Route 66 was made famous in 1939 by John Steinbeck in ‘Grapes of Wrath.’ And it’s been a permanent part of America’s music culture since 1947 when jazzman Bobby Troup wrote the song ‘Route 66’ about how to get your kicks on it.

In 2010, when I faithfully retraced John Steinbeck’s ‘Travels with Charley’ road trip for my book Dogging Steinbeck, I drove a long crumbling stretch of the highway he and his poodle Charley traveled in the fall of 1960.

This excerpt from Dogging Steinbeck describes the places and people I found on Route 66 while chasing the great author’s ghost in the fall of 2010.

Worshiping Route 66

Like John Steinbeck 50 years before, I slipped out the back door of the Monterey Peninsula. East into the dry gut of central California I sped along state routes 156 and 99. They were the same roads Steinbeck took on his way east to a Thanksgiving holiday at a cattle ranch near Amarillo, Texas, only my asphalt – per usual – was smoother, wider and safer….

Dodging grassy tan mountains, passing beneath a forest of wind turbines stretched across several ridge tops, I skirted the town of Mojave, slipped by the edge of Edwards Air Force Base and drove through the bleak Mojave Desert to the crossroads town of Barstow.

At Barstow, Steinbeck met U.S. Highway 66, his “Mother Road” from The Grapes of Wrath, and followed it all the way to Texas. I-40 has replaced, covered or bypassed Route 66, which no longer officially exists. But long, desolate stretches of the historic and culturally powerful road still parallel the interstate.

Old Route 66 comes back to life when it becomes the main street of traveler-centric desert towns like Gallup, Winslow, Kingman and Winona. Jazzman Bobby Troup made those dusty places hip & famous forever with the lyrics of his swinging 1946 hit “Route 66,” which Nat King Cole sang first and the Rolling Stones, John Mayer and dozens of others have covered.

If any road in America deserved to be worshipped, it was old Route 66. Starting in the 1930s, and until the western interstates were completed in the 1970s, it was the only practical east-west route by car from Chicago to L.A. Route 66 made it possible for migrants of every socioeconomic class to reach for the golden promises of California, not just the desperate migrants in The Grapes of Wrath.

Long before national chain motels, restaurants and truck stops were invented, the independent motels and mom & pop diners along Route 66 allowed truckers and ordinary tourists to cross a thousand miles of desert in comfort and safety. Like a long, thin travel theme park, the road was lined with wacky restaurants, wild Art-Deco architecture, reptile farms and motel rooms made out of teepees. Neon signs in small towns like Gallup, Grants and Tucumcari lit up the desert sky all night.

I had been on parts of Route 66 a dozen times.

The French Attack en masse

East of Barstow, I came upon the first and only serious traffic accident of my entire trip. Minutes earlier a sleek new silver tractor-trailer had rolled on its side, crushing the nose of its cab and exposing its pristine underside and 18 wheels to the desert blue sky. As a state cop kept the trickle of I-40 traffic moving, the driver, though unhurt, walked down the road with an anguished look on his face and both hands on top of his head. Clear day, good road, no traffic – the poor guy must have fallen asleep or been texting his girlfriend.

Shortly after that rare 30-second burst of interstate excitement, I exited at Newberry Springs to get on a stretch of old Route 66. The sign said I was on the National Trails Highway, which has been Route 66’s official name since 1985. When I saw the ruins of a small boarded-up motel, I pulled over and parked, which is always easy to do in the desert. “Free TV” was written on a tall “M-O-T-E-L” sign whose neon hadn’t glowed in many years. It would be the first of a hundred dead Eisenhower Era motels, roadside cafes and gas stations I’d pass in the next two days – road kill from when the interstate made Route 66 and its commerce obsolete.

After photographing the motel’s sunbaked corpse, I turned around and had the strangest experience of my trip. A gleaming white bus with “Divine Transportation” written on its side had pulled into the parking lot behind me and was disgorging passengers. People in shorts and T-shirts were walking right out into the middle of the highway, where they stood on the yellow centerline in threes and fours and took pictures of each other.

Employing my best journalism skills, and despite the usual language barrier, I quickly learned they were French tourists – cultural pilgrims, really. They had come to stand on old Route 66’s pavement and visit the world-famous Bagdad Cafe, which I had never heard of before and hadn’t noticed was 100 yards behind me.

Fifty-two French people, all from Marseilles, had traveled halfway around the world to come to the Bagdad Café. As apparently every hip French person knows, the little red restaurant with the pointy brown shingled roof is two culturally important things in one: It’s a shrine to the memory of Route 66 and it bears the name of an independent West German/American movie comedy that became a cult classic in Western Europe.

I had never seen or even heard of the movie. That was particularly embarrassing, since I was working for the Sunday entertainment section of the L.A. Times in 1987 when Bagdad Café came out. Nominated for an Academy Award, featuring Jack Palance, Bagdad Cafe is described by the International Movie Data Base as a film about “A lonely German woman” who “ends up in the most desolated motel on Earth and decides to make it brighter.”

When I got back to Pittsburgh I watched it. It wasn’t a typical Hollywood hack job, which made sense because it was made by a German, Percy Adlon. It was strange and slow at times, but also funny, sweet and magical. Most Americans would hate it because it involves no car chases or vampires. But it was easy to see why it was so beloved by the nutty French.

The movie was shot on location in Newberry Springs in the Sidewinder Café – what the current Bagdad Café was called in 1987. The original Bagdad Café was actually in the town of Bagdad itself, 50 miles farther east on Obsolete 66. It and the town both turned to dust in the late 1960s after Interstate 40 passed them by. But those trivial realities don’t matter to thousands of Western Europeans. They come to the desert by the busload to buy T-shirts, sweatshirts and caps at an oasis of American road culture that’s wallpapered to the ceiling with movie posters, banners, flags and thousands of letters and postcards scrawled in a dozen languages.

Bagdad Cafe

Andree Pruett and her staff were waiting for the French mob with a lunch of chicken, mashed potatoes and broccoli. Pruett, in her mid-60s, is the owner of the Bagdad Café. She and her late husband Harold moved from California’s biggest desert town – Los Angeles – to one of its tiniest, Newberry Springs. She came to write. He came to raise ostriches. But with no restaurant experience they bought the Sidewinder Café on a whim and a prayer in the mid 1990s, renamed it the Bagdad Cafe and figured out how to attract tourists from around the world.

Foreigners were Pruett’s main customers, especially the French. “They’re wonderful people,” she said, carrying six plates of food into the jammed dining room. “My doors are open because of them. Without the French I’d be almost out of business.”

About 75 percent of Bagdad Café’s pilgrims come from France and its former colonies, with 20 percent from the rest of the world and only 5 percent from the United States. The French, Italians and Portuguese flock to the cafe year round. Ten to 15 tour buses arrive each day between March and October, her peak season. Japanese come. Brazilians, also big fans of the Bagdad Café movie, usually arrive on motorcycles.

Watching Pruett in action was a seminar in the American work ethic Steinbeck worried was disappearing in 1960. On a lovely Sunday afternoon she was working her tail off, delivering food, running the register, helping people with T-shirt sizes, being pestered by me. She was the boss and she was doing most of the sweating.

Her small place was packed and noisy with the sound of French. Yet she was never rude or brusque to her employees or her customers, whose language was as alien to her as Greek. Pruett wasn’t getting rich, which was too bad because she deserved to be. She had built a world-famous small business in the middle of the desert. Literally and literally. How’s that for good old entrepreneurship and American knowhow, Mr. Steinbeck?

Pruett was unique, but then again she really wasn’t. She was one of more than 8 million American women who owned a small business. Unlike Steinbeck, whose contact with women was mostly limited to irritable waitresses and housewives, on my trip I met dozens of women who owned and operated their own restaurants, coffee shops, motels, bookstores and cinnamon bun shops. Women owned a third of American businesses in 2010, up dramatically since 2000, and their numbers were increasing. They were important job creators and a major source of growth for the economy, but most of them were plain nuts. You had to be nuts to start a small business because running one will drive you crazy.

The French mob belied all of their vicious but largely accurate ethnic stereotypes. They were well-behaved and enthusiastic guests. A mix of old and young, couples and groups, they waited patiently in the café dining room, then wolfed down their meals. If they didn’t like American road food, they didn’t show it.

As the French took turns posing with a genuine “California US Route 66” highway sign and tried on any piece of clothing with a “66” on it, I ate my free lunch with Sonia the Tour Guide. Sonia was the only French-English-speaking person within 40 miles. She explained that for Europeans the Bagdad Cafe/Route 66/Jack Kerouac/On the Road/Grapes of Wrath-thing is all part of the American myth.

Sonia the Tour Guide.

The Bagdad Café movie was a huge hit throughout Western Europe. Before her tour group arrived at the cafe, Sonia said, “They had a very special experience viewing the movie and hearing the soundtrack. For them it is part of the American Dream.”

Sonia was French Canadian, 30-ish, good-natured and a resident of L.A. She had been to the Bagdad Cafe 40 or 50 times, which must be the world record. The cafe was the first stop on a popular 10-day tour that began in Los Angeles, ended in San Francisco and included the Grand Canyon, Death Valley and Vegas. At the risk of being arrested, Sonia agreed to ethnically profile her clients. “The French were tough but they adapt. The Italians are honeymooners and are always arguing. The Portuguese are very conservative. I prefer the French people,” she admitted chauvinistically. “They are more open and flexible.”

In the Bagdad Café’s parking lot, as the French were reluctantly boarding their bus, Sonia the Tour Guide pointed to the derriere of my red RAV4 and announced something, in French, of course. All I could make out was the word “journaliste.“ A dozen men and women with cameras crunched down around the back of my car and began taking close-ups.

“What’s the big deal?” I asked Sonia. “Did you tell them I was a famous journalist or something?”

“Pas excitement, mon ami,” she would have said if she thought I understood four words of her native tongue.

It turned out the French are not just crazy about Jerry Lewis, Louis Armstrong and American road culture. They also have a thing about our license plates. In France, Sonia explained, automobile license plates are boring and all look the same – like someone’s Social Security number in the USA. To over-bureaucratized French people, America’s 50 colorful state license plates were like works of art and they collected photos of them.

As Sonia stepped onto her bus, which was bound for the Grand Canyon and then Las Vegas, a fresh load of French tourists pulled into the Bagdad Cafe. They weren’t coming for American road cuisine. They were coming for T-shirts and a chance to worship a part of our rich culture that will never die as long as the French stay French.

Old 66

East into the flat wide desert I zoomed. In my rearview mirror 20 more people from France were standing in the middle of the road taking pictures of each other. Except for a million scruffy low dirty-green bushes, a string of skeletal telephone poles and a few cinder mountains crawling low on the horizon, nothing but desert lay ahead. There were no cars to meet or pass. There weren’t even any old U.S. 66 signs. They had been swiped by souvenir hunters or taken down by the highway department decades ago.

I was officially riding the National Trails Highway, but every four miles or so a fading “Route 66” shield was painted in white on the cracked and rutted asphalt. Not one to miss a photo op or a chance to bend a traffic law in pursuit of journalism, I stopped in the middle of the road and parked. Imitating a French tourist, I used my smart phone to take a portrait of myself standing on a Route 66 logo. With my RAV4 over one shoulder and I-40 and its truck traffic over the other, it turned out to be the signature photo of my trip.

For 28 miles I rode rough old Route 66 as it paralleled I-40. Sometimes I went 75 mph, sometimes 40, when the asphalt was extra bumpy and crumbly. I had never seen a road surface so strangely eroded before – can asphalt rot in the sun? After 30 minutes, and without encountering another car, my joy ride back in time ended at a Dairy Queen/gas station at the I-40 exit for Ludlow, population 23. Ludlow’s motor courts, cafes and shade made it a popular rest stop until the late 1960s, when I-40 turned the town into one of Route 66’s more photogenic ghosts.

