Bill Steigerwald talks about his research into John Steinbeck’s famous Travels with Charley and what was eliminated from the manuscript before it went to press:
Three weeks before I left on my trip to retrace John Steinbeck’s steps in Travels With Charley in Search of America, I did something no one in the world had done in four years. I went to the Morgan Library & Museum in Manhattan to read the first draft of the book. The handwritten manuscript — along with a typed and edited copy — has been stored at the Morgan like the Ark of the Covenant at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark for almost 50 years.
Few scholars, graduate students, or critics had bothered to read it. If they had, the Travels With Charley myth — that for 11 weeks Steinbeck slowly traveled alone, camped out often, carefully studied the country, and told readers what he really thought about America and its 180 million people — might have been debunked decades ago.
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The edits to the first draft mostly make sense; a lot of extraneous details and long-windedness on Steinbeck’s part are cut. But excising material about Steinbeck’s regular liaisons with his wife Elaine in fancy hotels, his stay with his good friend and failed presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, and his outright contempt for Richard Nixon serve another purpose. The casual or romantic reader is left with the impression that Steinbeck was alone and on the road most of the time, when in fact he was neither. By the time Viking Press was done marketing the book as nonfiction and dressing it up with excellent but misleading illustrations by Don Freeman, the Travels With Charley myth was born and bronzed. The book was an instant and huge bestseller. Critics and reviewers, followed by several generations of scholars, never questioned the book’s nonfiction status.
