeck's search for America
Travels with Charlie works on many levels. As a result of one of our best writer's decision to go on a road trip with his dog in 1960, he left us with a vivid description of what he saw, as well as a good tale about a man and his dog. It has worn well and is as enjoyable for me now as it was when I read as a teenager.

Pleasant, thoughtful reading
Steinbeck seems right at home telling a good traveling story, the pleasure and interest he felt while completing this odyssey comes across in his prose. The book feels like a good story told by a friend over lunch (albeit much longer): a compilation of activities and destinations interspersed with commentary and recollection of individual interactions. This roundabout quality makes it easy to read and absorb, but at times leaves the story without a central driving theme or idea. The beginning and the end are the two sections that seem most coalesced, but at no point does the book drag.

I found Travels with Charley to be a book I could spend five minutes on or an hour on and take something away. Some sections could be read straight through and not feel weary. I doubt many would want to read the book in one sitting, many parts need time to mull over and the style sometimes becomes a bit stale and I found it better to come back later when I found it fresh.

can't get much better than a Steinbeck
Steinbeck's Travels with Charley was his last book I believe. This is a memoir of John Steinbeck's drive from Long Island, New York to the tip of Maine to California and back to Long Island. Of course it's well written, as you'd expect from any Nobel Prize winner in Literature, but it also captures that turbulent time in the early 1960s when Martin Luther King Jr. was trying to achieve Civil Rights and Khrushchev was banging his shoe in the United Nations.