As the sun disappeared I got back on the interstate. Too bad it was getting dark. At Ludlow old Route 66 veered away to the south, curving across the desert floor for 70 miles while I-40 cut straight through the low Bristol Mountains to Arizona. It would have been interesting to track more of the lonely highway that Steinbeck and the rest of the country had to travel in 1960. Not only that, but Old 66 went past the town of Bagdad – or at least past the empty spot in the desert where it and the real Bagdad Café used to be. Before I-40 was built 10 miles north of it in 1972, Bagdad was more than an oasis for travelers. The jukebox and dance floor of the Bagdad Café reportedly made the town of 600 the hottest entertainment spot between Barstow and Needles.

A lot of cool and tacky things died along old Route 66 because the interstate came and changed everything. But Bagdad – once a prosperous mining and railroad town – didn’t even have a ghost. There was no more there there. The town, its buildings, roads, houses and palm trees had literally disappeared. All that was left was a small sign standing by the railroad tracks that read “Bagdad.”

I would have liked to have seen that sign for myself, even in the dark, but I was getting itchy. I had turned the far corner on my lap around the USA and I was headed for home. It was Sunday, Oct. 31, 2010. Sag Harbor was 7,265 miles behind me on the Steinbeck Highway. I had seven days, almost 4,000 miles and two more French people to go.

I was running two weeks ahead of Steinbeck’s pace. His search for the heart and soul of America, such as it was, effectively ended when he hit Seattle. Then he went on his West Coast vacation for a month. Other than driving his truck back to New York, his iconic journey was over by California. So almost was his book.

When he says goodbye to his past from the top of Fremont Peak, it is already Page 184 of a 246-page book. Most of the remaining quarter of Travels with Charley is padded with, excuse the French, a lot of finely written bullshit. A lovely but longish description of the desert and its secrets. An encounter with two coyotes he decides not to kill. A dumb conversation with Charley at a dubious campout in a canyon near the Continental Divide.

Steinbeck did only two important things between California and New York City, as far as his book was concerned. He celebrated Thanksgiving at a cattle ranch near Amarillo and he went to New Orleans to witness white mothers protesting outside their newly integrated public school. I was going to visit both places and then bolt for home, as he did.

Nov. 21, 2010 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Nov. 7, 2010

Nov. 7, 2010

In 2010 I retraced the 10,000-mile route John Steinbeck took in 1960 for ‘Charley’ and turned my trip into Dogging Steinbeck. As I drove I wrote nine Sunday travel articles for the Post-Gazette.

Oct. 31, 2010

But for obvious reasons, I prefer Grokipedia’s better trea…

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Oct. 24, 2010

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Oct. 17, 2010

Oct. 10, 2010

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No. 2 travel story co-starred Maine and New Hampshire. No. 3 was from Baraboo, Wisconsin.

Sept. 19, 2010

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Fifteen Septembers ago, after lots of library research, I set out to retrace the 10,000-mile road trip around the USA that John Steinbeck made in 1960 for what became his 1962 nonfiction best-seller Travels With Charley.

I left his former ocean-side house in Long Island on Sept. 23, 2010, exactly 50 years after he and his poodle companion Charley did in his pickup/camper Rocinante.

I wrote up everything I learned and did on my trip and put it in Dogging Steinbeck, which is a lot of fun if you aren’t afraid of a lot of cheap jokes, a libertarian spin and learning what a fictionalizing, lying bastard our hero John Steinbeck was.

Sorry for that outburst.

But it turned out, as I easily proved by simply practicing honest and dogged journalism in libraries and on the “Steinbeck Highway,” that the great Steinbeck and his publisher Viking Press pulled a fast one on the American public.

Much of Charley was fictionalized or written and slyly edited to mislead readers about how Steinbeck traveled (fast and not rough), whom he met (not many real people), whom he traveled with (his wife Elaine for more than half of his trip) and what he really thought was wrong with 1960 America (lots, but he didn’t say).

For the whole story — for the whole unflattering truth about Travels With Charley and how the Steinbeck scholars never bothered to do the research or tell us about it — you’ll have to buy Dogging Steinbeck. A work of “true nonfiction,” it recounts my road trip and proves that Charley never deserved to be classified as nonfiction, which it was for half a century until I came along and blew the truth whistle. For some video treats from my road trip, visit YouTube.

Meanwhile, here is a snippet of my trip that zooms in on Sept. 23, 2010, the morning I left Steinbeck’s former home on Long Island. For links to other Steinbeck items, go to my substack.

Chapter 5 – The Dogging Begins

… my trip demanded that I leave my name and my identity at home. I had to be peripatetic eyes and ears, a kind of moving gelatin plate. I could not sign hotel registers, meet people I knew, interview others, or even ask searching questions. Furthermore, two or more people disturb the ecologic complex of an area. I had to go alone and I had to be self-contained, a kind of casual turtle carrying his house on his back.

– Travels with Charley

Steinbeck Timeline

Friday, Sept. 23, 1960 – Sag Harbor, New York

Early in the morning John Steinbeck and his French poodle Charley leave his summer home in his overloaded pickup truck-camper combo Rocinante. He takes three ferries to New London, Connecticut, and drives north toward his son's boarding school in Deerfield, Massachusetts. His cargo includes spare parts for his truck, dozens of books, two rifles and a shotgun.

Sleeping with Yachts

The moon was almost down and the sun was almost up as the black sky turned pink and red above Sag Harbor’s Long Wharf. My RAV4 had been one of three vehicles parked all night on the pier but the only one with a crazy person sleeping inside it. A local scofflaw in a coffee shop had tipped me off that the wharf was a safe place – i.e., I wouldn't be spotted by the cops and run out of town as a vagrant.

I cracked my sunroof so I wouldn’t fog my windows and give myself away, but I still waited all night for the tap of the local gendarme on my window. I must have blended in well with the yachts. The blackout curtains my wife made worked perfectly. The inside of my car had been dark and comfortable – like a sleeping berth on a train.

Fortunately, sleeping in strange spots was a career trait for me. In the 1960s, on a college weekend at the Jersey Shore, I slept in a laundry room on top of a washer-dryer combination. In the 1970s I slept on a picnic table at a rest stop outside Elko, Nevada. I’ve slept on trains, buses, ferries, planes and train station benches across Europe. In 1976, on Good Friday night, after I was locked out of my smaller hotel, I slept under a wall heater on the floor of a small hotel in Oban, Scotland. A kind young night clerk with a brother living in Miami let me do that. Then he woke me up with a tray of tea and toast in the morning and told me I needed to eat quickly before his boss showed up.

No one gently woke me up with a bagel and coffee on the Sag Harbor pier. But sleeping in the back of a RAV4 on foam sofa cushions with my own pillows and blankets rated far above all those strange hard places.  Pretending to myself that I got five hours of actual sleep, I drove out to Steinbeck's house again to see how many other nuts were there.  I should have realized no real journalist would be crazy/brave/stupid enough to spend a month alone on the Steinbeck Highway, but I was worried about competition.

In Steinbeck’s driveway I was afraid I’d find a scene from Smokey and the Bandit, Part IV, starring Paul Theroux, William Least Heat-Moon, P.J. O’Rourke, Anderson Cooper and an international cast of travel writers, documentary crews and dozens of steinbeckians with dogs and 30-foot motor homes. But no humans were there, just noisy seagulls and tree frogs. I wasn't, but it looked like I was going to have Steinbeck’s ornery ghost and his old highway to myself for the next 10,000 miles.

I walked around the manicured yard like I had a constitutional right to trespass there, as journalists are wont to do. The little swimming pool shimmered and gurgled. Everything looked perfect for the 50^th anniversary. I took a photo of my RAV4 idling in Steinbeck’s gravel driveway, documented the mileage on my odometer (2,920) and headed for the first of three ferries that would deliver me to New London, Connecticut. Steinbeck had taken the same watery shortcut to the continent exactly 50 years before me, primarily to avoid driving through New York City. After my recent experience in Manhattan, I was extra glad he did.

The videos start at Steinbeck's house in Sag Harbor, Long Island, which he left on Sept. 23, 1960 with his standard French poodle Charley, and they end in Pittsburgh, where I lived

They are raw and largely unedited and, as you will hear, the wind in Flyover Country was a constant companion. I visited Steinbeck's houses and several places he stayed on his journey that no one had ever seen in video form before.

To learn what I found out about Steinbeck's iconic 1962 road book -- i.e., that it was full of fictions and fibs and was not the true account of his trip that it was purported to be for half a century -- read my book Dogging Steinbeck or go to my substack.

Extra deal: Here is a montage of photos from Sag Harbor to Maine, to Chicago to Seattle to Monterey to Texas to New Orleans and back to Pittsburgh -- 11,276 solo miles:

This intro to the little speech I gave in Amsterdam to honor Geert Mak was written by my pal Will Ray, the man behind the web site SteinbeckNow.com.

Bill Steigerwald (at left), the American journalist who wrote Dogging Steinbeck “to expose the truth about Travels with Charley,” accepted the invitation to address an audience in Holland that included Queen Máxima (right) when his friend Geert Mak (center), the Dutch journalist who wrote In America—Travels with John Steinbeck, was awarded the 2017 Prince Bernhard Cultural Prize.

“My appearance at the ceremony for Geert Mak on November 27 in Amsterdam was a total surprise to Mak,” says Steigerwald. “It was like the old-time TV show This Is Your Life.”

The text of the tribute to a friendship that started with Steinbeck is published here for the first time. — Will Ray

My Euro-friend Geert and I think alike

By Bill Steigerwald

Good afternoon. Thank you for inviting me.

Though Geert and I were born an ocean apart, and though he’s much smarter and far more accomplished than I’ll ever be, we have some things in common.

We’re both 70-year-old Baby Boomers.

We both started out life with lots of hair.

We both grew up to be journalists and writers.

And we both specialized in the kind of drive-by journalism that he used so masterfully in 2010 for what became his American history book, In America—Travels With John Steinbeck.

In America is a great mix of big-picture history, on-the-road journalism and progressive opinion. The Guardian newspaper called it “witty, personable and knowing”—and it is.

But perhaps the most impressive thing about it is that it reads like it was written by a lifelong American, not a longtime citizen of Europe.

As a way to show how big America is and how much it had changed in the previous 50 years, Geert came up with idea to follow the same route around the United States that John Steinbeck took in 1960 for his famous road book Travels with Charley.

It was a really good idea—and I had thought of it too.

That’s why early on the morning of September 23, 2010, exactly 50 years after Steinbeck left on his iconic 10,000-mile road trip, Geert and I each drove to the great novelist’s former house on Long Island, New York.

We didn’t bump into each other at Steinbeck’s place.

I left to catch the ferry to New England an hour or so before Geert and his wife Mietsie arrived in their rented Jeep Liberty.

For nearly two months, from Maine to California and down to New Orleans, the Maks and I traveled to the same places and even interviewed some of the same people.

For the record, as we journalists like to say, the Maks traveled like adults. They stayed in motels and drove responsibly.

I drove alone, as fast as a runaway teenager, often sleeping in my Toyota RAV4 in Walmart parking lots or beside the highway.

We never did meet on the road, but before Geert got out of New England he discovered that I was a day or so ahead of him.

He also saw I was posting a daily road blog on a newspaper website and slowly proving my case that Steinbeck had fictionalized large chunks of what was supposed to be a nonfiction travel book.

Geert, who already had his own suspicions about Steinbeck stretching the truth, realized he had to include me in his book.

Two years later, after a Dutch reader alerted me that my name was in In America, Geert and I were exchanging friendly transatlantic emails–in English.

We compared notes on Steinbeck and the road trip we shared.

I confessed to him that I was a lifelong libertarian, someone he’d call “a radical individualist.”

