Bill Steigerwald

About Bill Steigerwald

Bill Steigerwald, a newspaper and magazine writer who worked at the Los Angeles Times and two Pittsburgh newspapers before turning to book-length investigative journalism, is the author of Dogging Steinbeck, a radical re-mapping of Steinbeck's Travels with Charley. 30 Days a Black Man: The Forgotten Story That Exposed the Jim Crow South, his second book, was published in 2017. Chasing Steinbeck's Ghost, a sequel to Dogging Steinbeck, was released as a Kindle book in 2020.

Film on Ernest Hemingway Fails to Mention Steinbeck

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It was a slog at times, and Ernest Hemingway the man repeatedly came off as a really unlikable jerk, but I made it through Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s Hemingway fest on PBS. Boy, was Hemingway a strange, mean, and multi-troubled soul. By comparison, he makes John Steinbeck’s grumpy persona look saintly.

There are interesting parallels between Hemingway and Steinbeck, though, especially their struggles with booze/drugs, their need to prove their manhood in war, and their rocky marriages and fatherhood failings. They were also equally terrified of speaking in public or on TV. Hemingway’s fame and influence surpassed Steinbeck’s and every other writer before and after World War II. But it was odd that Novick and Burns never mentioned Steinbeck at all.

Scott Fitzgerald had a few cameos. The name John Dos Passos was dropped. But you would have thought Hemingway was the only important American novelist alive after 1938.

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Hemingway’s Action “Unnecessarily Cruel and Stupid”

Burns could have slipped Steinbeck into the program—and provided a redundant example of what an ass Hemingway was—by mentioning the only meeting between the two literary heavyweights. As Jackson Benson describes it in his biography, The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer, Hemingway expressed the wish to meet Steinbeck in the spring of 1944 when they were both in New York City.

It must have been quite an event. The dinner party at Tim Costello’s on Third Avenue took weeks to arrange, was attended by Robert Capa (at left in World War II photo with Army driver and Hemingway, right), John O’Hara, and John Hersey and—says Benson—turned out to be pretty much a disaster. The only memorable incident was when Hemingway and O’Hara were at the bar arguing over the authenticity of the old blackthorn walking stick Steinbeck had given O’Hara. As Benson tells the story, to prove that the walking stick—which had been handed down to Steinbeck by his grandfather—was not the real deal, Hemingway bet O’Hara 50 bucks he could break it over his head.

“O’Hara accepted,” Benson writes. “Hemingway took the stick by both ends and pulled it down over his head, breaking it in two. ‘You call that a blackthorn?’ he said, and threw the pieces aside. O’Hara was mortified, while Steinbeck . . . looked on and thought the whole thing was unnecessarily cruel and stupid.”

Benson says Steinbeck admired Hemingway more than any other writer of his time. But it was Hemingway’s writing skills Steinbeck admired, not his creepy he-man personality. Based on Burns and Novick’s six-hour biography, Steinbeck had it right.

Ken Burns received the 2013 John Steinbeck award for humanitarian achievement given by the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University. Michael Katakis—a consultant and major contributor to the Hemingway film—is an essayist, fiction writer, and photographer who divides his time between Paris, London, and Carmel, California. Bill Steigerwald recently released the e-book version of his book on Ray Sprigle, which includes the original 21-part series reporter Sprigle wrote about his undercover journalism mission in the Jim Crow South in 1948.—Ed.

John Steinbeck to Adlai Stevenson: First Televised Presidential Debate Was Dull

john-steinbeck-adlai-stevensonJohn Steinbeck, who was in Maine on his Travels with Charley road trip at this time in 1960, did not see the historic first TV debate between JFK and Nixon, but he heard it. He wasn’t impressed. As he wrote in this September 28, 1960 letter to his political hero, pen pal, and two-time losing presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, he thought the world’s first televised presidential debate was too courteous and therefore dull. The world-famous writer was a socially well-connected New Yorker, an openly partisan Democrat, and a Nixon-hater with a keen interest in the JFK-Nixon race. As best I can decipher his Steinbeckian sprawl, this is what he wrote:

Dear Adlai:

This trip is good I think. I don’t know if I am learning much but I have time to think. Quote from a Maine lady of 90: “I am not interested in Sherman Adams’ dishonesty. I am not interested in John Foster Dulles’ stupidity. Come to think of it, I am not interested in the Moon.“ I wonder if this could be general.

Heard the beginning of the great debate. The arch courtesy was appalling — on both sides. Amounted to dullness. If I were writing Kennedy letters instead of Stevenson letters I would say, “Pour it on. Get mad! For example — “If things are so goddamn good, why are people so restless and miserable. If we are so well prepared, why are we so scared. If we are so sure, how does Castro push us around? Why we couldn’t even get a message (unclear) to Garcia. Are we interested in the past or the future? The future cannot be operated like the past because the materials (?) are different. Ike, with his Westerns is still trying to solve problems with an 1878 Colt. The crazy thing is that K is using the same method. He tried a DeSapio on Dag Hammarskjöld. Of one thing you can be sure. The Russians are not going to leave the U.N. unless they can take a quorum with them.

