Small towns in Maine haven’t changed much since 1960 …
Neither have many of the crossroads.
Steinbeck didn’t sleep in a Bangor motel as he says in
“Charley,” but I spent my first night at a Walmart there.
One Response to Steinbeck’s road to Bangor
“Travels Without Charley”
In "Travels Without Charley," Bill Steigerwald's road blog from the fall of 2010, he detailed how he discovered John Steinbeck’s 1962 nonfiction classic "Travels With Charley" is not a true and honest account of the cross-country trip he made in the fall of 1960. The daily account of Steigerwald's 11,276-mile trip, which first appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, starts in Sag Harbor, N.Y.
I went back and reread the parts of the book where he’s laying out the purpose of his trip and why he’s writing the book, and I didn’t see anything like you find in most modern nonfiction books, where the author bends over backward to say, “This is mostly true, but I was working from memory in a few places, and I changed a few things to make the narrative clearer and avoid lawsuits.”