He confessed to me that he was “a typical latte-drinking, Citroën-driving, half-socialist European journalist and historian.”

Someday, we promised each other, we would meet in Holland over a Heineken and have a friendly debate about the two very different 2010 Americas we found along the same stretch of highway.
I never made it to Amsterdam–until now.

But in May of 2014, when Geert was in New York at a writers conference, he jumped on a plane and flew to Pittsburgh for three hours just to meet me and buy me lunch.

His visit was both an honor and a special treat.

He was even nicer in person than he was online. In addition to being a renowned European journalist and historian, he was clearly a great guy, a regular guy.

That’s a high compliment from an American, but I don’t think that’s news to many people in the Netherlands.

Hello, Geert. I’m a little bit over-dressed. But I’m here to buy you that beer.

As a bonus, I guess, at the end of this interview I have added my response to a 2024 collection of dull and essays by Steinbeck scholars who loyally defended the honor of their hero from my 2012 expose that Charley was not nonfiction or trustworthy and was full of fictions and lies.

— Bill Steigerwald

Challenging Experts: A Lone Journalist Confronts John Steinbeck

A Conversation with Bill Steigerwald, Author of ‘Dogging Steinbeck’

Joel J Miller

Jul 10, 2024

Bill Steigerwald is a veteran journalist whose career spans nearly four decades, working for the Los Angeles Times in the eighties, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in the nineties, and the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in the aughts. I worked with him briefly at the turn of the century and was delighted to reconnect with him recently here on Substack, where he shares from the deep archive of his work.

As a former syndicated columnist, Steigerwald’s work has appeared in newspapers across the country. He’s also written for such magazines as Reason, Men’s Journal, Family Circle, and Penthouse and has interviewed such newsmakers as George McGovern, Jane Jacobs, Tommy Lasorda, Milton Friedman, and Timothy Leary.

After retiring from daily journalism fifteen years ago, Steigerwald began writing books. In 2017, he published 30 Days a Black Man: The Forgotten Story That Exposed the Jim Crow South, which relates Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter Ray Sprigle’s 1948 undercover reporting in the Deep South. Kirkus praised it as “a fascinating account of an anti-Jim Crow muckraking adventure.”

As great as that book is, however, I wanted to ask Steigerwald about John Steinbeck’s beloved bestselling 1962 memoir Travels with Charley—a book that, as I alluded to in my review, stretches the definition of nonfiction. In the fall of 2010, Steigerwald traveled 11,276 miles reconstructing Steinbeck’s legendary trip, painstakingly showing where Charley veered off course. Steinbeck’s flexible allegiance to the facts is now widely recognized in part because of investigative reporting by Steigerwald, shared in his 2012 exposé, Dogging Steinbeck.

Beyond Steinbeck or Travels with Charley, Steigerwald’s story also highlights, as this conversation reveals, the challenge of challenging experts in any field.

What qualifies you to take on Steinbeck and the Steinbeck scholars?

Nothing qualified me to take on the scholars—nothing except my innate skepticism of experts and my willingness, at age 63, to drive 11,276 miles around the country by myself, sleep in my RAV4 in Walmart parking lots, and interview a hundred strangers in pursuit of the true truth about Travels With Charley. 

Taking on the great Steinbeck and challenging the existing narrative about his iconic book was no big deal. I was used to being an outsider, whether it was when covering a KKK cross-burning or attending a conference of public transit officials. The process of reporting and researching Steinbeck’s travels and book was no different from what I had done in a hundred big Sunday newspaper features, just a lot bigger and on my own dime.

Naturally, the first people I turned to for help were the experts, the brilliant scholars who made up what I would someday collectively disrespect in good fun as the West Coast Steinbeck Studies Industrial Complex. As I wrote in Dogging Steinbeck, when I attended the annual Steinbeck Festival in Salinas, California, in August of 2010, I found myself an outsider among the 150 Steinbeck experts, Steinbeck worshippers, Steinbeck collectors, and Charley nuts in attendance. And I felt it.

Compared to the amateur and professional Steinbeckies, I knew nothing about their hero or the literary nuances of his many important and famous works. But by then, just seven weeks before the start of my road trip, I knew a few things they didn’t. In an attempt to accurately track Steinbeck’s trail, I had put together a fairly detailed time-and-place line of his actual Travels with Charley route.

For example, I knew where Steinbeck slept on October 12, 1960.

That piece of trivia wasn’t exactly a reason to alert the Pulitzer Prize committee. But I also already knew there were some yawning discrepancies between what Steinbeck wrote in his nonfiction book and what he actually did or did not do on his trip. At times during the festival it was hard to keep from screaming out that Emperor Steinbeck didn’t have on all of his nonfiction clothes.

I suddenly realized: I know much more about Steinbeck’s road trip than they do. It was a terrifying feeling. For the first time in my life, I was the expert in something, albeit a very minor, esoteric, inside-baseball something no one else cared about. In August of 2010, I had already become the global authority on John Steinbeck’s road trip, completely by accident. And I still hadn’t read the first draft of Travels with Charley or driven a single mile down the Old Steinbeck Highway.

How did you get into journalism? What drew you to the field and kept you there?

It was my parents’ fault. I had no choice but to become a journalist and op-ed columnist—for genetic and environmental reasons. My Canadian mother was a journalism major at Pitt in the late 1930s who thought FDR was a god. My father was a witty, sarcastic and super-opinionated conservative Republican who worshiped Count Basie and William F. Buckley Jr. and subscribed to Human Events. 

Our house on the suburban frontier of Pittsburgh was saturated with news and opinion. I and my younger brothers John and Paul, who would have long careers as prominent Pittsburgh sports broadcasters, grew up surrounded by the important print and electronic media of the Eisenhower–JFK era.

Two Pittsburgh daily papers were delivered to our house by paperboys like me. My father, a modestly successful stockbroker, brought the Wall Street Journal and the New York Daily News home from work every day. Time, Newsweek, Look, Life, Sports Illustrated, the Sporting News, and National Review arrived constantly by mail. For a decade a new Landmark nonfiction book for kids about Ben Franklin or the Pony Express arrived every month, slowly turning me into a future history major. 

I went to Villanova, graduated in 1969 without any honors, got married, had two kids and worked in Pittsburgh for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco as a sales rep. Wanting to add my then-conservative opinions to the liberal mediasphere of the time, in 1973 I went off to get a master’s in journalism at Penn State, where I seemed to be the only non-liberal student or professor.

When my marriage blew up, I moved to Cincinnati, got a job as a writer/editor at a 5,000-circulation suburban paper for 75 bucks a week and learned how to be a good community journalist. I also learned how to be a bartender so I could afford a car and apartment. 

In 1977, at age 29, I moved to Los Angeles and landed a job at CBS Television in its docudrama department. I was a fact-checker whose job it was to make sure that made-for-TV movies about real people and real events were true enough to be billed as true stories. The job was perfect for me, but CBS was interested in ratings, not historical truth. 

After six months, I quit over the network’s heavy fictionalizing of what it promoted as the “true story” of Dr. Mudd, the country doctor who was imprisoned after treating John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg after he shot Lincoln. (Dr. Mudd, played with maximum sympathy by Dennis Weaver, was portrayed as a twentieth-century liberal punished for doing a good deed for a stranger; he was actually Booth’s pal, a slave owner, and involved in the assassination plot.) 

Luckily, I soon slipped in a side door at the mighty Los Angeles Times and became a copy editor, freelancer and letters editor in its popular Calendar entertainment section. The LA Times was then one of the richest, most powerful, and relevant newspapers in the U.S. Its circulation was 1.2 million or so in the 1980s and it had bureaus around the world and in DC. Now its circulation is less than 200,000.

When I returned to my hometown of Pittsburgh in 1989, I worked at the liberal Democrat Post-Gazette in the 1990s and the conservative/libertarian Tribune-Review in the 2000s. I did hundreds of weekly Q&As with smart and famous people like John Kenneth Galbraith, Thomas Sowell, Ted Sorensen, and Nikita Khrushchev’s rocket-man son, Sergei. I also wrote more than a thousand weekly op-ed pieces and columns on magazines.

I had a long pleasure cruise in journalism in the last Golden Age of Print. I had adventures only journalists could: A trip to Lima, Peru, to ride a freight train into the Andes. Chasing tornadoes for a week at a time in Kansas—twice. Flying through Hurricane Bonnie in 1998 at 10,000 feet and then waking up in her eye when she came ashore in North Carolina.

I watched a dozen movies being made. I spent quality time with or interviewed too many famous, important or smart people to recount—from actor Jimmy Stewart and Charles Bukowski to Tommy Lasorda and Milton Friedman. 

I shook hands with Hillary Clinton and Karl Rove when neither knew I was a working journalist. I ate a bag lunch with the historic Jane Jacobs. I helped elderly John Kenneth Galbraith down a flight of stairs and was helped on with my raincoat by William F. Buckley Jr. In Beverly Hills, when I interviewed Timothy Leary on his front lawn, he gave me drugs—two aspirin.

I stayed in journalism because every workday was enjoyable, most of my colleagues were great people and 99 percent of the time I was able to write the stories I wanted and say the libertarian things I wanted to say. I always tried my best to make the newspapers I worked for more interesting, entertaining, and ideologically balanced. I figure I wrote 2 or 3 million words under my byline by the time I quit newspapers in 2009. I’m still waiting for my Pulitzer, which I would love to be able to refuse.

Describe your investigative process when it came to uncovering the facts in the Steinbeck story.

As I said in Dogging Steinbeck, I thought writing a book about America hooked around Steinbeck’s trip would not be complicated or controversial. I figured I’d simply retrace the trail he blazed as faithfully as possible, as a journalist, using Travels with Charley as my guide, map, and timeline. But when I reread the book I quickly learned Charley made a lousy map.

Though it was a nonfiction book filled with real places, real people and real events, it was often vague and confusing about where Steinbeck really was on any given date. It was not a travelogue, not a serious work of journalism and, as I soon realized, it was not an accurate, full, or reliable account of his actual road trip.

Since Steinbeck, who died in 1968, left no notes, no journal, and no expense records from the road, I had a lot of work to do. I plotted every town and highway he mentioned in Travels with Charley on a 1962 road atlas. I read the major Steinbeck biographies. I called up scholars and archivists. 

In the spring of 2010 I traveled to central California’s magnificent Monterey Peninsula—a.k.a. “Steinbeck Country”—to do research at the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas and scout old Steinbeck haunts like Cannery Row. I visited libraries at Stanford and San Jose State, looking for clues of time and place in letters he wrote from the road and in old newspaper articles.

In August I went to the Mudd Library at Princeton and the Morgan Library in New York City, where I spent three days reading the cursive scrawl of Steinbeck’s first draft to see how it differed from the published book.

Then on September 23 I left Steinbeck’s seaside house in Sag Harbor exactly 50 years after he set out on his trip with Charley. For the next six weeks I retraced Steinbeck’s route as closely as possible, trying to imagine what Steinbeck might have seen, going where he stayed overnight and interviewing people who met him.

Give us the backstory on your decision to retrace Steinbeck’s journey.

Simple and innocent. In 2009 I was looking for a book to write and somehow I stumbled on the fact that the fall of 2010 would be the fiftieth anniversary of Steinbeck’s road trip. I figured retracing his route as faithfully as possible would make a good book. It’d be a clever way to see how much America had changed since Steinbeck saw a thin slice of it during the Nixon–JFK presidential race in 1960. 

I picked out an agent in New York City, Peter Rubie, because he was an author, a jazz guitarist, and a former Fleet Street newspaper guy from London. I successfully pitched him with an email and wrote a good book proposal for my idea that he pitched to dozens of book editors. We went 0 for 30-something. I was a nobody. No one cared about Steinbeck anymore. No book editors embraced the idea of retracing his Travels With Charley trail, even though over in the Netherlands the great Dutch intellectual and newspaper editor Geert Mak was preparing to retrace it for what would become his bestseller, In America: Travels With John Steinbeck.