“K” was USSR Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Sherman Adams was the Eisenhower White House aide who resigned under fire in 1958 after accepting a vicuna coat and other gifts from an old friend who was having problems with the government. Dag Hammarskjöld, another Steinbeck friend, was United Nations Secretary-General. According to Wikipedia, “Carmine Gerard DeSapio was an American politician from New York City. He was the last head of the Tammany Hall political machine to dominate municipal politics.” Steinbeck and his dog Charley continued their road trip around the USA for almost another 10,000 miles and about 75 days. Everything you need to know about Steinbeck’s trip and his iconic road book, and lots you don’t, can be found in Dogging Steinbeck, the book I wrote about the many fictions I discovered in Travels with Charley when I set out to replicate Steinbeck’s journey “in search of America.”

John Steinbeck’s September 28, 1960 letter to Adlai Stevenson is at Princeton’s Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library.

Dogging Steinbeck Started on This Day 10 Years Ago

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Sixty years ago this morning, on September 23, 1960, John Steinbeck and his poodle Charley set out from Sag Harbor on the iconic road trip around the United States that would become Travels with Charley in Search of America. Ten years ago this morning I set out from Steinbeck’s seaside house on the eastern end of Long Island and followed his 10,000-mile trail as faithfully as possible.

I admit I had my suspicions that Steinbeck had embellished Charley and had invented some of the colorful Americans he said he met at random. (I couldn’t help it—I was a veteran drive-by print journalist who knew how hard it was on the road to bump into the right people you need for a story.)

But my original intention was not to discredit Steinbeck, show him up, or prove that his 1962 New York Times nonfiction bestseller was a heavily fictionalized and disappointingly dishonest account of his actual journey. My main goal simply was to turn my solo adventure along the Steinbeck Highway into a book that would compare the America of Barack Obama that I saw in 2010 with the America of JFK and Nixon that Steinbeck saw in the historic fall of 1960.

Some of what I saw out my windshield on my mad 11,276-mile dash around the country can be seen in these 16 videos on YouTube.

I’m no documentary maker, as you will see. The videos are largely unedited and the wind is a recurring character. But I visit Steinbeck’s houses, the top of Fremont Peak, and many other places he stopped on his journey.

What I learned about the facts and fictions of Travels with Charley, the character of John Steinbeck, and the nature of America’s Flyover People is documented in my Amazon book Dogging Steinbeck. And Chasing Steinbeck’s Ghost is a guide to where Steinbeck really was on each day of a nearly 11-week search for the country he admitted he did not find.

Illustration by Stacy Innerst.

After Travels with Charley, Pittsburgh Newspaper Journalist Finds Staying Home with COVID-19 Easy

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I’m a very lucky man.

Living in an old money-pit at the top of a hill in the woods and having no neighbors was always a sweet deal for an underpaid Pittsburgh newspaper journalist.

But in the medical and political madness of our times, they have become priceless gifts.

When summer is in full swing my 12 acres are ridiculously green and lush. I like to say it’s like being in Vietnam, but I have no idea what I’m talking about because I dodged that jungled corner of the world half a century ago.

On any given morning here in Western Pennsylvania, my Montana-raised wife Trudi and I can look out one of our 20 oversized windows and see a Disneyland of birds, chipmunks, rabbits, squirrels, groundhogs, and deer. In the spring and fall, wild turkeys parade past my house. Where they spend their summers I don’t know.

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Birds are everywhere. They wake us up at dawn and dart through the under-story all day. Turkey vultures circle silently above our 1938 vintage metal roof. Robins and doves have built nests in the crooks of our rain gutters. Woodpeckers have drilled holes in our ancient redwood siding for their homes.

The young Rough-Legged Hawk that flashed by our kitchen window and snatched a baby dove from its nest last month has moved on to tougher prey. At night we hear the local gang of coyotes howling and yapping, but during the day they are as invisible as the owls hooting somewhere in the dark.

Living in the woods in an old house means coexisting with nature—literally. It’s not just spiders, ants, and stink bugs. At one time or another, our uninvited house-guests have included birds, bats, frogs, toads, mice, snakes, and a teen-age raccoon who came in a kitchen window and thought it could live behind the cereal boxes.

During our pandemic and national shutdown, I’m even more blessed to be living in Penn’s Woods. For some strange reason unknown to the disease experts Pittsburgh and the western half of the state were spared the worst of the COVID-19.

In my largely rural, natural gas-fracking county 20 miles south of Pittsburgh, where 220,000 Flyover People live, we’ve had six deaths from COVID-19. Philly on the East Coast was hit hard, but there have been fewer than 200 deaths in Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh and 1.3 million Steelers-worshippers are located. More than half of the area’s COVID-19 deaths have been in nursing homes and, like everywhere else, only a handful have been under 70.

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Despite Pittsburgh’s relative good luck, the governor’s sweeping shutdown of the state quickly ended my career as a weekend Uber driver. As a worker in the transportation sector, I was deemed by the people in charge to be essential. But closing downtown offices, restaurants, bars, sporting events, and all nightlife in mid-March wiped out 90 percent of Uber’s customers. The evidence—two leased vehicles that rarely leave—sits in our driveway.

Miraculously, my potential financial disaster turned into a windfall when 1099-contract workers whose jobs were wiped out by COVID-19 were made eligible to receive $600 a week under the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act.

I wish I could say I’ve been using my government-paid vacation to write another book or catch up on my Cicero or Saroyan. But mostly I’ve been mowing my weedy token lawn, playing golf twice a week, and wasting time ranting and raving about political things I can do nothing about on Facebook and Twitter.

