What was the inspiration for travels with charley?

Answer 1

The cross-country trek of Travels With Charley by John Steinbeck is a road narrative about Steinbeck's trip from New York to Salinas, California and back. The reason that Steinbeck took this trip is that he felt as if he had lost his connection to America and the inhabitants thereof. In order to stay true to his career as a writer of Americana, Steinbeck embarked upon his journey in order to make that connection and be able to reach a kind of verisimilitude in his writing.

An interesting aspect of TWC is that Steinbeck, as a man, is similar to the characters residing in his fiction. Along the way, Steinbeck is a vacilando, a Spanish term for one who aimlessly sets out on a trek without much reason as to why. However, the trek itself is an organic one and has its own purpose for being. Only upon completion of the journey is the reason of the un-navigated quest revealed. In this sense, Steinbeck is similar to the protagonist of The Wayward Bus, Johnny Chicoy, who seeks to run away from his home but ultimately returns when the road proves inhospitable.

Along the quest in Travels With Charley, Steinbeck reveals a great loneliness that is often associated with being alone on the road, and this loneliness is emphasized in his personal letters to his wife, Elaine. In expressing his loneliness, Steinbeck reveals himself to be similar to the characters of his novels who are in desperate need of companionship on their journeys (i.e., George from Of Mice and Men). Also, the loneliness of Adam Trask in East of Eden has significant parallels to Steinbeck's life, for he pines over the his self-imposed displacement from his wife.

At its core, Steinbeck takes the journey to help him reconnect with America and to translate the knowledge of his country into his writing. However, his writing of fiction is completed when he publishes his last novel, The Winter of Our Discontent, in 1961. What the trip reveals to me is not how he would be able to continue to write about America but how his perception of himself as a resident of the United States was developed.