Screw ’em all, I decided. I’ll do the trip and self-publish the book on Amazon. Maybe I’ll get lucky and be abducted by aliens. In any case, I had invested too much in the idea. I leased a new RAV4 after making sure I could sleep in the back on a mattress. My wife made blackout curtains that proved to be priceless in brilliantly lighted Walmart parking lots from Maine to Washington state. I bought a video camera, a new smart phone, packed a dozen Professional Reporter’s Notebooks and hit the road to Sag Harbor—doglessly. 

How does reality square with the impression Steinbeck desired to make? What were the biggest whoppers he told?

Travels With Charley was marketed, sold, and reviewed as a nonfiction account of Steinbeck’s road trip in search of America. It hit No. 1 in the New York Times’s nonfiction best-seller list. But the editors slyly edited the first draft of the book. They made it appear that one of America’s greatest authors had traveled alone, traveled rough and traveled slow for 10,000 miles, camping out under the stars often as he searched for the America and Americans he had lost touch with. 

But he didn’t do any of those things on his 75 day road trip. 

In fact, he traveled with his wife Elaine more than half the time. The couple spent an entire month together on the West Coast. As they drove from Seattle to San Francisco in the camper truck, they moved slowly through Redwood Country and stayed at fancy resorts. After that they stayed for about two weeks at the Steinbeck family’s seaside cottage in beautiful Pacific Grove.

As for camping out under the stars, Steinbeck may have done it a few times. But mostly he slept in luxurious private homes in Maine and Texas, modern motels and the finest old hotels in Chicago and San Francisco. And when he drove alone from Maine to Chicago, from Chicago to Seattle, from Monterey to Texas and from New Orleans back to his home in New York, he didn’t stop to meet his fellow Americans. He drove as fast as he could. 

The Travels with Charley myth is the book’s biggest whopper. Steinbeck’s first draft revealed much more of his actual trip, including a handful of embarrassingly dull West Coast scenes starring Elaine. But to preserve the romantic theme of a man traveling with his dog, Viking’s smart editors cut her out of the book and replaced her with the book’s star character—Charley.

Travels with Charley is riddled with little whoppers, fictions and rearrangements of time and place that don’t matter to anyone and don’t disqualify it as a work of nonfiction. But Steinbeck clearly made up a parade of suspiciously cardboard characters he said he met. 

The least believable one was the itinerant Shakespearean actor he said he befriended while camping out in the middle of the endless wheat fields of Alice, North Dakota. Actually, as he betrayed in a letter he wrote to Elaine, that night he was taking a hot bath in a motel in Beach, North Dakota. Steinbeck also left out some interesting stuff he did on his actual trip, including his overnight visit with his pen pal Adlai Stevenson near Chicago, his stay at a shiny modern motel in Seattle and his five-day layover in San Francisco with his old friends.

In some ways this feels like a battle of disciplines, the novelist vs. the journalist. Why should we care that Steinbeck fudged the story? Isn’t that what novelists do?

It is discipline vs. discipline. Novelists play around with facts. Journalists—in theory—stick to them, protect them, and even worship them. At one point, before I published Dogging Steinbeck, I wrote in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that what Steinbeck did to fictionalize Charley was no big deal: 

Travels with Charley has always been classified as a work of nonfiction, but no one ever claimed it was a “Frontline” documentary. Does it really matter if Steinbeck made up a lot of stuff he didn’t do on his trip or left out a lot of stuff he did do? Should we care that Charley could never be certified as “nonfiction” today. . . ?

All nonfiction is part fiction, and vice versa. It’s not like Steinbeck wrote a phony Holocaust memoir that sullies the memories and souls of millions of victims. . . . It doesn’t matter if it’s not the true or full or honest story of Steinbeck’s quixotic road trip. It was never meant to be. It’s a metaphor, a work of art, not a AAA travelogue. 

But for my book I did a 180. I said that at first I had been satisfied merely exposing Steinbeck’s trickery and deceit. I had been a literary detective. I didn’t feel qualified to be the prosecutor or the judge. That was a job for people with PhDs in literature. “My work is done,” I wrote. “I’ll let the scholars sort out whether Steinbeck’s ghost deserves to be hauled on to Oprah’s stage to defend himself for his 50-year-old crimes against nonfiction.”

Boy, was I naïve. I actually thought Steinbeck scholars would be disappointed to learn that a great American author had been caught in a major lie. They weren’t. I thought they’d care. They didn’t. I thought they’d thank me for my hard work, or maybe give me an honorary degree in something. Hah.

In a few weeks I returned to my senses. I clearly wasn’t thinking straight when I wrote that it didn’t really matter what Steinbeck and Viking Press had done to twist and hide the truth. Of course it mattered. I was a journalist. Finding out the truth about Travels with Charley—or anything else—did matter to me. It had been my career to seek truth and report facts. Truth, big or small, should always matter to any honest journalist, no matter what their politics or biases were.

The New York Times covered your corrective and Reason magazine featured an article by you on the subject. How has your take on Steinbeck’s story been received overall and by the specialists?

Wikipedia’s Travels With Charley citation mentions my corrective, though it underplays the extent to which it is fictionalized. Whenever I see someone writing about the book now, they usually mention that its veracity has been seriously sullied by somebody or other and it is now considered a work of fiction. 

My fellow journalists generally support me. They, the New York Times editorial page, and the great travel writer Paul Theroux think what Steinbeck did was a literary crime—“something of a fraud,” I like to say. They think he should be called out and shamed for what he did. Steinbeck, who was a good novelist and a lousy journalist, isn’t entirely to blame. He’s guilty for going along with Viking’s nonfiction packaging. But it was the editors and Viking’s marketers who reinforced the Charley myth and perpetuated it for half a century until I came along and made them fess up.

The Steinbeck scholars think I was nuts and unfair to beat up a novelist like Steinbeck for fudging around with reality. They think I made a big nitpicking deal out of the obvious. Of course he was going to throw a bunch of fiction into Charley, they say. He was a novelist, for Pete’s sake. We knew it all along. We just didn’t want to share it with the rest of the world.

It’s funny what the Steinbeck scholars have finally done in reaction to my troublemaking. They collected an all-star team of experts and had them write essays for a book that’s coming out in December from Alabama University Press. Called Steinbeck’s Uneasy America: Rereading Travels With Charley, it is sure to be stuffed with excuses and new genres like “fictive travelogue” for what Steinbeck did to reality. 

What separates what you did from the “do your own research” approach common on social media?

Nothing really. Journalists—good and honest ones—do their own research all the time. That’s their job. I used to say that a good journalist has to know how to invade specialized professions or subcultures, figure out what’s going on by asking questions and observing, and then write up an interesting (and entertaining) story explaining everything so their mother could understand it. 

Anyone who’s curious and persistent can practice good journalism. No occupational license required. No special college degrees. That was always true. But the Internet has shattered the legacy media’s monopoly on news and information into a million pieces and democratized journalism. Bloggers, doctors, and comedians like Joe Rogan do good journalism now.

As journalistic outlets fold and recede, how can those of us who value the work done by journalists ensure that we don’t entirely lose the benefits of the practice?

Don’t trust and verify is good advice for the future. Journalism is more diverse and untrustworthy than ever, and that’s saying something. But I bet the market will figure out how to provide the reliable reality-based information we need and want. Rich people, Big Tech, and wealthy institutions like universities will publish it. Maybe print will make a comeback like vinyl. Maybe we’ll see the return of pamphlets.

People worry about AI replacing or destroying journalism. But I bet it will turn out to be a great tool for journalism. It’ll require sharp editors. But think how many writers and reporters will be saved from doing tedious grunt work like rewriting press releases and freed up for more important stories.

Final question: You can invite any three authors for a lengthy meal. Neither time period nor language is an obstacle. Who do you pick, why, and how does the conversation go?

Frédéric Bastiat, Ambrose Bierce, and Steinbeck. Bastiat is my great hero—a superior journalist and propagandist of freedom who taught the principles and fallacies of economics to the public in an entertaining way. I’d ask him what he thinks about the present and future of America. I’d ask Bierce, America’s cleverest journalist, to update his Devil’s Dictionary. As for Steinbeck, I’d ask him if he is sorry for faking so much of his Charley trip, tell him I don’t hate him for changing my life, and assure him I am only kidding when I call him “a lying bastard.”

Update:

September 2025

The scholars who contributed to Steinbeck’s Uneasy America: Rereading Travels With Charley had their fun, using me as their helpless pinata. Barely identifying me, misrepresenting what I wrote in Dogging Steinbeck, most of them proved they are humorless and were too lazy to read my book.

So, in the spirit of newspaper columnists everywhere, I wrote this new chapter to defend myself:

26 -- Revenge of the scholars

Spring 2025

In late 2024 the University of Alabama Press published Steinbeck’s Uneasy America: Rereading Travels with Charley, a collection of deeply academic and embarrassingly worshipful essays written by 14 top Steinbeck scholars.

Though the scholars and their editors will never admit it, their book was a much belated response to the public shaming I gave them in the New York Times and other media places in 2011 for collectively failing – for half a century – to question the veracity of Travels with Charley.

Scholars don’t like to be shamed for their lazy “scholaring” – especially by outsiders without the proper academic credentials.

In Steinbeck’s Uneasy America, they got their revenge on me. It’s my duty and pleasure to defend myself from the scholars’ smug, ignorant and often petty attacks – and to assert that I am not a mean, angry and narrow-minded rightwing newspaperman who set out to bring Steinbeck down and treated the great author unfairly.

***

My troublemaking journalism and my book Dogging Steinbeck may have been the reason Steinbeck’s Uneasy America was written, but my name pops up only about a dozen times in various essays. I’m identified only as a journalist – a generic newspaper reporter from nowhere with no credentials and no past.

No essayist bothered to point out that I was formerly a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist and history book author who worked 30 years at the Los Angeles Times and two Pittsburgh daily papers.

No essayist gave me credit for discovering dozens of things that Steinbeck scholars did not know about Steinbeck’s actual trip.

And if anyone gave me props for being the guy who forced Charley’s publisher to finally change the book’s introduction in 2012 to warn readers they were about to read a work of fiction, not nonfiction, I didn’t spot it in the academic fog.

Only one essayist, professor Susan Shillinglaw, praised me for doing the basic research in 2010 that they had never done in 50 years – going to the Morgan Library in New York City and reading the original draft of Charley to see how it differed from the published book.

In Steinbeck’s Uneasy America I was usually brought on stage for a few seconds and mocked as being the old-school journalist who was hung up on facts and “facticity.” I was the naive truth-seeker who didn’t understand that we are living in a post-truth age where nonfiction and fiction books are interchangeable, where truth is always unknowable.

In their essays the scholars work overtime thinking up literary explanations and excuses for Steinbeck’s fictionalizing and lying. They detected subtle double and triple meanings hidden in Charley’s text. They spotted metaphors, symbols and obscure literary references no civilians could ever see.

Unfortunately, they were so busy worshipping Steinbeck’s “multi-layered” writing that they never got around to critiquing him and his publisher Viking Press for their most serious and most obvious ethical shortcoming – deliberately misleading millions of unwitting readers for 50 years by marketing and selling Charley as a true and honest account.

But to the scholars their hero hadn’t committed a form of literary fraud with his fictionalizing and outright lies. He was a great novelist who was quietly practicing a newish genre called “autofiction” that allowed the author to invent and embellish and dramatize the real world he pretended to depict.

The scholars’ top hitman, and top embarrassment, was a Western Carolina University English professor named Brian Railsback. He spent his first nine pages praising Steinbeck’s career-long quest for “unblemished truth” in his great novels and explaining why Steinbeck knew he’d never find it in our subjective universe. Then he devoted almost two pages to cherry-picking short, out-of-context quotes from Dogging Steinbeck.

