Travels with Charley in Search of America (29 page)

It is very strange. Up to Abingdon, Virginia, I can reel back the trip like film. I have almost total recall, every face is there, every hill and tree and color, and sound of speech and small scenes ready to replay themselves in my memory. After Abingdon—nothing. The way was a gray, timeless, eventless tunnel, but at the end of it was the one shining reality—my own wife, my own house in my own street, my own bed. It was all there, and I lumbered my way toward it. Rocinante could be fleet, but I had not driven her fast. Now she leaped under my heavy relentless foot, and the wind shrieked around the corners of the house. If you think I am indulging in fantasy about the trip, how can you explain that Charley knew it was over too? He at least is no dreamer, no coiner of moods. He went to sleep with his head in my lap, never looked out the window, never said “Ftt,” never urged me to a turnout. He carried out his functions like a sleepwalker, ignored whole rows of garbage cans. If that doesn’t prove the truth of my statement, nothing can.

New Jersey was another turnpike. My body was in a nerveless, tireless vacuum. The increasing river of traffic for New York carried me along, and suddenly there was the welcoming maw of the Holland Tunnel and at the other end home.

A policeman waved me out of the snake of traffic and flagged me to a stop. “You can’t go through the tunnel with that butane,” he said.

“But officer, it’s turned off.”

“Doesn’t matter. It’s the law. Can’t take gas into the tunnel.”

And suddenly I fell apart, collapsed into a jelly of weariness. “But I want to get home,” I wailed. “How am I going to get home?”

He was very kind to me, and patient too. Maybe he had a home somewhere. “You can go up and take the George Washington Bridge, or you can take a ferry.”

It was rush hour, but the gentle-hearted policeman must have seen a potential maniac in me. He held back the savage traffic and got me through and directed me with great care. I think he was strongly tempted to drive me home.

Magically I was on the Hoboken ferry and then ashore, far downtown with the daily panic rush of commuters leaping and running and dodging in front, obeying no signals. Every evening is Pamplona in lower New York. I made a turn and then another, entered a one-way street the wrong way and had to back out, got boxed in the middle of a crossing by a swirling rapids of turning people.

Suddenly I pulled to the curb in a no-parking area, cut my motor, and leaned back in the seat and laughed, and I couldn’t stop. My hands and arms and shoulders were shaking with road jitters.

An old-fashioned cop with a fine red face and a frosty blue eye leaned in toward me. “What’s the matter with you, Mac, drunk?” he asked.

I said, “Officer, I’ve driven this thing all over the country—mountains, plains, deserts. And now I’m back in my own town, where I live—and I’m lost.”

He grinned happily. “Think nothing of it, Mac,” he said. “I got lost in Brooklyn only Saturday. Now where is it you were wanting to go?”

And that’s how the traveler came home again.

The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights
Foreword by Christopher Paolini
Steinbeck’s only work of fantasy literature—a modern retelling
of the legendary Arthurian tales.
ISBN 978-0-670-01824-6

Steinbeck’s tough but loving portrait evokes the lives of Monterey’s vital laboring class and their emotional triumph over the bleak existence of life in Cannery Row.

A parable about commitment, loneliness, hope, and loss,
Of Mice and Men
remains one of America’s most widely read and beloved novels.
ISBN 978-0-14-017739-8

The diver Kino believes that his discovery of a beautiful pearl means the promise of a better life for his impoverished family. His fall from innocence is one of Steinbeck’s most moving stories about the American dream.

This cycle of coming-of-age stories tells of a spirited adolescent boy whose encounters with birth and death teach him about loss and profound emptiness, instead of giving him the more conventional hero’s pragmatic “maturity.”

Adopting the structure and themes of the Arthurian legend, Steinbeck created a “Camelot” on a shabby hillside above Monterey on the California coast and peopled it with a colorful band of knights. As Steinbeck chronicles their thoughts and emotions, temptations and lusts, he spins a tale as compelling, and ultimately as touched by sorrow, as the famous legends of the Round Table.
ISBN 978-0-14-004240-5

In September 1960, Steinbeck and his poodle, Charley, embarked on a journey across America. A picaresque tale, this chronicle of their trip meanders along scenic backroads and speeds along anonymous superhighways, moving from small towns to growing cities to glorious wilderness oases.

This original new collection brings together for the first time more than fifty of Steinbeck’s finest essays and journalistic pieces, along with the complete text of his last-published and long-out-of-print
America and Americans
.

Written as a play in story form, this novel traces the story of a man ignorant of his own sterility, a wife who commits adultery to give her husband a child, the father of that child, and the outsider whose actions affect them all.

The masterpiece of Steinbeck’s later years,
East of Eden
is the powerful and vastly ambitious novel that is both family saga and a modern retelling of the book of Genesis.

Introduction by Robert
DeMott

This Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression follows the western movement of one family and a nation in search of work and human dignity.

This powerful social novel, set in the California apple country, is a story of labor unrest in the migrant community and the search for identity of its protagonist, young Jim Nolan.

This exciting day-by-day account of Steinbeck’s trip to the Gulf of California with biologist Ed Ricketts, drawn from the longer
Sea of Cortez
, is a wonderful combination of science, philosophy, and high-spirited adventure.

First published in 1938, this collection of stories set in the rich farmland of Salinas Valley includes the O. Henry Prize-winning story “The Murder,” as well as one of Steinbeck’s most famous short works, “The Snake.”

Introduction by Donald V. Coers
In this masterful tale set in Norway during World War II, Steinbeck explores the effects of invasion on both the conquered and the conquerors. As he delves into the emotions of the German commander and the Norwegian traitor, and depicts the spirited patriotism of the Norwegian underground, Steinbeck uncovers profound, often unsettling truths about war—and about human nature.
ISBN 978-0-14-018746-5

Steinbeck’s dispatches filed from the front lines during World War II vividly evoke the human side of the war.

Each of these interconnected tales is devoted to a family living in a fertile valley on the outskirts of Monterey, California, and the effects, either intentional or unwitting, that one family has on all of them.
ISBN 978-0-14-018748-9

Introduction by Susan Shillinglaw;

Photographs by Robert Capa

First published in 1948,
A Russian Journal
is a remarkable memoir and unique historical document that records the writer and acclaimed war photographer’s journey through Cold War Russia.
ISBN 978-0-14-118019-9

Steinbeck’s only work of political satire turns the French Revolution upside down, creating the hilarious characters of the motley royal court of King Pippin.

Returning to the scene of
Cannery Row
—the weedy lots and junk heaps and flophouses of Monterey, California—Steinbeck once more brings to life the denizens of a netherworld of laughter and tears, from Fauna, new headmistress of the local brothel, to Hazel, a bum whose mother must have wanted a daughter.
ISBN 978-0-14-018750-2

Introduction by Robert DeMott

Set in familiar Steinbeck territory,
To a God Unknown
is a mystical tale, exploring one man’s attempt to control the forces of nature and, ultimately, to understand the ways of God.
ISBN 978-0-14-018751-9

In this imaginative and unsentimental chronicle of a bus traveling California’s back roads, Steinbeck creates a vivid assortment of characters, all running away from their shattered dreams but hoping that they are running toward the promise of a future.
ISBN 978-0-14-243787-2

Ethan Hawley works as a clerk in the grocery store owned by an Italian immigrant. His wife is restless, and his teenaged children are hungry for the tantalizing material comforts he cannot provide. Then one day, in a moment of moral crisis, Ethan decides to take a holiday from his own scrupulous standards.
ISBN 978-0-14-018753-3