But I haven’t been a total bum for three months.

I’ve been trying to get Hollywood interested in my tragically overlooked 1948 Jim Crow history book, 30 Days a Black Man, which I hope Netflix will make into a series co-starring Jeff Daniels and Denzel Washington.

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On my website I posted the original newspaper series in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that 30 Days is based on. In 1948, star newspaperman Ray Sprigle collaborated with the NAACP of Walter White and pretended to be a black man in the Deep South for a month.

Sprigle shocked the oblivious white North with his angry, powerful, nationally syndicated account of the oppression, discrimination, and humiliation 10 million blacks suffered every day under Old Jim Crow. Sadly, his mostly forgotten series about life in America’s apartheid is timely as hell.

And oh yeah.

I also put together a small Kindle book called Chasing Steinbeck’s Ghost, which is a time-and-place-line of the 10,000-mile road trip Steinbeck took in the fall of 1960 for Travels with Charley.

Ten years ago in September I retraced Steinbeck’s route as faithfully and accurately as possible for what became my 2013 nonfiction book Dogging Steinbeck.

The Chasing Steinbeck’s Ghost timeline is as accurate as I could make it. It includes a bunch of photos I took of such things as Steinbeck’s Sag Harbor home, the trendy places he hung out at in San Francisco, and the big ranch in Texas where he and Elaine spent Thanksgiving.

There also are a few excerpts pulled from Dogging Steinbeck about some of the many fictions and fibs Steinbeck and his editors at Viking Press slipped into what until I came along 50 years later was marketed and taught as a work of nonfiction.

I hope my little guide doesn’t ruin the fun for others who want to follow Steinbeck’s tire tracks. Traveling around the USA to see America and meet Americans—post-COVID 19, of course—is a road trip everyone should experience at least once.

Why The Grapes of Wrath Disappeared from Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt

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The Grapes of Wrath played a part in the monstrous promotional campaign that helped American Dirt become one of this year’s biggest best-sellers.

But John Steinbeck’s classic is no longer part of the controversy that has befallen Jeanine Cummins’s novel about a Mexican mother and her son who illegally cross the border into the United States. American Dirt was exuberantly plugged in January by Oprah Winfrey for her book club and praised by a score of book reviewers as heart-poundingly suspenseful, unforgettable, important and timely, realistic, moving, a future classic, etc. etc. etc. Stephen King and John Grisham raved about it in their blurbs, and a line on the original book cover touted it as a modern-day version of The Grapes of Wrath.

Then, after American Dirt sold upwards of 200,000 copies, it was slammed by a wave of criticism for its political incorrectness and its stereotypical portrayal of Latinos. Oprah took serious heat for plugging the novel. The publisher, Macmillan-owned Flatiron Books, apologized for the excessive promotional campaign and removed the Grapes of Wrath reference from the cover. Citing “specific threats to booksellers and the author,” Flatiron chose to cancel Cummins’s book tour. Laura Miller’s piece on the controversy at Slate sums up the problem pretty well, posing the question “Will the American Dirt Fiasco Change American Publishing?”

Note to Author: “Pendeja, You Ain’t Steinbeck”

A reductive version of the complaints about American Dirt claims that the novel’s detractors believe a white woman shouldn’t write about the experiences of Latino migrants. In truth, nearly all of the considered criticism of the novel points out either inaccuracies or stereotypes which, according to “Pendeja, You Ain’t Steinbeck”—Myriam Gurba’s widely shared review at Tropics of Meta—betray Cummins’s lack of knowledge about her subject matter and her attempt to render a complex situation and culture into “trauma porn” palatable to an American readership envisioned as primarily white. Slate says that American Dirt‘s publisher went wrong by enthusiastically hawking a commercial novel as if it made “a contribution to a vital understanding” of the immigration issue when in fact the migrant experience was merely used “as a backdrop for an entertaining suspense story.”

In other words, when it comes to promoting a serious political message or pushing for sociopolitical change, The Grapes of Wrath it ain’t.

The controversy over American Dirt isn’t over yet. Starting tonight at midnight, Apple TV+ will live-stream a discussion taped last month that features Oprah, Cummins, and three prominent critics of the novel. The show, as The Hollywood Reporter puts it, will be a “debate about the marginalization of Latino voices, the lack of diversity in publishing, and the question of who is best suited to tell a given story.”

Image courtesy Slate magazine.

Text of Tribute to Geert Mak At Award Event in Holland

Image of Bill Steigerwald, Geert Mak, and Queen Maxima at award event in Holland

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.—Ed.

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.

John Steinbeck Saw “Fake News” Coming When Donald Trump Was Still In Diapers

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Did John Steinbeck discover “fake news” seven decades before President Donald Trump? Based on what he wrote about the mainstream media of his day in A Russian Journal, the author of The Grapes of Wrath came pretty close.

Cover image from John Steinbeck's 1948 book A Russian JournalA Russian Journal is Steinbeck’s first-person journalistic account of the trip he took with photographer Robert Capa in 1947 to the war-battered Soviet Union. In Chapter 1, before he sets off for Russia, Steinbeck describes why he and Capa mistrusted the way the news in America was being gathered, edited, and disseminated by the dominant print and electronic media of their day. It has a familiar ring:

We were depressed, not so much by the news but by the handling of it. For news is no longer news, at least that part of it which draws the most attention. News has become a matter of punditry. A man sitting at a desk in Washington or New York reads the cables and rearranges them to fit his own mental pattern and his by-line. What we often read as news now is not news at all but the opinion of one of half a dozen pundits as to what that news means.