For instance, when I wrote in my introduction that “My book is subjective as hell. But it’s entirely nonfiction,” I thought I was making a little joke that college professors, especially English ones, would get. But Railsback said I was starting my expedition by committing “a fatal Steinbeckian error -- a series of preconceptions.” I have no idea what Railsback was talking about, but since he has a Ph.D. in something, I’ll take his word for it.

Railsback obviously never read much of my book. Otherwise, he would never have written so many inaccurate or unfair things about why I decided to follow Steinbeck’s Charley route, how Steinbeck and I each traveled or what I actually wrote in plain English.

He intimated, in a confused and unfounded way, that I preferred traveling in comfort on interstates and I “somehow missed how Steinbeck wanted to work, moving slowly on the backroads, keen to see and hear what was going on around him.”

First of all, as is made clear throughout this book, I retraced Steinbeck’s exact route as faithfully as possible in 2010. Interstates barely existed in 1960. I drove where he drove exactly 50 years before me. Railsback should be ashamed by how little he still knows about Steinbeck’s actual trip and why it was nothing like the Travels with Charley Myth that he still believes.

Steinbeck did not travel slowly on the “backroads” and linger to talk to the common people. When he was alone, he drove like a race car driver on the major two-lane U.S. highways between Chicago and Seattle, between Monterey and Texas and from New Orleans to New York City. He mostly slept in the best resorts and hotels, usually with his wife Elaine. In 75 days away from home, he rarely camped out alone.

Railsback also clearly has no idea what a libertarian is. He wrote, referring to me, that “he is a fan of William F. Buckley Jr. and Barry Goldwater.” Yeah, as I clearly wrote, I was. In 1964. So was “Goldwater Girl” Hillary Clinton. When we were 17. But not now, which would have been clear to any honest or careful reader or someone who knew anything about politics.

Among his other idiotic political statements – and wild guesses -- was that I was fired up to take down Steinbeck because he was “a New Deal Democrat who knew and admired the likes of FDR, Adlai Stevenson, and LBJ.”

That was a total misrepresentation. Simplistic, sloppy BS. It was also taken completely out context – context like this, which he must not have read a few paragraphs later:

By today’s definitions, Steinbeck was a ball of political contradictions. He was a highly partisan FDR big-government Democrat who went ape for Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s and became a White House-sleepover friend of LBJ and frequent weekend guest at Camp David. Like most of his New Deal generation, he had a naïve trust in the federal government to solve massive social and economic problems.

But Steinbeck was never close to being the true-believing commie or socialist both his rightwing enemies and leftwing friends liked to claim he was. He was what we call today “a Cold War liberal.” He supported labor unions, the civil rights movement and LBJ’s war on poverty. He was also a staunch anti-communist who believed in containing the Soviet Union and what then was so impolitely called “Red China.”

He was a sincere patriot, which, along with becoming too friendly with LBJ, may have blinded him to the folly of Vietnam and the fallacy of the Domino Theory. He was a loud public hawk on Vietnam in its early stages but became a quiet dove when he realized the war was unwinnable. Intolerant of anti-war protesters, whom he thought were stupid and cowardly, he despised hippies and the ‘60s youth culture….

Despite our differences, I had grown to like the grouchy, contradictory guy. Underneath his New Yorker magazine limousine liberalism, he hid an admirable libertarian streak. He wrote fine paeans to individualism, understood the importance of private property rights and hated bureaucrats and government bullying. Plus, he didn’t moralize about things like prostitution. He treated prostitutes kindly in his books and thought they provided a service to the community, which of course they do.

Railsback also falsely insinuated that I was disappointed at the end of my trip, that I set out on my travels intending to shock the Steinbeck community, that I really expected to get an honorary degree from Steinbeck scholars for my discoveries (another missed joke).

Based on his political cheap shots, his skill at misreading, missing or unfairly representing what I said or meant, and his inability to understand jokes, hyperbole or sarcasm, Railsback proved that he read very little of Dogging Steinbeck. Either that, or he didn’t comprehend what he read. Or he’s a deliberately dishonest man.

***

Meanwhile, if the other scholars who wrote and edited Steinbeck’s Uneasy America had actually taken the time to read Dogging Steinbeck, they also might have realized that it’s much more than a 270-page attack on Steinbeck’s fictionalizing.

It is the definitive record, so far, of Steinbeck’s actual Charley road trip. Along with a lot of 1960s history and my personal drive-by commentary, it contains a running discussion of the complex interplay of fact, fiction, subjectivity and truth in works of nonfiction.

Plus, though it is obviously subjective and focused on a narrow slice of the United States, it is a sharp, 11,276-mile snapshot of Flyover America and its people taken by a working journalist in the fall of 2010.

My Charley trip was real drive-by journalism, a serious book project, not a lark or an excuse to drive around the country by myself for six weeks. I repeatedly made it clear throughout that I was having great fun chasing Steinbeck’s ghost – and, yes, fact-checking him. Along the way, I made scores of cheap jokes, many at my own expense.

I tried to write Dogging Steinbeck like a gigantic Sunday feature story -- entertaining, informative and readable. Half literary expose, half American road book, it was aimed at ordinary readers, not Steinbeck lovers, not dog lovers and definitely not Steinbeck scholars or academics.

I’m tough on Steinbeck and his book, but I am fair. I mock him or criticize him when he deserves it, but I also said many nice things about him, his great writing and even his partisan politics.

Sorry if I sounded angry and “hectoring” to the scholars, who apparently as a class are better at detecting hidden metaphors than spotting jokes or sarcasm. But after racking up a couple million words under my byline, I write with the edge and wise-ass tone of a newspaper op-ed page columnist, not an English professor.

That’s why most good journalists like David Cay Johnston and people like Paul Theroux and Brian Lamb of C-SPAN appreciated or plugged my book, even though few of them agreed with my libertarian political spin.

Railsback and a couple of academics took me to task for seeking publicity from PBS when I was on the road and slimed me for seeking mainstream media attention for my future book. Apparently, promoting your own book – which every profit-seeking publisher demands you do yourself as part of your publishing deal -- is a mortal sin in their Ivory Towered world, where professors are compensated for writing dull books that don’t matter it they’re ever read.

Also, as I traveled in 2010 I wrote a daily road blog for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s web site. I also filed eight Sunday travel pieces from the road for the paper, whose editors had kindly advanced me $1,500 for my expenses. The P-G wanted as much publicity for my expedition as I did.

Finally, nowhere in Steinbeck’s Uneasy America’s collection of mostly dull, inside-Steinbeck essays is there anything like the fair-minded and balanced treatment I was given in 2021 by Steinbeck scholar emeritus Robert DeMott.

Professor DeMott was commissioned by the editors of Steinbeck Review to review my brief guidebook to Steinbeck’s actual road trip, Chasing Steinbeck’s Ghost: The Timeline for John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley Road Trip. In the fall issue he took the opportunity to address the impact and importance of this book. (Steinbeck Review’s editors, despite several requests by me since 2013, have still never deemed Dogging Steinbeck worthy of a serious review.)

Here is some of what DeMott wrote:

Steigerwald had a brilliant idea in following Steinbeck’s trail and in trying to connect the popular literary text with the physical waypoints of the author’s journey. Having tried unsuccessfully for years on my annual Montana fly fishing trip to locate the place Steinbeck claimed to have spent the night in​ or near Livingston (the exact spot remains a mystery to Steigerwald as well),​ I applaud his overall pluck, endurance, sleuthing efforts, and the dogged​ detective work involved in tracing the elder writer’s route.

Credit should be​ given where credit belongs, for Steigerwald’s was an endeavor no one else​ thought to undertake, and in the process he located (and photographed) many of the physical places that Steinbeck visited on his extended U.S. drive-about, among them Eleanor Brace’s spectacular house in Deer Isle, Maine, the​ Westgate Motel in Beach, North Dakota, and wife Elaine’s former brother-​in-law’s cattle ranch near Clarendon, Texas.

Without Steigerwald’s sleuthing,​ who would have known of these venues? Further, we might never have discovered how many of the events, places, and persons Steinbeck might have​ made up after the fact without Steigerwald’s determined snooping.​

But Dogging Steinbeck has become one of our most maligned Steinbeck-​related books in recent years, a lightning rod for all manner of personal, political, and lit-crit dustups, and has been a book many informed readers have loved to hate. The reason, I think, is the author’s self-important hectoring tone, his finger-wagging criticism, his beleaguered sense of being duped, and his libertarian refusal to bow to any kind of elitist pretensions.

Instead of providing a biographical and literary context for understanding Steinbeck’s wildly popular but frequently flawed and clunky book, Steigerwald, a sort of Sean Hannity of culture reporters, leaped to the offensive. He has the bulldog tenacity, bristling ego, single-minded purpose, and occasional mean streak that makes such commentators formidable opponents. His presence cannot be denied and refuses to go away, which of course has put many well-meaning commentators on the defensive.

I thought of suing DeMott for calling me “a sort of Sean Hannity of culture reporters” – joke!, professors. Joke! But I forgave him and thanked him in an email for his fine and fair review – and for his wise even-handedness.

I just wish that when he wrote the foreword for Steinbeck’s Uneasy America he had thought to repeat some of those nice things he had said in Steinbeck Review about my contribution to Steinbeck scholarship.

-- Bill Steigerwald, September 2025

To Livingston, I Presumed

He had never visited Montana before, but Steinbeck chose the right place for the first of his two sleepovers in the state. After leaving the Custer battlefield site, he worked his way west to Livingston, which is stretched along Old Highway 10 on the bank of the Yellowstone River. He had covered about 400 miles on Day 4 of his Seattle Sprint. Crossing the sweeping plains of eastern Montana and slowly climbing into the shadow of the Rockies, he fell in love with Montana at first sight, as most normal people can’t help but do. Montana’s spectacular natural beauty put a spell on him. As he would famously write in Charley, “Of all the states it is my favorite and my love.”

Steinbeck confessed his new love to his wife Elaine in a letter from Livingston that night. Though he told her he was at a trailer park “outside of Bozeman,” he was almost certainly in Livingston. It’s only 27 miles east of Bozeman and the towns are separated by the desolate and motel-less Bozeman Pass, which nears 6,000 feet as it cuts through the Gallatin and Bridger mountains.

Adding the long day’s events to the letter he had written the night before but had not mailed yet, Steinbeck gushed over Montana’s “grandeur.” He described “the little square burnt-up men” he saw in the bars, mentioned his Little Big Horn side trip and told his wife about the old-fashioned stockman’s hat he bought in Billings to replace his naval cap, which he said was attracting too much attention so far from the sea. It was very cold and Steinbeck said there was snow in the Rockies and on the “great snowy mountain beside me.” He was heading toward Idaho in the morning, he said, but didn’t think he’d make it. Montana was not only huge. It was so beautiful he drove slower than usual so he could gawk at it.

As Steinbeck did 50 years earlier, I got a stunning dose of what Montana was most famous for on my relaxed drive from Billings to Livingston on I-90: Gigantic sky, gigantic land, jagged mountain ranges running every which way, an endless sunset and not enough humans to form a Wednesday night basketball league.

With a population of almost 1 million, Montana has 300,000 more people today than when Steinbeck blew through it. Huge and rural and wild, it’s still 99 percent empty. Like so many of the states on the Steinbeck Highway, it’s not even close to being a microcosm of America. In 2010 it was 90 percent Caucasian with twice as many Native Americans as Latinos and more Asians than blacks. It had so few blacks – 4,000 in the whole state – that Butte, a city of 34,000, had fewer African Americans than registered sex offenders.

Montana’s economy is powered by minerals, cattle, wheat and millions of visitors who are lured by a magnificent outdoor rec room that is inhumanely cold in winter and catches fire every summer. Despite its newfound oil and gas riches, the presence of mega-landlord Ted Turner and a trickle of celebrity immigrants from Hollywood, Montana is shockingly poor – the 6^th poorest state in terms of median family income.

