Steinbeck, me & the pursuit of 'true nonfiction'

In September of 2010 I set out to follow the route John Steinbeck took exactly 50 years earlier for what became his iconic road book Travels With Charley. I had lots of fun and caused lots of trouble.

This substack is about how I came to write my 2012 book Dogging Steinbeck and what I learned about the underlying untruthfulness of John Steinbeck’s best-selling road book Travels with Charley. This article first appeared in MILLER’S BOOK REVIEW 📚 on July 10, 2024. Joel Miller wrote the questions, emailed them to me and I tried to write honest answers that made sense.

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.

Steinbeck wrote that on October 12, 1960, he camped out overnight along a small river in the vast wheat fields near Alice, North Dakota, and met an itinerant Shakespearean actor who carried a treasured letter from John Gielgud in his pocket. But he actually slept more than 300 miles to the west in Beach, North Dakota, in the Westgate Motel, where he told his wife in a letter he enjoyed a hot bath.

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. 

One night Steinbeck supposedly camped out in New England he actually stayed at the exclusive Spalding Inn in the White Mountains of New Hampshire (top left). He had to borrow a tie to eat dinner. Steinbeck met Elaine in Chicago for several days and stayed at the super-swank Ambassador East (top right) where Sinatra, JFK and other celebrities stayed. Unmentioned in ‘Charley,’ Steinbeck and Elaine stopped for five days in downtown San Francisco. They kenneled Charley and checked into the luxurious St. Francis (bottom left), where every president since Taft has slept. The two spent a long Thanksgiving weekend near Amarillo, Texas, at Bitter Creek Ranch (bottom right), where some of the state’s richest cattle ranchers and oil barons went to fish and hunt.

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