Steinbeck didn’t call it “fake news.” And he was complaining about bias in the media from a partisan New York liberal Democrat’s point of view. But anyone whose politics are not located in the dead center of the political spectrum today can feel his pain.

Claims of political bias or slanted news coverage from the left and right were nothing new when A Russian Journal was published in 1948, and they’ve been with us ever since. Conservatives have complained about the liberal East Coast media for half a century. In the babble of our Talk Radio/Cable News/Digital Age the mainstream media is criticized 24/7 from a thousand sane and insane places. No faction is happy with the spin of the news. In 2016 a Bernie supporter or a lifelong Nation magazine subscriber was just as likely to be unhappy with CNN’s coverage of the election as a member of the Tea Party.

Composite image of John Steinbeck on journalism

The Mainstream Media’s Loss was Literature’s Gain

Though the young John Steinbeck was sacked as a New York City newspaper reporter because he couldn’t stop using his literary skills to improve on the facts, he was basically a journalist. A literary journalist. He had a love-hate for the journalism profession and its practitioners. He envied the ability of reporters to parachute into a strange place and quickly come up with the basic facts for a news story. But he also knew from experience that no journalist or writer—no matter how great—ever gets the whole story or captures more than just a glint of what really happened in a bank robbery, a presidential campaign, or a world war. He wrote this in A Russian Journal:

Capa came back with about four thousand negatives, and I with several hundred pages of notes. We have wondered how to set this trip down and, after much discussion, have decided to write it as it happened, day by day, experience by experience, and sight by sight, without departmentalizing. We shall write what we saw and heard. I know that this is contrary to a large part of modern journalism, but for that very reason it might be a relief. . . . This is just what happened to us. It is not the Russian story, but simply a Russian story.

Cover image from John Steinbeck's 1962 book Travels with CharleySteinbeck’s journalism was super-subjective–sometimes to a fault. Russian Journal was his story about the backward, unfree, monstrous USSR he glimpsed in 1947, just as Travels with Charley was his subjective story about the 1960 America he saw on his iconic 10,000-mile road trip. Both books started out as works of nonfiction–as ambitious acts of serious, albeit personal, journalism. In Charley the many fictions Steinbeck slipped into his story about America overwhelmed the “true” facts, and after 50 years its publishers had to admit that it was so fictionalized Charley could not be considered a credible account of how he traveled or whom he really met.

A Russian Journal has suffered no such loss of credibility. It’s a great work of subjective journalism—a rare glimpse into a dark and alien world by a keen observer. Anyone teaching college students how to report and write in a precise, interesting, and powerful way would be smart to have them study how well Steinbeck did it—his way, and under trying circumstances .

The 1960 Election and Steinbeck’s Pacific Grove Stay in Travels with Charley

Image of Bill Steigerwald's timeline of Steinbeck's Travels with Charley

Fifty-five Novembers ago this week, as the historic 1960 election between Nixon and JFK was coming to a photo finish, the Steinbecks–John, Elaine, and their dog Charley–were laying over at the Steinbeck family cottage in Pacific Grove on California’s Monterey Peninsula.

In time and distance, Steinbeck was a little more than halfway through his 11-week Travels with Charley road trip. He and Charley had left Sag Harbor, New York in his pickup/camper combo, Rocinante, on September 23, 1960, and would return to New York City around December 5-6. Their 75-day journey covered about 10,000 miles of mostly two-lane highway.

Based on clues found in letters and the Monterey Peninsula Herald, the Steinbeck family relaxed at the Pacific Grove cottage with Steinbeck’s sister Beth for about two weeks. They were quickly discovered by the local press.

Cover image of Dogging Steinbeck, by Bill Steigerwald

As I write in my ebook Dogging Steinbeck:

In 1960 the Traveling Steinbecks were at the cottage for only a day or two when the Monterey Peninsula Herald dispatched a writer and photographer to do a story. The resulting feature, which ran in the Nov. 4 paper, was very well written by Mike Thomas and included a photo of Steinbeck standing in the garden with a cigarette in his mouth.
 
Thomas found Steinbeck fixing a wooden front gate, which the author said he had probably built himself 30 years earlier. Describing Steinbeck as a big man with broad features, piercing blue eyes, graying hair and small goatee, Thomas said he was wearing corduroy pants and a shapeless green sweater.
 
His fingers were nicotine stained and he had a Zippo cigarette lighter on a string around his neck. Wife Elaine was there. So was “an aging poodle sitting in a car at the curbside.” When Thomas asked if he would ever move back to the Monterey area, Steinbeck said he felt like a stranger on the peninsula and repeated his Thomas Wolfe mantra – “You can’t go home again.”

1960 Monterey Peninsula Herald story about Steinbeck's Pacific Grove stay

While relaxing at his old “P.G.” home, Steinbeck saw the remnants of the once-thriving sardine fishing industry he described in Cannery Row, and he apparently revisited some of his old haunts on Alvarado Street, including the Keg, which was owned by his friend Johnny Garcia.