In the fall of 2010, its unemployment rate was about 2 percentage points lower than the national average of 9.5. Oil and gas development was nothing like North Dakota’s fracking bonanza. And there were no six-figure corporate jobs open in Round Up or Big Timber. Still, Montana was a cheap place to live and housing could be laughably affordable if you didn’t want to own your own mountain.

When I pulled into Livingston’s Yellowstone Inn it was almost dark. I knew my way around the artsy tourist town, which is on the (relative) doorstep of Yellowstone Park and is a popular base camp for fishing and hunting expeditions. I’d been to Livingston half a dozen times before. I’m not a hunter, hiker, kayaker or fly-fisherman. But I’ve seen a fair amount of the state’s “grandeur” and its neighborly people on vacations at my wife’s family’s log cabin in the Lewis & Clark National Forest north of Bozeman.

I had also seen most of Montana’s collection of livable small cities. Missoula was a hip college town. Great Falls, where my wife grew up, and Billings, the biggest city in the state with 104,000 people, were dustier and working class. Bozeman was part Missoula/part outdoor-recreation Mecca. Butte was an ex-copper boomtown that belonged Back East in the Rust Belt. Lewistown was a small jewel set among several mountain ranges in the dead center of the state.

Helena, the capital, I had only seen once, but I imagined it had too many politicians, bureaucrats and lawyers per square mile than was healthy. But as far as I knew, all of Montana’s mini-cities had old residential neighborhoods and solid, healthy, original downtowns with cool old buildings that had made it through the 20^th century without being bulldozed, wrecking-balled, gentrified, redeveloped or otherwise “improved” by their local politicians.

Drinking with Batman

On the drive from Billings I had set up a quick meeting with actor Michael Keaton, who was from Pittsburgh but lived on a ranch east of Livingston. I knew Keaton a little bit through my sportscaster brother John and from my time in Los Angeles  during the 1980s. Thanks to the magic of cell phones and Keaton’s personal assistant in L.A., we met for a beer at the 2nd Street Bistro in Livingston’s historic downtown

The bistro is on the ground floor of the Murray Hotel, a creaky, uniquely time-warped treasure right on old U.S. 10. The hotel is the most famous of Livingston's old buildings, thanks to its flamboyant neon sign, crazy Western decor and rowdy 106-year-old history. Calamity Jane and Buffalo Bill stayed there – not as a couple, mind you. And there are not-so-tall tales of a grizzly bear in the bar, cowboys riding horses up the stairs and movie director Sam Peckinpah, a permanent resident from 1979-1984, shooting holes in the ceiling of his room.

The bistro, more civilized, was prized for its fine grub and good wine. It had become a safe hangout for Livingston's colony of artists, writers and actors, who included landscape painter Russell Chatham, author Tom McGuane, Margot Kidder and Keaton, who’s well-liked in Pittsburgh as a regular guy who got to play Batman in a movie and make out with Michelle Pfeiffer but never went Hollywood.

Keaton lived up to his good-guy rep. Though we hadn’t seen each other in 15 years, we were like old friends who'd gone elk hunting together the previous weekend. We sat at a mini-bar in the bistro with just the bartender and an actor from New York who, unbelievably, used to live in the same 1927-vintage apartment building I once lived in on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood.

Keaton had been out bird shooting and had an SUV full of dogs at the curb. But before he left we went around to the proletarian Murray Bar to check the score of the Yankees-Rangers playoff game. Dozens of lonely young Montana homeboys were sipping beer, playing pool and praying a bored starlet would walk through the door and ask for a lift back to Hollywood. The Fossils, who did not choose that name by accident, were tuning their guitars.

No one bothered or seemed to recognize Keaton, whose only disguise was a baseball cap. The Murray Bar was the kind of under-illuminated neighborhood man-cave Steinbeck might have slipped into for a dozen beers when he was 25 or 30. The 2nd Street Bistro was more like the upscale places he frequented on his Travels with Charley trip. But like the celebrity colonists from Tinseltown, the bistro wasn’t there in 1960.

From Livingston I continued west toward Seattle on what’s left of U.S. 10, the two-lane highway Steinbeck drove.

I discovered two important and surprising truths when I retraced the route John Steinbeck took around the country in 1960 and turned into his Travels with Charley in Search of America.

I found out the great author’s iconic “nonfiction” road book was a deceptive, dishonest and highly fictionalized account of his actual 10,000-mile road trip.

And I found out that despite the Great Recession and national headlines dripping with gloom and doom, America was still a big, beautiful, empty, healthy, rich, safe, clean, prosperous and friendly country.

Dogging Steinbeck is the story of my adventures on and off the road with John Steinbeck’s ghost in 2010. This excerpt is my defense of Flyover America 2010 and its people — the people who soon were going to put Donald Trump into the White House — twice.

Dogging Steinbeck

America according to New Yorkers

In 2008, as the American economy plummeted into the Great Recession and Barack Obama was riding the Hope and Change Express to the White House, Bill Barich decided to drive across America. Barich’s book about his road trip, Long Way Home: On the Trail of Steinbeck’s America, was inspired by a re-reading – as an adult – of Travels with Charley.

Barich, a California native in his late 60s, has written for the New Yorker, authored eight books and lived in Ireland for about a decade. He wanted to see if Steinbeck’s gloomy prophecy about the decline of America and his concern about the moral flabbiness of its people was finally coming true. He didn’t retrace the Steinbeck Highway. For about six weeks he crossed the waist of America from New York City to San Francisco, roughly on U.S. Route 50, which meant he, like Steinbeck and I, saw a whiter, more rural, more Republican small-town America.

Barich thought Steinbeck’s private opinion of an America in decay was distorted because Steinbeck was depressed, in poor health and spent too much time alone on his Charley trip, which is a laugh I’ll address a few dozen paragraphs from now. But Barich took most of the author’s other critiques of 1960 America more seriously. He told The New York Times he thought Steinbeck’s “perceptions were right on the money about the death of localism, the growing homogeneity of America, the trashing of the environment. He was prescient about all that.”

It’s no surprise Barich, an expatriated liberal writer exploring the conservative heart of Red State America, agreed with Steinbeck’s sociopolitical and cultural complaints. For 50 years Barich, Steinbeck and their fellow travelers have set sail into the hinterlands from New York City with the same cargo of elitist clichés about what’s wrong with America.

Not to stereotype their views too unfairly, but folks like Barich instinctively believe a caricature of Flyover America. They believe the country west of the Hudson and east of the Hollywood sign is overpopulated, over-sprawled, over-malled, devoid of culture, polluted, ruined by national chains and strangled with congested freeways.

Barich made no effort to hide his cultural and political biases. He decried “the pernicious malls and ugly subdivisions” he said were a permanent, unfixable part of America. He also agreed with Steinbeck on some negative points, including that Americans were “frequently lax, soft, and querulous, and they sometimes capitulated to a childish sense of entitlement.”

As for Barich’s politics, they were as predictable as a New York Times editorial. He made the obligatory complaint about America’s “divisive (i.e., conservative) talk-show pundits.” He repeated the insulting but common fable that whenever hinterland conservatives criticize Barack Obama or Big Government in Washington they are parroting one of Rush Limbaugh’s “latest proclamations that consciously stoke the fear and paranoia of Americans.”

He also mocked Sarah Palin and the white Middle Americans who came to worship her at a Republican rally in Wilmington, Ohio. “The faces tilted up to her were as vacant as those of stoned kids at a rock concert, absent of any emotion except surrender,” Barich wrote. He was not exaggerating about the adoring crowd. But he was being unfair and unbalanced.

I happened to attend a Palin rally in 2008 – her first one – as a journalist. The day after her selection as McCain’s VP, on a blisteringly hot August Saturday, she appeared with him at a minor league baseball field 20 minutes from my house south of Pittsburgh. It was like a rock concert – for 10,000 desperately hopeful middle-aged Republicans.

Hanging on a cyclone fence taking photos, I got close enough to Palin to see the dark ring of sweat on her collar as she shook hands and snuggled babies. The crowd was totally nuts for her, especially the women. No one cared about John McCain or what Palin said in her stump speech, which was word-for-word what she had said on TV the day before. They had clearly come to cheer and hope – and yes, adore.

Barich didn’t attend a Barack Obama campaign event on his trip. But every little dig he made about the Palin rally and the Republican crowd’s embarrassing enthusiasm for their unprepared heroine also could have been said about the hopers & dreamers packing a typical Obama rally. Not that Barich would have ever considered making fun of Obama’s idolaters.

Though politically predictable, Barich wasn’t a total Steinbeck yes man. He pointed out that the author missed some positives about America – for example, the vast wildernesses that had been saved and “the potential rewards of new technologies.” But Barich concurred with many of Steinbeck’s complaints about Americans not being able to handle their hard-earned glut of affluence and comfort.

Barich characterized his fellow countrymen as “friendly, well-intentioned, good humored, kind, and generous, but also loud, aggressive, clumsy, gullible, and poorly educated.” Naturally, he said he preferred Europe’s older quieter, gentler, more sophisticated – i.e., more socialist – societies, where “pernicious malls” and “divisive” talk shows aren’t so free to disturb the order of things.

That’s fine what Barich thought. He paid his commentator’s dues. He drove the hard miles, so he got to throw his conventional liberal wisdom and biases around in his book. Like Steinbeck’s book and this one, his account of what he saw and thought was purely subjective. It was filtered by his previous experiences, worldview, values and politics and was subject to the randomness and serendipity of the road. All obvious stuff, but it’s rarely noted and always worth repeating in our ruthlessly subjective universe. It’s something Steinbeck pointed out as well in Charley.

Barich was more hopeful about the country’s long-term future than Steinbeck was in 1960. That was a refreshing twist on the usual New York-centric gloom and doom. But you get the sense that Barich’s optimism had more to do with the victory of Barack Obama than what he found on his solo tour of America’s midsection, which he described as “alternately grand and awful, sublime and stomach-turning, both a riddle and a paradox.”

America Unchained

Like all stereotypes, the Hollywood/Manhattan stereotype of America and its Flyover People is based on reality. But its main ingredient – besides its premise of moral, cultural and intellectual superiority – is exaggeration. Take over-population. Sure, big cities are densely populated. That’s kind of what great, dynamic, productive urban centers are supposed to be. That’s how they generate economic wealth and new ideas.

But anyone who drives 50 miles in any direction in an empty state like Maine or North Dakota – or even in north-central Ohio or Upstate New York – can see America’s problem is not overpopulation. More often it’s under-population. Cities like Butte and Buffalo and Gary have been virtually abandoned. Huge hunks of America on both sides of the Mississippi have never been settled. From Calais to Pelahatchie, I passed down the main streets of comatose small towns whose mayors would have been thrilled to have to deal with the problems of population growth and sprawl. In a dozen states, I cruised two- and four-lane highways so desolate I could have picnicked on them.

If anyone thinks that rural Minnesota, northwestern Montana, the Oregon Coast, the Texas Panhandle or New Orleans’s Upper Ninth Ward have been homogenized, taken over by chains or destroyed by suburban sprawl and too much commercial development, it’s because they haven’t been there. It’s a 50-year-old myth that America has been conquered and homogenized by national chains. It wasn’t close to being true in 1960, when Steinbeck was worrying about corner groceries being wiped out by the mega-grocer A&P, the largest restaurant chain in the country was Howard Johnson’s and Holiday Inn of America was three years old.

Today restaurant and motel chains cling to interstate exits, where the heavy traffic is, and they clone themselves in the upscale suburbs. But try to find a Bob Evans, a Holiday Inn Express or a burger joint with a familiar name in a small town or in the sticks. You better like McDonald’s or Subway, because in most of the Zip Codes I was in those were your only choices – if you were lucky.

