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Long way home : on the trail of Steinbeck's America

"We do not take a trip; a trip takes us, " John Steinbeck noted in his 1962 classic, "Travels with Charley." In the summer of 2008, Bill Barich stumbled upon a used copy of "Travels in Ireland, " where he has lived for the past eight years, and it inspired him to explore the mood of the United States as Steinbeck had done almost a half century before. With a hotly contested election looming, and in the shadow of an economic meltdown, Barich set off on a 5,943-mile cross-country drive from New York to his old hometown in San Francisco via Route 50, a road twisting through the American heartland."Long Way Home is" the stunning result of his pilgrimage, an illuminating and perceptive portrait of America at a dramatic point in its history. Where Steinbeck returned from the road depressed about the country's soul, Barich--while not uncritical of the narrow-mindedness and incivility of our present culture--finds brightness among the dark and rekindles his belief in the long view, as exemplified by the unbridled optimism of some high school kids in Hutchinson, Kansas, and by the undaunted spirit of an eighty-year-old barber he chanced upon in Jefferson City, Missouri. "The world truly does renew itself while we're looking the other way, " he observes.From the Eastern Shore of Maryland to the spectacular landscape of Moab, Utah, to Steinbeck's own Salinas Valley, filled with memorable encounters and redolent with history and local color, "Long Way Home" is a truthful, inspiring account of the country at a social and political crossroad. "The highway snakes into a tunnel, " Barich writes about a stretch of Route 50 in West Virginia, "then erupts into the light with the force of revelation.".

Dogging Steinbeck : how I went looking for John Steinbeck's America, found my own America, and exposed the truth about 'Travels with Charley'

Nancy Pearson collection of fan mail sent to John Steinbeck, together with a letter from Steinbeck to Pearson, 1962-1964

Included in the collection are thirty-two pieces of fan mail; one a post-card from Japan and seven pieces are from Russia. Eight of these letters are accompanied by typed carbon copies (unsigned), one of which is signed by Janet Beckman, Steinbeck's secretary. It is unknown who actually wrote or dictated the carbon replies. The letter from Steinbeck to Ms. Pearson is very characteristic of the author (found in folder one). He remarks, "If they only knew that one never learns it and that every day it becomes harder, not easier, they would give it up. Unfortunately the process of doing a piece is also the process of outgrowing it and the horizons keep well ahead rather like Einstein's expanding universe, so that a writer, far from overtaking any goal, finds himself always slipping back in relation to the end. Only very slowly does one learn how impossibly difficult it is." Folder four includes a 1963 issue of Publisher's Weekly featuring Steinbeck, an original invitation to the White House for the inauguration of President Lyndon B. Johnson (1965), and a Russian/English reprint of Steinbeck's Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech, 1962, called "A Writer's Credo." Fan letters mention the following works by Steinbeck: Travels with Charley, Grapes of Wrath, Red Pony, Burning Bright, Of Mice and Men, Moon is Down, Tortilla Flat, Winter of Our Discontent, Cannery Row, Sweet Thursday, and The Pearl.