TRAVEL | BOOKS
Travel Writing That’s Earned A Place On the Bookshelf
Sometimes armchair travel is the best you can do
“When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever, and now that I’m fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ship’s whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tramping… I fear the disease is incurable.” — John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley: In Search of America
Did you know John Steinbeck was also a travel writer?
I can’t recall who introduced me, but eventually his Travels With Charley made it onto my lengthy reading list. Upon opening it, the two-page intro spoke to all the crevices of my soul, and I was smitten.
Here was a giant of literary fiction reminding me that this restlessness to see the world, this affliction, has been with us for a long time, and that I’m not alone.
Published in 1962, just before the lost-innocence of the Kennedy assassination, Steinbeck recounts an epic road trip across the nation with his dog Charley in the…