The America I traveled was unchained from sea to sea. I had no problem eating breakfast, sleeping or shopping for road snacks at mom & pop establishments in every state. The motels along the Oregon and Maine coasts are virtually all independents that have been there for decades. Here’s a post-trip stat I saw from the American Hotel & Lodging Association that didn’t surprise me a bit: Of the country’s 52,215 motels and hotels with 15 units or more, 22,200 are independent – i.e., not affiliated with a chain. You can go the length of old Route 66 and never sleep or eat in a chain unless you choose to. Same for U.S. Route 101 in Oregon and Northern California.

Steinbeck, like many others have since, lamented the loss of regional customs. (I don’t think he meant the local “customs” of the Jim Crow South or the marital mores of the Jerry Lee Lewis clan.) Pockets of regional culture are not as concentrated and isolated as they once were, which is a blessing for the median national IQ and the English language, but they’re not extinct and there are many new pockets.

I didn’t go looking for Native Americans, Amish, Iraqis in Detroit, Peruvians in northern New Jersey or the French-Canadians who have colonized the top edge of Maine. But I had no trouble spotting local flavor in Wisconsin’s dairy lands, in fishing towns along Oregon’s coast, in the redwood-marijuana belt of Northern California, in San Francisco’s Chinatown and the cattle country of Texas.

As for the demise of local dialects, it too is exaggerated by those who find such culturally backward things quaint and worth preserving. In Maine, Texas and Louisiana I met white Anglo-Saxon Americans whose accents were so heavy I wasn’t always sure they were speaking English. I’ll never forget Duke Shepard of Deer Isle.

In the last 10 years, I’ve had the same experience in the Mississippi Delta, southern West Virginia and the hollers of eastern Kentucky, where I met a proud hillbilly who’d be debunked as a crude 1930s stereotype if he appeared in a movie. (He kept his ex-wife in a converted chicken coop and had two sons in prison, one for murder.) Pittsburgh’s steel-making jobs may have disappeared, but its distinct working-class accent hasn’t. Just listen to a C-SPAN call-in show for a random hour and you’ll hear hard American accents that six decades of TV have done nothing to soften.

Again, not to generalize, but the New York-Hollywood elites believe in a cultural caricature. They think the average Flyover Person lives in a double-wide or a Plasticville suburb, eats only at McDonald’s, votes only Republican, shops only at Walmart and the Dollar Store, hates anyone not whiter than they are, speaks in tongues on Sunday and worships pickup trucks, guns and NASCAR the rest of the week.

Those stereotypes and caricatures are alive and well in Flyover Country. But though I held radical beliefs about government, immigration and drugs that could have gotten me lynched in many places, I never felt I was in a country I didn’t like or didn’t belong in. Maybe I just didn’t go to enough sports bars, churches and political rallies.

Yes, Americans were materialistic as hell. They could afford to be, thanks to the incredible democratization of wealth and luxury that’s occurred in the last 50 years. Hundreds of millions of Americans were enjoying the kind of lifestyle that only 1-Per-Centers like Steinbeck could afford in 1960. Steinbeck – and ex-pats like Barich living like lords in Ireland – have a lot of nerve complaining about the greedy materialism of America’s commoners when they themselves already have every material goodie they need or want.

The hundreds of ordinary Americans I bumped into were real, not made up and not composites. They were unique, hard-working people who were living longer, better, richer lives than Steinbeck could have dreamed. Unlike Steinbeck, who met one unlikable, sour, grammatically challenged person after another (or said he did), I met a procession of happy, friendly saints. I’m not a touchy-feely guy. And I know that as an old white guy by myself I was a threat to no one. But I was treated so well, I fell in love with every other American I met. For five minutes, anyway.

Introduction to ‘Dogging Steinbeck’

I discovered two important and surprising truths when I retraced the route John Steinbeck took around the country in 1960 and turned into his Travels with Charley in Search of America.

I found out the great author’s iconic “nonfiction” road book was a deceptive, dishonest and highly fictionalized account of his actual 10,000-mile road trip.

And I found out that despite the Great Recession and national headlines dripping with gloom and doom, America was still a big, beautiful, empty, healthy, rich, safe, clean, prosperous and friendly country.

Dogging Steinbeck is the story of my adventures on and off the road with John Steinbeck’s ghost in 2010. This excerpt is about my stop in the middle of North Dakota’s empty oceanic wheat fields, where Steinbeck wrote in “Travels With Charley” he bumped into a traveling Shakespearean actor.

12 – Makin’ Time in North Dakota

Steinbeck Timeline

Wednesday, Oct. 12, 1960 – Beach, North Dakota

Sticking to U.S. 10, Steinbeck moves from Frazee, Minnesota, through Fargo and Bismarck to Beach, North Dakota, a small agricultural town near the Montana border. He drives about 425 miles, almost straight west. In Beach he checks into a small motel, probably the Westgate, and has a bath.

Town Without People

Steinbeck had romantic ideas about the city of Fargo and he was looking forward to seeing it for the first time. But when he drove through its downtown on Wednesday morning Oct. 12, 1960, he apparently got swept along in the traffic and didn’t stop. I had a similar experience in Fargo when crossing over the Red River of the North into North Dakota from Detroit Lakes. The “West 10” signs I was following vanished and I ended up on North Broadway Drive. In the lunch-hour rush I inched bumper-to-bumper past the Fargo Theater, the city’s signature downtown landmark, and the stone-faced Fargo National Bank.

Steinbeck’s description of Fargo in Travels with Charley shows how much information a great writer can pack into half a sentence: “… it was a golden autumn day, the town as traffic-troubled, as neon-plastered, as cluttered and milling with activity as any other up-and-coming town of forty-six thousand souls.” Except that there were more than twice as many Fargonians alive in 2010, that sounded like the town we both briefly met. Fargo and its “broken-metal-and-glass outer-ring,” as Steinbeck called its trashy outskirts, extended farther west into the void of eastern North Dakota than when he complained about it. I didn’t see any auto graveyards or landfills. But soon the malls, pawnshops, car dealers, tank farms and fairgrounds evaporated. U.S. 10 West and its signs vanished, too, buried forever under Interstate 94.

The land west of Fargo on I-94 was flat and wide, un-peopled and plowed to the max – like it’d been since about 1900, I’d bet. Turning off the interstate at County Road 38, which went nowhere in two directions, I went south toward the town of Alice, where Steinbeck says in Charley he camped out overnight. North Dakota is the fourth least densely populated state and most of it is farmland, facts that would surprise no one driving across it. The combines I saw from Route 38 looked like ants, and there were more combines on the horizons than houses. Traffic simply did not exist.

From outer space, Alice is a little splash of civilization spilled on a gigantic grid of farmland and perfectly straight roads. Everything around Alice is disturbingly parallel and perpendicular, except one thing – the drunken Maple River. Starting northwest of Alice and flowing south, it wriggles and wanders for miles, doubling back on itself, forming little pools, disappearing into wetlands and almost encircling Alice before trickling northeast to join larger rivers and lakes that ultimately empty into Hudson Bay.

I was looking forward to Alice. I had Google Mapped it before my trip and it wasn’t really a town or even a village. From its satellite photo, it looked more like an unfinished, poorly zoned suburban development – a random scattering of a few dozen homes, buildings, a church or two, with a lot of empty space tied together with what looked like gravel roads.

When I arrived in Alice at 3:30 in the afternoon, no one was there to greet me. That was because hardly a soul is left in Alice. When Steinbeck wrote about it, it had only about 160 inhabitants, but it still had all the proper parts of a town. By 2010 Alice was down to 50 humans. The post office was closed. So was the town grain silo, the town school and the town Catholic Church, St. Henry’s.  It still had a mayor. And the town cemetery was still alive and well, though it was going to run out of dead people long before it ran out of space.

Steinbeck says in the first draft of Travels with Charley that he “found a pleasant place to stop on the Maple River just north of Alice.” While there alone, away from the road, he says an itinerant Shakespearean actor pulled in and parked his trailer not far from him. Steinbeck describes the actor in minute detail. He had a classic profile and wore a leather jacket, olive-drab trousers and a cowboy hat with “the brim curled and held to a peak by the chin strap.” Eventually the two men share coffee and whisky and discourse for five boring pages about the joys and sorrows of the acting profession. The tedious scene could have been worse. Steinbeck originally had the actor deliver 20-lines of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” rap. Wisely, that overt hunk of page filler was cut from the first draft.

The actor says when he performed Shakespeare on the road, he respectfully borrowed the “words, tones and inflections” of John Gielgud. Then he pulls out a treasured letter he kept folded in his wallet. It was from Sir John himself. Steinbeck quotes the brief note in full. His lucky encounter with the actor, long on dialogue, is rich in specifics and detail. But it never happened.

A Farmer Gets the Joke

Two miles west of Alice, near the vacant intersection of 45^th and 137^th streets, I stood next to an impenetrable dry cornfield on an elevated farm road. It was the highest ground for miles. It was sunny and warm, but the chilly wind whipped up whitecaps on the small lake nearby and slapped little high-frequency waves against its grassy shore. I was looking for signs of the Maple River – what in Pennsylvania we’d more accurately call Maple Creek.

It was there that the absurdity of what Steinbeck tried to pull on his readers really hit me. I already knew from a letter he sent to his wife that he lied in Charley about camping overnight in Alice. I also knew he didn’t bump into his quotable thespian soul mate. Not anywhere near Alice, anyway, and not in the theatrical, stilted way he described. But standing in the middle of that middle of nowhere, trying to imagine anyone meeting anyone else there at all – I really did laugh out loud. You had to be there with all that corn and farmland to appreciate the joke.

I was still laughing when I found a farmer, or he found me. He was running a big blue Ford tractor, pulling a disk plough that magically turned a wide swath of his soft green field to black. Looking as pathetic as possible, I hailed him. He climbed down from his cab to see what was wrong with my car or my head. We were both wearing blue jeans, T-shirts and baseball caps, but he was wearing work boots and, presumably, socks.

After I explained what I was doing, he trusted me with the basic facts of his life as long as I promised not to tell the whole World Wide Web his name. He was 50, the son of a farmer and a farmer himself for 23 years. He had what he called a “smallish” farm – 1,400 acres, a little over 2 square miles. He grew half wheat and half soybeans, not just corn like most of his neighbors, because he said wheat doesn't take as many people or trucks to produce.

I didn’t pry into his finances. But an Internet business directory listed his company as having $95,000 in annual revenue and a staff of 1, which I assumed was him. The only help the farmer had was his wife, two daughters and a good credit line. His wife – he pointed to a dust cloud half a mile away – was running the family combine. His older daughter ran it when she wasn’t away at college.

I told the farmer what Steinbeck said he did near Alice. Then I asked if he knew a spot nearby where Steinbeck might have camped overnight by the Maple River and met a traveling Shakespearean actor with a John Gielgud letter in his wallet. He looked around, got the joke and laughed.  

In Travels with Charley Steinbeck states without equivocation that he camped overnight near Alice. He didn’t. In the real world, the nonfiction world, he passed by Alice on Wednesday, Oct. 12, 1960. It was Day 3 of his 2,100-mile, seven-day sprint from Chicago to Seattle and he spent it crossing the entire state of North Dakota.

In the morning he may have paused for several hours along the Maple River somewhere near Alice. It’s even possible he met an itinerant Shakespearean actor – or a man from Mars.

But in a day that started in Frazee, Minnesota, Steinbeck logged about 425 miles before stopping for the night in Beach, North Dakota, an agricultural town in the Badlands near the Montana border. By sundown Wednesday he was already 321 miles past Alice, about to take a hot bath in a motel. We know all this is true because it’s what he told his wife in a letter he wrote that night from Beach.

