An exciting new addition to Clay’s slate of LTA Cultural Tours for 2025! We’re headed to Steinbeck Country — California’s Central Coast. On this tour we’ll visit Monterey, Pacific Grove, Carmel, and just across the Santa Lucia mountains, the author’s hometown of Salinas. These California landscapes stayed close to Steinbeck’s heart throughout his life and shaped the Nobel Prize-winning author’s indelible literary legacy.
Greetings! I’m thrilled to announce that I will lead a John Steinbeck Cultural Retreat in the heart of the author’s home turf of Salinas and Monterey, California, this September 21-27.
My dear friend and Steinbeck scholar, Russ Eagle, will join us on this extraordinary tour of Steinbeck’s California. Our event will be headquartered at the incomparable National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, which is also partnering with us on this program.
I have a renewed excitement about Steinbeck thanks to my recent five-month, 21,000-mile Airstream road trip following his 1960 Travels with Charley journey. That trip caused me to think about Steinbeck every day for half a year, to puzzle over his complex character, and to think about his unique American literary legacy.
John Steinbeck wrote one of the top five American novels, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), which won the Pulitzer Prize. It was almost immediately turned into one of the great films of the era. The novel was condemned by big agriculture in California, burned by its detractors, and banned in the Bakersfield school system until the 1970s. Representative Lyle Boren of Oklahoma declared for the Congressional Record that The Grapes of Wrath is “a lie, a black, infernal creation of a twisted, distorted mind.”
Steinbeck’s California is unique among the cultural tours I have the opportunity to lead:
First, there is plenty of adventure. Like Steinbeck, we climb the last spiky steps to the summit of Fremont Peak for a magnificent view of all of Steinbeck Country, including the great Salinas Valley, the shimmering blue of Monterey Bay, and the author’s hometown of Salinas “spreading like crabgrass toward the foothills.” Another day, we hike along Point Lobos’ rocky shores and sea-sprayed trails, the breathtaking coastal stretch south of Carmel Bay that landscape painter Francis McComas called the “greatest meeting of land and water in the world.”
There are other unique experiences as well:
— A private dinner and discussion in the lovely Victorian home where Steinbeck was born and raised.
— A visit to the National Steinbeck Center archives to see and handle original manuscripts, letters, and other Steinbeck memorabilia.
— Another evening finds us dining among the arched catacombs of the opulent wine cellar deep below the famed Sardine Factory on Cannery Row.
— Plus, there is plenty of time for literary discussion, and even that is unique on this trip. We’ll discuss Travels with Charley, for example, with Steinbeck’s actual camper truck sitting right before us. When it’s time to talk about Cannery Row, we’ll move to Ed Ricketts’ lab on Cannery Row, the prime setting for the 1945 novella.
— Throughout the week, we will be joined by staff members from the National Steinbeck Center.
Steinbeck’s California offers all the best features of my cultural tours. It’s an experience designed to penetrate this great American author’s work and the unique geography that shaped him.
We expect this tour to reach capacity quickly. Learn more and register here.