He also cast an absentee ballot for Kennedy, who lost California to Nixon by 35,000 votes in the 1960 election, a race that was too close to call until results from Illinois gave Kennedy the edge. (JFK was actually ahead in California for about a week until the absentee ballots were counted.) JFK lost to Nixon in then-heavily Republican Monterey County by a whopping 56-43 percent majority.

Image of the 1960 election debate between Kennedy and Nixon

Steinbeck’s ambitious search for America, which he acknowledged in Travels with Charley and in private letters was largely a failure, resumed around November 15. He drove on to Amarillo, Texas, where Elaine caught up with him for a Thanksgiving feast at a massive cattle ranch owed by the family of her ex-husband, the movie star Zachary Scott. From Texas, Steinbeck and Charley drove home alone to New York by way of New Orleans, where Steinbeck witnessed the ugly protests against the integration of the city’s public schools described so powerfully in Travels with Charley.

Image of the New Orleans desegregation protest described in Travels with Charley

He kept no expense records and took virtually no notes. His book Travels With Charley in Search of America, the fictionalized account of his trip and the people he met on it, came out in the summer of 1962. Published by Viking Press, it was a huge commercial and critical success. In late October it touched the top of the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list for a week and stayed on the Top 10 nonfiction list for more than a year.

For Dogging Steinbeck and my website Truth About Charley. I tried to create a definitive timeline of where Steinbeck was on each day of his trip. It wasn’t easy and it has some holes that probably never will be filled. It’s based on the unedited first draft of Travels with Charley; letters Steinbeck wrote from the road to his wife Elaine and others; biographies, newspaper articles, and interviews; and best-guesses. It’s as accurate as I could make it.

Image of Adlai Stevenson

The results of the 1960 election pleased Steinbeck. A lifelong partisan Democrat, he despised Richard Nixon, a fact he repeatedly made that clear in letters to his hero Adlai Stevenson in the summer of 1960 and in the first draft of Travels with Charley, before most of his political slights were deleted by Viking’s editors. In 1968, as Steinbeck’s health was getting worse, he had to endure Nixon’s political resurrection and watch him defeat Hubert Humphrey. But, as I say in Dogging Steinbeck, “Luckily, he died that year on Dec. 20, so he never had to witness his hated Tricky Dick being sworn in as president.”

Illustration showing where John Steinbeck was at various times during Travels with Charley by Stacey Innerst, courtesy Bill Steigerwald.
 

Travels with Charley Around The United States? Fact and Friction in Bill Steigerwald’s Book, Dogging Steinbeck

 Cover image of Bill Steigerwald's Dogging Steinbeck, the truth behind Travels with Charley

Shortly before John Steinbeck flew from the United States to Sweden to accept the Nobel Prize in Literature on December 10, 1962, Anders Österling, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, synopsized the enduring works of fiction that motivated the academy’s decision to award Steinbeck the Nobel Prize. Österling said this about Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley in Search of America, published the same year:

Steinbeck’s latest book is an account of his experiences during a three-month tour of forty American states, Travels with Charley . . . .  He travelled in a small truck equipped with a cabin where he slept and kept his stores. He travelled incognito, his only companion being a black poodle. We see here what a very experienced observer and raisonneur he is. In a series of admirable explorations into local colour, he rediscovers his country and its people. In its informal way this book is also a forceful criticism of society. The traveller in Rosinante – the name [John Steinbeck] gave his truck – shows a slight tendency to praise the old at the expense of the new, even though it is quite obvious that he is on guard against the temptation. “I wonder why progress so often looks like destruction,” he says in one place when he sees the bulldozers flattening out the verdant forest of Seattle to make room for the feverishly expanding residential areas and the skyscrapers. It is, in any case, a most topical reflection, valid also outside America.

The Facts and the Friction About Travels with Charley

Fifty years later, my research revealed evidence that many of the events recounted in Steinbeck’s fall 1960 driving tour of the United States were embellished, contrived, or invented. Like readers and reviewers at the time, however, the Nobel Prize committee had little reason to doubt the literal truth of where, when, and how Steinbeck traveled; who (other than Charley) sometimes sat, conversing in non-canine, in the seat next to him; and who he encountered in fact, not imagination, during the road trip he took to reconnect with the United States after his and his wife Elaine’s recent return from England. As I show in my book Dogging Steinbeck, John Steinbeck did a lot of fictionalizing in Travels with Charley. Viking Press worked hard to create the convenient myth that he traveled alone, traveled rough, and traveled slowly. This legend lives on in hallowed academe, where adjustments to what the anointed call the John Steinbeck “canon” are slower than change at the Vatican, and books not written by the tenured Steinbeck priesthood are met with denial, silence, or anathema.

Why John Steinbeck’s Writing About Marginalized Misfits In the United States Deserved the Nobel Prize Anyway

Could the 1962 Nobel Prize decision have gone the other way if the truth about Travels with Charley were known then? I doubt it. John Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for novels and stories dramatizing daily life among marginalized people in the United States written decades before Travels with Charley. Did he deserve the award? If anything, it was overdue, and he didn’t have long to live. His modest Nobel Prize acceptance speech appealed from his failing heart to the world’s conscience at a time when totalitarian repression and Cold War conflict appeared to Steinbeck to threaten the survival of the human species and the individual’s freedom to live, think, and create. But Travels with Charley, a bestseller, was among the top nonfiction books of 1962, and it continues to sell well, occupy Steinbeck scholars, and appeal to non-academic readers throughout the United States and abroad. The inconvenient truth is that it belongs in the fiction section of the John Steinbeck shelf. The creaky Steinbeck canon could use an honest overhaul, and Steinbeck lovers everywhere deserve truth in advertising.