Alice wasn’t the only overnight campout in North Dakota that Steinbeck invented. The next night he didn’t sleep under the stars in the spooky Badlands, either. In Charley Steinbeck beautifully describes how the slanting evening sunlight warmed the strange and harsh landscape of the Badlands, how he built a fire, how the starry night was filled with sounds of hunting screech owls and barking coyotes, and how the “night was so cold that I put on my insulated underwear for pajamas.”

It was total fiction. On Thursday night, Oct. 13 – Day 4 of his Chicago-Seattle sprint – he was actually already 400 miles west of Beach and the Badlands. He was in Livingston, Montana, watching the third Nixon-Kennedy TV debate at a trailer court. Because he was moving so quickly from Chicago to Seattle, Steinbeck was forced to make up two overnight camping adventures in North Dakota and stick them in between his actual stays in Frazee and Beach.

Steinbeck’s two flights of “creative nonfiction” under the stars in North Dakota are important, but not just because they are such bald-faced fabrications. Along with his non-meeting with the Yankee farmer in New Hampshire, they are the scenes in the book that created the myth that he was traveling slowly, camping out and roughing it alone in the American outback.

After snapping a corncob in half and telling me it was fit only for ethanol, the friendly farmer went back to his disking. For half an hour I drove to several places where farm roads intersected with the tiny Maple River as it squirmed through the tall grass.

I didn’t know it then, but there were a dozen possible places west, south or east of Alice where the river meets a road. Bumping into a sophisticated thespian anywhere near Alice – or anywhere else – would have been a fantastic bit of good luck for any traveling writer. It wasn’t impossible. It’s just that it doesn’t happen like that in the real world.

I left the cornfields near Alice and aimed for Bismarck, 165 miles west on I-94. Somewhere in the hilly terrain I crossed the Continental Divide. The elevation was only 1,490 feet because, though North Dakota is rich in oil and gas and energy jobs, it’s poor in mountain ranges. In Bismarck, where the supply of motels was not keeping pace with the demand from the energy boom, I couldn’t find a room under $125, but I was more than happy to check in at the nearest Walmart.

###

It’s easy to buy Dogging Steinbeck online at Amazon. Other articles about my 2010 trip and book excerpts are at 'Dogging Steinbeck' -- Exposing the untruths in 'Travels With Charley'

In a last-ditch effort to attract national media attention, a few hours before I left my house, I blasted a self-promotional email to nearly everyone I had ever known, worked for or pitched freelance articles to in journalism.

It was as over-the-top as I could make it and as far as I can tell it did me and what was left of my career no good at all.

September 21, 2010

Ex-newspaperman Bill Steigerwald to chase John Steinbeck’s ghost for 10,000 miles.

To go everywhere Steinbeck and dog Charley went in Travels with Charley.

Will follow great author’s exact route half a century later.

Desperate act of drive-by journalism by former Pittsburgh/LA paperboy, columnist, editor.

Will take no federal stimulus money.

Will take no dog.

Hello friends, former co-workers, fellow libertarians, people who have no idea why they’re getting this email blast.

On Thursday, Sept. 23, I’ll leave John Steinbeck’s former seaside home in Sag Harbor, New York, a place I could never afford to live or visit for more than two hours, and begin chasing his ghost around America’s blue highways for 10,000 miles.

I’m going to retrace the iconic road trip Steinbeck made in the fall of 1960 and turned into his 1962 nonfiction bestseller Travels with Charley. I’m not taking an iconic dog and I’m not driving an iconic pickup truck/camper. I do hope to write a book hooked around following the exact route Steinbeck took and telling the whole story of what he did or did not do on his journey exactly 50 years ago....

The chase begins

Fourteen Septembers ago, after lots of library research, I set out to retrace the 10,000-mile road trip around the USA that John Steinbeck made in 1960 for what became his 1962 nonfiction best-seller Travels With Charley.

I left his former ocean-side house in Long Island exactly 50 years after he and his poodle companion Charley did in his pickup/camper Rocinante. I wrote up everything I learned and did on my trip in Dogging Steinbeck, which is a lot of fun if you aren’t afraid of finding out what a fictionalizing, lying bastard our hero John Steinbeck was.

It turned out, as I easily proved half a century later by simply practicing honest and dogged journalism in libraries and on the “Steinbeck Highway,” that the great Steinbeck and his publisher Viking Press pulled a fast one on the American public.

Much of Charley was fictionalized or written and edited to mislead readers about how Steinbeck traveled (fast and not rough), whom he met (not many real people), whom he traveled with (his wife Elaine for more than half of his trip) and what he really thought was wrong with 1960 America (lots).

For the whole sorry story — for the whole unflattering truth about Travels With Charley and how the Steinbeck scholars never bothered to research or tell us about it — you’ll have to buy Dogging Steinbeck. For some video treats, there’s YouTube. For other ‘Charley’ related rants, there’s my sybstack.

Meanwhile, here is a snippet of my trip that zooms in on Sept. 22, 2010, when I visited Steinbeck’s former home on Long Island. For links to other Steinbeck items, go to my substack.

Dogging Steinbeck, an excerpt

… my trip demanded that I leave my name and my identity at home. I had to be peripatetic eyes and ears, a kind of moving gelatin plate. I could not sign hotel registers, meet people I knew, interview others, or even ask searching questions. Furthermore, two or more people disturb the ecologic complex of an area. I had to go alone and I had to be self-contained, a kind of casual turtle carrying his house on his back.

– Travels With Charley, 1962

Steinbeck Timeline

Friday, Sept. 23, 1960 — Sag Harbor, New York

Early in the morning John Steinbeck and his French poodle Charley leave his summer home in his overloaded pickup truck-camper combo Rocinante. He takes three ferries to New London, Connecticut, and drives north toward his son’s boarding school in Deerfield, Massachusetts. His cargo includes spare parts for his truck, dozens of books, two rifles and a shotgun.

Me and Steinbeck’s Ghost

Before sunset I went out to Steinbeck’s summer home on Bluff Point Lane. It was only a five-minute drive from downtown Sag Harbor. But because it was at the dead-end of a narrow private gravel road at the tip of a peninsula, the house was hard to find — exactly as the reclusive and publicity-shy author wanted.

I didn’t use the driveway because John Stefanik’s car was there. Stefanik has been taking care of the house since 1982, when Elaine Steinbeck hired him to do the job. The wood-sided house and its outer buildings, shallow swimming pool and shaggy lawn were looking pretty good beneath the heavy shade of tall oaks. The trees were much taller and fatter than when Steinbeck lived there, of course, especially the one that he playfully planted three feet from the front door and now nearly blocks it.

Stefanik usually required appointments for media pests like me. But when I explained why I was there he let me wander around the 2-acre lot. Stefanik couldn’t have been friendlier. While he and his son did their buzzing yard work, I walked out on the dock where Steinbeck used to park his 22-foot cabin boat. I also checked out “Joyous Garde,” Steinbeck’s restored writing shack. Overlooking Morris Cove, it’s hardly bigger than the British phone box Dr. Who flies around in.

I didn’t ask for a peek inside the gray-painted house, which is still owned by Elaine Steinbeck’s heirs. But earlier in the week a New York Times reporter and photographer came to do a feature story about the place to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the start of Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley trip. Based on the Times’ pictures, the interior is homey, airy, simply decorated and hung with Steinbeck photos. Steinbeck was loaded, but frugal. It apparently still looked pretty much as it did when he lived in it.

By the time the Stefaniks drove off and left me standing in the driveway, the last sunset of summer was over and fall was arriving with a rare astronomical splash. The full moon was climbing through the trees like a gigantic yellow balloon. I thought its extra plumpness and brightness were due to my tired eyes. But according to NASA’s sky-watchers, for the first time since 1991 northern autumn was beginning on a night with a “Super Harvest Moon.”

Scientists don’t quite understand why, but somehow the light from the sun and the moon combine to create a 360-degree glow that makes the full moon look wider and brighter than usual. I knew none of this “moon illusion” stuff as I stood there alone with my notebook, cameras and, I guess, the ghosts of Steinbeck and Charley, who was buried somewhere in the yard.

Steinbeck’s ‘Act of Courage’

John Steinbeck was especially brave to embark on his solo road trek in 1960 — and it had nothing to do with not having radial tires, GPS or air bags. Given his lousy health, his biographer Jackson Benson said the Travels With Charley trip could be best appreciated “as an act of courage.” As Steinbeck’s son Thom told The New York Times, “The book was his farewell. My dad knew he was dying, and he had been accused of having lost touch with the rest of the country. Travels With Charley was his attempt to rediscover America.”

Steinbeck’s agent, doctor and everyone who loved him tried to talk him out of his trip, which he had been thinking about taking for at least six years. What if he had a heart attack and collapsed in the middle of nowhere? He’d die for sure and he might never be found. He refused to hear such cautionary crap. He was the contemporary rival and equal of Hemingway. He was the World War II correspondent who went on daring midnight raids in PT boats off the Italian coast with Douglas Fairbanks Jr. He was a future Nobel Prize-winner. He may have been born with a heart too small for his big body, as a European doctor once told him. But he was not a famous dead author yet, literally or figuratively. He was still a man — and not an old man. He still had balls. He still had stuff to say and write and prove.

Steinbeck wrote in letters to his agent and others that he was tired of being fussed over like a sick baby or an invalid who had to be “protected” and “hospitalized.” He had to go on his great land-voyage of rediscovery — and go by himself, even though at the last minute he would ask his wife if he could take her 10-year-old standard French poodle Charley with him for company. Defending his solo project in a letter to his agent Elizabeth Otis, he said what he was proposing was not “a little trip of reporting, but a frantic last attempt to save my life and the integrity of my creative pulse.”

The thing that came closest to thwarting Steinbeck’s big trip was a random act of violence by Mother Nature. In early September 1960, Hurricane Donna, one of the 20th century’s nastiest storms, hit Florida and wouldn’t let go of the Eastern Seaboard until it got to the eastern tip of Long Island. Donna’s oversized Category 3 eye passed directly over Steinbeck’s summerhouse, wrecking his plans for leaving soon after Labor Day and almost killing him. As he described dramatically in the opening of Travels With Charley, he braved Donna’s 95-mph winds to save his boat after it became tangled with other boats anchored in the middle of Morris Cove and broke free of its anchor.

As “the trees plunged and bent like grasses” and the “whipped water raised a cream of foam,” Steinbeck said he waded through chest-high water to his boat, which was pinned against a neighbor’s pier. He started its 100 horsepower engine, moved it back to the middle of the cove, re-anchored it, jumped into the water and rode a wind-blown log to shore. If he really did all those heroics — and if he wasn’t slyly creating a dramatic metaphor for the risky trip he was about to take around the USA — it was an impressive feat. Especially with a bum knee and a bad ticker.

Steinbeck also went in search of America and Americans for practical reasons. For 20 years he had been living on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and traveling around Western Europe like an archduke. As he explained in letters written before his trip, he constantly was expected to write and comment about America, to represent its values and culture. Yet he no longer knew his own country or people except from memory or by reading. He understood New York City was not really America. It was a political and cultural terrarium — an “island” he called it. The high-end celebrities and power-people he loafed with — Elia Kazan, John Huston, Arthur Miller, Adlai Stevenson — were not representative of real Americans and he knew it.

Steinbeck hoped his road trip, undertaken discreetly, would put him back in touch with Real America. His plan was to get out into the sticks and meet regular people face-to-face. Anonymously. Alone. Not on tour buses or in motels, but where they lived and worked and drank and prayed. He wanted to see for himself what Americans were up to and what they were thinking and arguing about during a historic presidential election. It was Journalism 101 — a grassroots observing and reporting mission by one of the world’s most popular writers. He and his agent, editor and publisher knew the great author’s quest for America would make another successful Steinbeck book, which it did, in spades. It’s just a shame that the ambitious trip he planned so carefully never really happened.