John Steinbeck's 'Travels with Charley' and 'America and Americans': Myth, materialism and the American road circuit

John Steinbeck's last two works of nonfiction, Travels with Charley (1962) and America and Americans (1966), have been popularly received as an American author's sentimental observations of an increasingly unfamiliar nation. However, critical consideration of these texts as nostalgic elegies prevents them from being examined as socially purposive works similar to his earlier proletarian efforts like The Grapes of Wrath (1939). This thesis contends that these journalistic texts must be reexamined for their analyses of contemporary practices of consumption, social mobilization, and managing national abundance. By exploring both the compositional means by which Steinbeck attempts to render a dispassionate traveling survey of America and his critique of specific mass consumptive practices, this essay argues that he, rather than being rendered un-American through the perceived failings of his cross-country search, must return empty-handed when his irresolvable national imaginings prove immaterial beyond their capacity to identify him as a restless, mobility-seeking American.