Learn more about the results of Bill Steigerwald’s investigative reporting, and Bill Barich’s book about Travels with Charley (also shown in photo), by reading  “Shades of Partial Truth in Travels with Charley at SteinbeckNow.com.

Remembering the San Francisco Journalist Who Interviewed John Steinbeck During Travels with Charley

Image of Curt Gentry, the writer who interviewed Steinbeck during Travels with Charley

The death of the San Francisco freelance writer Curt Gentry on July 10 made me especially sad. An old-school journalist, a loyal fan of John Steinbeck, and a fearless writer about subjects close to Steinbeck’s divided heart (J. Edgar Hoover, San Francisco whorehouses), he helped me greatly when I researched Dogging Steinbeck, my true account of Travels with Charley, Steinbeck’s so-called non-fiction book. Curt Gentry was a gentleman, and one of the nicest guys I ever met.

Cover images from Helter Skelter, J. Edgard Hoover, and other books by Curt Gentry

Helter Skelter, J. Edgar Hoover, and Travels with Charley

As noted in his San Francisco Chronicle obit, Gentry made his fame and fortune co-writing Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders, and a devastating biography of John Steinbeck’s dark nemesis, J. Edgar Hoover. Controversy and power never frightened Curt. Among his 13 books were histories of the downing by the USSR of an American spy plane during the Eisenhower Administration, detested by Steinbeck, and of the legendary madams who made San Francisco famous and, for Steinbeck, appealing.

From the mid-1950s until his death, Gentry lived in San Francisco’s trendy/hip North Beach neighborhood. In late October of 1960, Steinbeck pulled into town with his wife Elaine and their dog Charley on the California leg of the author’s Travels with Charley road trip to rediscover an America he said he no longer understood. Gentry deftly landed an interview with his literary hero and wrote a long piece for the San Francisco Chronicle about what Steinbeck told him.

In late October of 1960, Steinbeck pulled into town with his wife Elaine and their dog Charley on the California leg of the author’s Travels with Charley road trip . . . . Gentry deftly landed an interview with his literary hero and wrote a long piece for the San Francisco Chronicle about what Steinbeck told him.

Fifty years later, Gentry was one of the first people I tracked down when I began my research before I wrote Dogging Steinbeck, a book that reveals how Steinbeck and his editors at Viking padded Travels with Charley with fictions and fibs, then passed it off as a work of nonfiction for half a century. In The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer, Steinbeck’s biographer Jackson Benson mentioned Gentry’s San Francisco Chronicle piece without giving the young journalist’s name.

Thanks to the San Francisco Public Library and the Internet, I found Gentry’s address and phone number and called him from Pittsburgh to ask for his help retracing Travels with Charley for my book. How would the man who exposed Helter Skelter and J. Edgar Hoover but admired Steinbeck react when he heard I was trying to piece together his hero’s actual (as opposed to imagined) Travels with Charley? He replied he’d be happy to meet me for lunch whenever I was in San Francisco. I met with him twice, on two separate trips, during long, memorable lunches at nearly empty North Beach restaurants.

Image of San Francisco Chronicle interview with Steinbeck about Travels with Charley

“Steinbeck Meets the Press” During Travels with Charley

Here, in this “Steinbeck meets the press” excerpt from Dogging Steinbeck, is what Curt Gentry told me about his encounter with John Steinbeck at Steinbeck’s San Francisco hotel during Travels with Charley in 1960:

“Headquartered at the St. Francis, Steinbeck hung out with old friends at some of the city’s top bars and restaurants. The local print media instantly discovered his arrival. Herb Caen, the famed city columnist of the San Francisco Chronicle and ‘the uncrowned prince’ of the city, reported in his daily column on Oct. 28 that his friend John Steinbeck had ‘chugged’ into town ‘from New York’ on the evening of Oct. 26.

“The next day local writer Curt Gentry got a tip from a Chronicle staffer. Doing what any hustling freelancer would do, Gentry called the famous visiting author in his hotel room and begged for an interview. Steinbeck was notoriously publicity shy, but he told Gentry to come to the St. Francis the next morning.

Doing what any hustling freelancer would do, Gentry called the famous visiting author in his hotel room and begged for an interview. Steinbeck was notoriously publicity shy, but he told Gentry to come to the St. Francis the next morning.

“Gentry, then 29, would go on to write more than a dozen books, including his biggest one with Vincent Bugliosi, Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders. But in 1960 he was a struggling writer, ex-newspaper reporter and bookstore manager. He lived in North Beach, the super-hip Italian neighborhood in downtown San Francisco. He mixed with jazz musicians, young writers and the Beats, who were headquartered at Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore at the corner of Broadway and Columbus. He knew Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsburg in passing and novelist/poet Richard Brautigan well, but Gentry was also a serious Steinbeck fan.

“On my research trip in the spring of 2010 Gentry met me at the Washington Square Bar & Grill. In its heyday the dim, aging, wood-lined North Beach landmark was a hangout for writers, politicos, musicians and the city’s in-crowd. But the WashBaG, as Herb Caen had nicknamed it, was almost empty when I was there and in a few months would close forever. Gentry, as well known to the staff as the owner, was easy to spot at the bar, looking dapper in his brown cap. He was the real deal. Helter Skelter made him rich. His 1991 New York Times bestseller J. Edgar Hoover exposed Hoover’s paranoia, his serial abuses of power and how he created the myth of the FBI as invincible and incorruptible.

