How to Consult Your Destiny Via Thoreau’s Walden
Tuesday, January 07 2025
During a long life of hard reading, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden is the book that helps me understand what it is to be human.
- Published in Books
Reading Walden and Wrestling With Thoreau
Tuesday, December 31 2024
As I look to the start of the new year, Thoreau’s 1854 classic, Walden, still deeply challenges and inspires me.
- Published in Features
Traveling With Charley: 1960 in the American South
Monday, December 23 2024
Road-weary and keen to return home to New York, the final leg of Steinbeck’s cross-country journey took him through the troubled South of 1960.
- Published in Features
Reading Charles Dickens for Christmas — Have Desk Will Travel
Tuesday, December 17 2024
Clay does a special public reading from the works of his favorite English Novelist, Charles Dickens.
- Published in Dispatches from the Road
John Steinbeck’s Beloved Monterey Bay — Video Dispatch
Monday, November 11 2024
As Clay traveled across the country, he stopped at John Steinbeck’s beloved Monterey Bay, home of the author’s great friend Ed Ricketts and the inspiration for many unforgettable characters immortalized in his novels.
- Published in Dispatches from the Road
Reports of the Book’s Demise are Greatly Exaggerated
Tuesday, October 22 2024
A stop at a West Texas Barnes & Noble persuades Clay that books remain alive and kicking.
- Published in Features
John Steinbeck: The Journals of a Novelist
Tuesday, October 08 2024
Two journals John Steinbeck kept while writing his two most famous novels provide an intimate look into the author’s creative process.
- Published in Features
Where the American West Begins — Video Dispatch
Tuesday, October 08 2024
Clay stops on the banks of the mighty Missouri River, the boundary of America’s east and west. It is here that John Steinbeck noted, “The two sides of the river might well be one thousand miles apart.”
- Published in Dispatches from the Road
Looking for America in London
Tuesday, October 01 2024
Clay shares impressions from a recent visit to England, where he led a cultural tour.
- Published in Features
Steinbeck Meets an Itinerant Actor Along North Dakota’s Maple River — Video Dispatch
Saturday, September 28 2024
In October 1960, traveling through eastern North Dakota, John Steinbeck stopped along the lonely Maple River. Here, the author had a remarkable encounter with an itinerant Shakespearean actor.
- Published in Dispatches from the Road