Bill Steigerwald

The 27th review of my book on Amazon.com — by a woman named Judy who grew up in Montana — is perfect. Nicely written, smart and sensible, it’s a fair and balanced assessment by a Steinbeck fan who wasn’t blinded by her love of “Travels With Charley.”   Valuable Addition to American Road Trip Literature, April 8, 2013 Amazon Verified Purchase(What’s this?) This review is from: Dogging Steinbeck: How I went in search of John Steinbeck’s America, found my own America, and exposed the truth about ‘Travels With Charley’ (Paperback) I read just about every American travelogue and “Travels with Charley” was my first and favorite. I was a believer through the first couple of readings, but after decades of long road trips I began to be suspicious. Dogging Steinbeck confirmed my doubts. I never learned much during days spent just rocketing over highways except that this is a vast country sparsely populated with mostly kind, helpful people. The best conversations, comparable to the ones Steinbeck apparently enjoyed daily, generally occur only in hostels or while soaking nude in remote hot springs. I believe Steinbeck did not set out to perpetrate a fraud. He could not have known that he couldn’t learn much in his mode of travel over just 11 weeks. Finding knowledge, adventure, and joy in a road trip takes skill and a propensity to dawdle. Just as Steinbeck’s fraudulent account was not premeditated, Bill Steigerwald’s book was not motivated by the desire to unmask Steinbeck. No experienced road-tripper could miss the fictional aspects, especially armed with Steinbeck documents detailing the actual trip as was Steigerwald. One critical reviewer who obviously has not read Dogging Steinbeck called it a hatchet job. It is most certainly not. The author’s respect for both the truth and Steinbeck is obvious. I wish John Steinbeck had been healthy and free enough to apply his wonderful literary skill to the kind of trip he needed to take to write the book that he initially envisioned. But if the book we got was the only one he could write, I forgive him. Because of Travels with Charley my life has been richer, happier, and, while travelling, I have attended Sunday services from cathedrals to adobe missions to inner-city converted store fronts. Still, Charley is the only fictionalized travelogue I will forgive. A travel book is only one perspective of one journey, and Steigerwald is right to insist that readers are owed a true account. I felt that Steigerwald’s account of his trip and his research was as honest as he could make it. His political opinions do not detract from the book: although he did not make his book about himself, he did tell us who he is and that can only help readers to understand his perspective. I recommend this book to all who enjoy American road trip literature.

The Truth About 'Travels With Charley'

Bill Steigerwald

Ah, the great power of C-SPAN. After my hour-long interview with Brian Lamb on his March 3 “Q&A” program, sales of “Dogging Steinbeck” surged nicely. I’m not ready to retire yet.  But before my C-SPAN appearance, my ranking on Amazon’s various Journalism and Travel categories was never higher than No. 4 (which it hit briefly after a rave Weekly Standard review by Sean Macomber). Brian Lamb and C-SPAN took me to these dizzy heights Monday morning. Staying up there will be tough without help from the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and Charlie Rose, but being No. 1 in something for even just a little while is kind of fun. Dogging Steinbeck, March 4, 2013 Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,672 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store) #1 in Books > Education & Reference > Writing, Research & Publishing Guides > Writing > Journalism & Nonfiction #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Reference > Writing, Research & Publishing Guides > Journalism #3 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Travel > Essays & Travelogues

The Truth About 'Travels With Charley'