Gentry, then 29, . . . mixed with jazz musicians, young writers and the Beats, who were headquartered at Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore at the corner of Broadway and Columbus. He knew Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsburg in passing and novelist/poet Richard Brautigan well, but Gentry was also a serious Steinbeck fan.

“At 79 Gentry was still writing tough books like the one he was working on about the Las Vegas mob. He couldn’t have been nicer, more helpful or more supportive of my Charley-retracing project. Not only did he buy me lunch and ignore our wide political divide. But he told me stories about the 1960 North Beach scene, repeated his favorite Steinbeck gossip and, when I expressed doubt about pulling off a book deal, kindly said, ‘I have faith in you.’

“On top of that moral support, Gentry gave me something else that was priceless – 10 pages of notes he had typed up after his meeting with Steinbeck. An observant record of what Steinbeck was doing and thinking in mid-Charley trip, Gentry’s account depicts a politically partisan 58-year-old at the top of his game, not lonely, not depressed, but full of piss and vinegar.

“When Gentry went to the St. Francis for his 11 a.m. interview, he said, Elaine was still in bed, Charley was in a kennel and John was hung over. ‘It looked like they both had quite a night,’ Gentry told me. A longtime admirer of Steinbeck, Gentry showed up at Steinbeck’s hotel suite with two shopping bags filled with every Steinbeck title he could carry – 21 books.

Gentry showed up at Steinbeck’s hotel suite with two shopping bags filled with every Steinbeck title he could carry – 21 books.

“He asked Steinbeck to sign the books, which he cheerfully did. Steinbeck had just finished sending Adlai Stevenson a telegram containing some silly anti-Nixon jokes and was sewing together the clasp for his walking stick. Later, after Steinbeck finished a rant about what he called the immorality of Americans, Gentry wrote that ‘he tossed the stick across the room in anger.’

“In his notes, Gentry described Steinbeck as friendly, talkative and animated. They discussed, among many subjects, the presidential election, what was wrong with America, why his friend and neighbor Dag Hammarskjold would make a great president and why Hemingway should write about people not bullfighting. Steinbeck told Gentry he was driving across the country in an attempt to find out what the American people thought about politics. ‘Everywhere he has traveled,’ Gentry wrote in his notes, ‘there is fantastic interest. People are not indifferent, or undecided. They just won’t say.’

“Telling Gentry he had lately been seeing signs of a close Kennedy victory, Steinbeck made fun of Eisenhower and bemoaned the fact that for the previous eight years the Republicans had ‘made it fashionable to be stupid.’ Gentry also noted that Steinbeck ‘had much to say on Richard Nixon, a great part of it unprintable.’ According to Gentry, Steinbeck was down on Americans for becoming soft and what he called ‘immoral.’ Previewing what he would express in his recently completed but not yet published novel The Winter of Our Discontent, Steinbeck defined immorality as ‘taking out more than you are willing to put back.’

Telling Gentry he had lately been seeing signs of a close Kennedy victory, Steinbeck made fun of Eisenhower and bemoaned the fact that for the previous eight years the Republicans had ‘made it fashionable to be stupid.’

“Steinbeck, wrote Gentry, ‘went on to note emphatically that “a nation or a group or an individual cannot survive immorality. The individual can’t survive being soft, comforted, content. He only survives well when the press is on him. In Rome when they began taking more out than they put in they began to decay.” And then his voice grew louder, his gestures became more emphatic as he added “If a fuse blew out in the Empire State Building today a million people would trample themselves to death . . .  No one can do anything anymore. Who could slaughter and cut up a cow if they had to? No it has to be carefully cut for them, cellophane wrapped. They have lost the ability to be versatile. When either people or animals lose their versatility they become extinct.”‘

“When Gentry asked if he’d ever come back to live in California, Steinbeck said what he would later write in Travels with Charley after visiting his old haunts in Monterey. Steinbeck, according to Gentry, ‘said, sadly, “The truest words ever written were Thomas Wolfe’s ‘You Can’t Go Home Again.’ I wish it weren’t so but when I come back to California to stay it will be in a box.”‘

“Gentry had another gift for me. He gave me a copy of his original Steinbeck article, before it was edited. The piece ran in the San Francisco Chronicle on Sunday, Nov. 6, 1960, under the headline ‘John Steinbeck: “America’s King Arthur is Coming.”‘ (In an eerie presaging of Jackie Kennedy’s post-assassination comment that her husband’s presidency had been ‘an American Camelot,’ Steinbeck had said, apparently in reference to JFK, that all countries have legendary King Arthur-types who show up during times of trouble.)

Gentry had another gift for me. He gave me a copy of his original Steinbeck article, before it was edited.

“In his article Gentry described Steinbeck as ‘big in body, mind, and heart’ and ‘full of humor, vitriol, compassion and strong feeling.’ What Gentry had written was printed in the paper verbatim until it came to his attempts to share some of Steinbeck’s stronger political opinions with the Chronicle’s readers. A 500-word chunk at the end of his article containing all the mean things Steinbeck had said about Nixon and Eisenhower had been simply lopped off. The newspaper, which along with the San Francisco Examiner gave its editorial support to Nixon, wasn’t going to let a famous author trash its Republican hero two days before the election.

