The Age of Acrimony
Monday, May 27 2024
Lindsay Chervinsky reviews “… the dirty tale of how democracy got clean” in Jon Grinspan’s The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, 1865-1915.
- Published in Books
A Visit With Author Jay Parini of Middlebury, Vermont
Friday, May 17 2024
Sitting in the Airstream, Rocinante. I had a delightful interview with Steinbeck biographer Jay Parini of Middlebury College in Vermont.
- Published in Dispatches from the Road
The Age of Exploration Meets the Era of Disillusionment
Thursday, May 16 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.
- Published in Books
Reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich While Traveling With Charley
Monday, May 13 2024
Clay visits Cedar Rapids, Iowa, boyhood home of pioneering journalist and author William Shirer, who later became friends with John Steinbeck.
- Published in Features
A Stop at Thoreau’s Walden Pond Near Concord, Massachusetts
Sunday, May 12 2024
Clay stops to visit Thoreau’s Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts as part of his Travels with Charley road trip.
- Published in Dispatches from the Road
Visiting John Steinbeck’s Home in Sag Harbor, New York — Video Dispatch
Thursday, May 09 2024
Clay visits John Steinbeck’s Sag Harbor home where the noted author began his 1960 cross-country journey, immortalized in Travels With Charley.
- Published in Dispatches from the Road
John Steinbeck’s True Motivations for Hitting the Road in 1960
Thursday, April 25 2024
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.
- Published in Features
Shakedown Cruise: The Great Adventure Begins
Tuesday, April 23 2024
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 …
- Published in Dispatches from the Road
John Brown: A Remarkable American Story
Monday, April 01 2024
Hero, terrorist, martyr or madman? Clay examines the dramatic life of John Brown.
- Published in Features
Rereading Blue Highways — An Enduring Backroads Journal
Monday, March 25 2024
Originally published is 1982, Clay says William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways is still our best backroads manifesto.
- Published in Books