Sitting in the Airstream, Rocinante. I had a delightful interview with Steinbeck biographer Jay Parini of Middlebury College in Vermont.
The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Conact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook by Hampton Sides. Published May, 2024
I have been reading Hampton Sides’ excellent new study of Captain James Cook’s third voyage (1776-1779), The Wide, Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact, and The Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook.
Clay visits Cedar Rapids, Iowa, boyhood home of pioneering journalist and author William Shirer, who later became friends with John Steinbeck.
Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts where Thoreau lived
Clay stops to visit Thoreau’s Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts as part of his Travels with Charley road trip.
May 9 / John Steinbeck, his dog Charley and his camper rig.
Clay visits John Steinbeck’s Sag Harbor home where the noted author began his 1960 cross-country journey, immortalized in Travels With Charley.
John Steinbeck with his dog Charley
As Clay begins his great Travels With Charley journey, our resident Steinbeck specialist, Russ Eagle, weighs in on what spurred the Nobel Prize-winning author to take to the road in a custom truck camper and his dog in 1960.
Airstream
April is the cruelest month, says T.S. Eliot, perhaps because it brings you some false spring that often enough is put in its place by late blasts of winter. This is certainly true on the Great Plains. But I am leaving on my big John Steinbeck Travels with Charley Tour on April 27 …
painting of John Brown
Hero, terrorist, martyr or madman? Clay examines the dramatic life of John Brown.
Book cover: Blue Highways: Journey Into America by William Least Heat Moon, first published in 1984.
Originally published is 1982, Clay says William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways is still our best backroads manifesto.
Book cover: 1984
The question is: how prophetic was Orwell? What does he say to us in the age of “fake news” and “alternative facts”?
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