Travels With Charley

Travels with Charley : Steinbeck and Racism

In his travelogue , Travels with Charley : In Search of America (1962 John Steinbeck recounts his trip across the United States with his French standard poodle Charley in a custom-made camper . The American writer 's determination to travel across the entire breadth of the American continent was an obvious indication of his search for America a usual theme in American travel literature . This work is more than a travel book . Here , Steinbeck tries to answer the questions : What is America ? What defines it ? What makes America something

unique ? While the author sees the beautiful , he also finds the ugly and fearful side of America

Racism is one of the themes tackled in Travels with Charley , which Steinbeck highlights in the fourth chapter of the last part of the book Although the author foresaw the looming problems of pollution , waste of natural resources , and urban decay , he did not foresee the degree to which the racial problem would stay to be southern . His treatment of the South completely in terms of the racial tumult in the 1960s is understandable , as brittleness characterized the mood of the South during that period and anger was the predominant emotion . Steinbeck personified this anger in the cheerleaders in New Orleans who gathered everyday to ridicule little black girls who were attending an integrated a grammar school

In the second to last chapter of the book , the author was drawn to the distortion of normal life (249 ) and left Texas in...