Bill Steigerwald

My journalism career is complete. Brian Lamb, founding father of CSPAN, American hero and fellow journalist, has interviewed me. Not that I can remember anything he asked me about my book “Dogging Steinbeck” or what I answered when we met in CSPAN’s beautiful DC studios three weeks ago. My interview with the man I like to call “St. Brian” will be displayed for the whole world to see on Lamb’s Sunday night “Q&A” program on CSPAN March 3 at 8 and 11 p.m. ET. I dread watching my “performance” almost as much as I dreaded doing the one-on-one interview. I’m a radio Steigerwald Brother, not a TV Steigerwald Brother, as should be obvious Sunday night. But my pain and dread were worth the thrill. Brian Lamb and CSPAN and I go way back together — or at least I do. I first spoke to him in 1980 not long after the cable channel was born and began providing American TV watchers with their first taste of real ideological diversity. I called CSPAN from my apartment in Hollywood USA to ask a question of  the guest, Ed Clark, the 1980 Libertarian Party presidential candidate. Clark couldn’t even buy some decent network TV-news time in those bad old oligopolistic days when the lefty liberals at CBS, ABC, NBC called the shots and set the national political agenda. A year or two later I met Lamb for about two seconds at a party in L.A. thrown the L.A. Times’ cable TV reporter. In 2004 I turned the tables on Lamb and interviewed him for my weekly Q&A at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.  A year later, on New Year’s Eve, if I recall, I called him on the air during CSPAN’s 25th anniversary show. Lamb, who’s known for his laconic interviewing style and kindly, unflappable demeanor, was one of the nicest celebrity guys I ever interviewed, and I’ve interviewed hundreds of famous/important people over the years. Here’s how I set up my Q&A with Lamb, which occurred in December of 2004 and shed light on his motives for starting CSPAN and his deliberate effort to open up America’s cablewaves to more diverse and strident political voices: God Bless, Brian Lamb Talk about your fair-and-balanced TV. Thanks to saintly cable pioneer Brian Lamb, C-SPAN has been providing the country with a serious, unbiased and unfiltered look at the widest possible spectrum of political ideas and information for 25 years. Operating on a puny $45 million annual budget provided by the cable industry, the multimedia empire that Lamb founded and has carefully fathered covers government, the political process, party conventions, debates, seminars and author appearances across the country and now includes three C-SPAN cable-satellite channels, a C-SPAN radio channel and the Web site c-span.org. After 15 years and reading 801 books, Lamb recently disappointed many faithful C-SPAN viewers by recently ending “Booknotes,” his popular hour-long Sunday program which featured his gentle, quirky interviews with top nonfiction writers. I talked to him from his offices in Washington, D.C. Q: Any regrets yet about deciding to end “Booknotes”? A: Sure. The regrets that you have are tied to the fact that so many people seemed to value the information. You hate to give something like that up, because it meant so much to enough people that it kept me going over the years. [...]

The Truth About 'Travels With Charley'

Bill Steigerwald

I’ve gotten many thoughtful comments on and off the record about “Dogging Steinbeck” from readers in China and Minnesota and Belgium. Travel master Paul Theroux sent me a nice note saying how much he liked “Dogging Steinbeck.” He’s publicly endorsed my expose of the fictions and lies that John Steinbeck and his truth-challenged editors/publishers passed off as a work of nonfiction in “Travels With Charley.” Brian Lamb of CSPAN liked “Dogging Steinbeck” so much he invited me on his show to make a tongue-tied fool of myself (my global debut is Sunday, March 3, at 8 p.m. on CSPAN’s “Q&A”). But then I also get nasty ad hominem attacks like this one from a disturbed person named Heidi: “It would appear that you are bitter hack who is spending your retirement trying to justify your failures by breaking down the successes of those who came before you. Attempting to expose the fraudulence of other authors is a testament to the truth of your character. You are a man who is wasting the opportunity to write on far reaching criticism of books whose meaning are out of your reach. Even if your assertions are true, it matters not as Steinbeck and Capote were gifted writers. You, Sir, are a fraud and you spend your days running from that truth. I’ll take Steinbeck’s lies over your bullshit any day.” If turnabout is fair play, I get to make some wild-assed assumptions about Heidi’s troubled psyche. I’d guess that  Heidi, who clearly doesn’t understand the difference between journalism and fiction, apparently was so unhappy to learn that one of her favorite childhood books was full of shit that she decided to take out her unhappiness on little old me. I’m sure she didn’t read my book or take the time to find out how I came to discover Steinbeck’s literary fraud. But, as I like to do when I get these kinds of irrational attacks, I hereby offer Heidi a free ebook copy of “Dogging Steinbeck” so that she find out how wrong she is about me, my motives and why I spent  three years and a lot of my own money writing my book.    

The Truth About 'Travels With Charley'

Bill Steigerwald

I don’t get too many emails about my expose of Steinbeck and my debunking of “Travels With Charley,”  but most of them are pretty smart and supportive. Then I get really silly/dumb emails like this one: “You sad, sad man. Why couldn’t you leave it alone AND us with our reading pleasure ?  What’s next, the REAL invasion of Poland or the TRUE story of the Omaha Beach landing? It’s history and doesn’t need the bones laid bare.” I hope this is from a 12-year-old, but if not, here’s my annoyed response. “Perhaps you don’t mind if famous writers make up books and pass them off as true accounts; perhaps you don’t think there’s anything wrong about a major publisher, Viking Press, making tens of millions of dollars selling a book under false pretenses; perhaps you would rather remain ignorant of the truth about “Charley” so that you can continue to believe your romantic notions about a book that is not only full of fictions and lies but is not a very good book; I’m a journalist who set out on a mission to faithfully retrace Steinbeck’s route but quickly learned that his book was mostly fiction and a lot of carefully crafted lies. There’s nothing sad about what I did or who I am. In the real world, this is what honest journalists do — follow the facts as they find them/see them and report the results honestly. If you can’t take the truth on this silly book like a man/woman, what do you do when you find out the truth about things that matter. Unless you’re about 12, I’d say it’s time to grow up.”    

The Truth About 'Travels With Charley'