{"id":2727,"date":"2010-12-27T14:48:52","date_gmt":"2010-12-27T21:48:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2010\/12\/travels-with-steigerwald\/"},"modified":"2010-12-27T14:51:19","modified_gmt":"2010-12-27T21:51:19","slug":"travels-with-steigerwald","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2010\/12\/27\/travels-with-steigerwald\/","title":{"rendered":"Travels With Steigerwald"},"content":{"rendered":"

from The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

The Next Page: The fabulism of ‘Travels With Charley’<\/h1>\n

Sorry, Charley: After criss-crossing America in the tracks of John Steinbeck’s ‘Travels With Charley,’ Bill Steigerwald came to a conclusion: The esteemed work is something of a fraud. (Victimless, perhaps, but still.)<\/p>\n

By Bill Steigerwald<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Bill Steigerwald<\/p>\n

A cornfield near Alice, N.D., where Steinbeck supposedly camped overnight and met an itinerant Shakespearean actor in October 1960.<\/p>\n

ALICE, N.D. —\u00a0“Hah!”<\/strong>\u00a0I blurted out as a million North Dakota cornstalks rattled in the pushy October wind.<\/p>\n

“Who were you trying to kid, John? Who’d you think would ever believe you met a Shakespearean actor out here?”<\/p>\n

For three weeks I had been retracing the 10,000-mile road trip Steinbeck made around America for his nonfiction bestseller “Travels With Charley,” and chronicling it for the Post-Gazette.<\/p>\n

I wasn’t in the habit of speaking directly to the ghost of John Steinbeck. But I couldn’t stop from laughing at the joke that Steinbeck played on everyone in the pages of “Travels With Charley,” released in 1962 to national acclaim and still revered as a document of the American soul.<\/p>\n

No one could hear me talking\u00a0to Steinbeck’s ghost that Oct. 12 afternoon. I was parked on an unpaved farm road in the earthly equivalent of outer space — the cornfields of North Dakota, 47 miles southwest of Fargo.<\/p>\n

[ click to continue reading at the Post-Gazette<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette The Next Page: The fabulism of ‘Travels With Charley’ Sorry, Charley: After criss-crossing America in the tracks of John Steinbeck’s ‘Travels With Charley,’ Bill Steigerwald came to a conclusion: The esteemed work is something of a fraud. (Victimless, perhaps, but still.) By Bill Steigerwald Bill Steigerwald A cornfield near Alice, N.D., […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2727","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literary-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2727","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2727"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2727\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}