It also harshly criticizes advancing technology's detrimental impact on humans and the natural landscape. So too Travels with Charley celebrates the exploits of the common laborer, particularly migrant workers and those engaged in farming the land. The Grapes of Wrath lauded as a book that 'celebrated life and the common fellowship of man,' specifically within the United States (Cordyack). Ironically, while some critics felt that Travels with Charley was an inaccurate and biased view of the United States, the text deals with many of the same social issues as The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Steinbeck's Pulitzer and Nobel Prize for Literature winning novel and the gold standard to which all of his works have been held by critics. John De Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer (1782) and Henry David Thoreau's Walden (1854). Steinbeck's celebration of the country's natural landscape and blatant criticism of contradictory values in the United States are steeped in a long tradition of American landscape writing reminiscent of J. Steinbeck's disappointment at seeing the country become 'monster America' instead of the great nation he hoped for became a catalyst for a rare, uninhibited view of the United States filtered through the lens of one of America's most observant authors (20).

According to Simkins however, while Steinbeck may have been 'disillusioned with his society and with the critics' at the time Travels with Charley was written, Steinbeck wrote with clarity and feeling about what no one else had the courage to: America destroying itself from within (Simkins). Noted Steinbeck critic Peter Lisca asserts that Travels with Charley represented 'all the baggage of the third-rate journalist who sees only the stereotype and the cliché' believing that Steinbeck's vision of America was overly skewed by his disappointment with changes in American society (233). According to Scott Simkins, Steinbeck's work becoming 'more personal, more subjective' was not only an affront to many critics, but a move that many critics interpreted as an artistic decline (Simkins).

Perceptive, revealing, and completely delightful' and the San Francisco Examiner deemed it 'rofound, sympathetic, often angry an honest and moving book by one of our great writers,' the academic community was less receptive of Steinbeck's highly personal work (qtd. While the Boston Herald wrote Travels with Charley is 'ne of the best books John Steinbeck has ever written.

Debuting in 1962, Travels with Charley, like much of Steinbeck's work after Grapes of Wrath (1939), garnered a mixed reaction from reviewers and the general public. In Travels with Charley in Search of America, John Steinbeck set out to discover 'the speech' of America and to see for himself all of the changes in the United States that he had previously heard about 'only from books and newspapers' (Steinbeck 5).

Charley john steinbeck