“The edits didn’t surprise Gentry. He was very involved in politics in 1960. Like Steinbeck, he was a devout Adlai Stevenson Democrat. During the 1956 presidential year, when he was active in the Young Californians for Stevenson, Gentry was called upon to drive Stevenson around town a couple times. He also was a driver for JFK, who apparently was on his best behavior because Gentry had no sexy story to share.

A 500-word chunk at the end of his article containing all the mean things Steinbeck had said about Nixon and Eisenhower had been simply lopped off. The newspaper, which along with the San Francisco Examiner gave its editorial support to Nixon, wasn’t going to let a famous author trash its Republican hero two days before the election.

“Gentry and Steinbeck kept in touch, exchanging several letters over the next few years. After Steinbeck’s death Gentry wanted to write a book about him and his relationship with his close friend Ed Ricketts, the marine biologist and real-life model for Doc in Cannery Row. Steinbeck’s agent, Elizabeth Otis, liked the idea, Gentry said. But widow Elaine – who controlled Steinbeck’s estate with a firm hand – nixed it. Elaine was, to put it kindly, not Gentry’s favorite Steinbeck. One thing that bothered him, he said, was the closeness of Elaine to Steinbeck’s biographers, Jackson Benson and Jay Parini.

“’They automatically accepted anything she said about his first two wives, Carol or Gwen,’ he said. ‘Everything I’ve read and heard is that Elaine was a real ball-buster and a terrible person, with her ex-husband, Zachary Scott (the movie actor), manipulating her in the background.’ That was a new bit of inside-Steinbeck World gossip/dirt for me. I had no idea if it was true and didn’t care one way or the other, but it sounded like something a guy who wrote an expose of J.E. Hoover might know.

“Since Gentry had lived almost exclusively in North Beach since the mid-1950s, he was a good person to ask about how the neighborhood had changed. The biggest difference, he said, was the proliferation of striptease joints. That was pretty much all the ‘entertainment’ there was in 2010. But in 1960, the clubs and bars spinning around the intersection of Columbus and Broadway were booking stars of the present and incubating stars of the future. Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Art Tatum played in clubs. Johnny Mathis got his start in North Beach in the mid ‘50s right after high school.

“The famous North Beach nightclub the Hungry i, by itself, is said to have launched the careers of Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Bill Cosby, Jonathan Winters and Barbra Streisand. The Hungry i was owned by mad impresario Enrico Banducci, who also opened up Enrico’s Coffee House on Broadway. Upstairs was Finochio’s, the famous nightclub featuring a vaudevillian floorshow of female impersonators. Gentry knew and liked Banducci. As soon as he made enough money, Gentry said, he basically lived in Enrico’s sidewalk cafe, which by day was a Herb Caen watering hole and by night a jazzy de facto after-hours club for cops, prostitutes and scuffling writers like him.

“Enrico’s Café, now closed, still existed in 2010. But its glory days, like North Beach’s, were ancient history. The afternoon I went to check it out it was closed for lunch. Basically unchanged since 1960, its outside tables were jammed inside behind big glass doors. The sidewalk patio was showing its age, its concrete cracked and its booths worn at the corners. The three-story building needed a paint job. The top floor where Finochio’s raunchy floorshow once shocked or entertained the straight world looked vacant.

Since Gentry had lived almost exclusively in North Beach since the mid-1950s, he was a good person to ask about how the neighborhood had changed. The biggest difference, he said, was the proliferation of striptease joints.

“Enrico’s Café’s near neighbors in 2010 were strip clubs like the Hungry I Club (‘The Best Girls in Town’) and Big Al’s adult bookstore. But still on the corner of Columbus and Broadway was City Lights Books, which became world famous in 1956 after its owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti published Allen Ginsberg’s poem ‘Howl.’ The precedent-setting First Amendment test-case that followed ultimately overturned the country’s obscenity laws and allowed banned books like Lady Chatterley’s Lover to be published in the Land of the Free.

“For several days in the fall of 1960 Steinbeck loafed only a few hundred feet from City Lights, yet he had nothing to do with the Beats and their revolutionary scene, and vice versa. Ferlinghetti’s assistant told me Ferlinghetti and Steinbeck – the new literary generation and the old – never met then or any other time. By 2010 City Lights and the Beat Museum – a well-done retail shrine to the lives and works of Kerouac, Ginsberg and other dead Beats – were the only two reasons left for going to what was once one of the coolest, most cutting edge, most culturally important intersections in America.”

Curt Gentry’s Book Blurb for Dogging Steinbeck

“I still believe John Steinbeck is one of America’s greatest writers and I still love Travels with Charley, be it fact or fiction or, as Bill Steigerwald doggedly proved, both. While I disagree with a number of Steigerwald’s conclusions, I don’t dispute his facts. He greatly broadened my understanding of Steinbeck the man and the author, particularly during his last years. And, whether Steigerwald intended it or not, in tracking down the original draft of Travels with Charley he made a significant contribution to Steinbeck’s legacy. Dogging Steinbeck is a good honest book.” – Curt Gentry

Photo of Curt Gentry by Jim Wilson courtesy San Francisco Chronicle. Excerpt from Dogging Steinbeck courtesy Bill Steigerwald.