Journalist and author Bill Steigerwald [See his website ]recently checked in to say he is doing well in another chapter of his life, away from the daily grind of newspaper reporting since retiring in March, 2009.
After 30 years reporting for the Los Angeles Times in the 1980’s, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in the 1990s, and the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review at the turn of the 21st century, the veteran journalist used his modest buyout package (including tearing through his 401 (k) ) to embark on what seemed at the time to be a crazy book idea.
Unlike other harebrained book ideas that often go nowhere, Steigerwald’s project actually bore fruit and ended up receiving a fair amount of national attention, including from The New York Times and C-Span.
The Pittsburgh native unraveled how John Steinbeck’s 1962 best-selling travelogue (billed as a work of nonfiction) ``Travels with Charley: In Search of America’’ about his journey through 34 states, covering more than 10,000 miles with his elderly French poodle was nothing more than an colorful exercise in creative writing. Or more to the point, as Steigerwald tells it, ``Travels with Charley was a load of fictional crap. It was not the true nonfiction account of his 1960 road trip we'd been led to believe but a highly fictionalized and dishonest book -- a "literary fraud," as I so indelicately called it.’’ [in Reason Magazine ]
A Pulitzer Prize (1940) winning author, Steinbeck wrote 27 books, 16 of them novels and six other nonfiction works.
In the travelogue, among other topics, Steinbeck chronicles French Canadian potato pickers in Aroostook County, Me., a fire and brimstone sermon in Vermont, the peculiar lifestyle of truck drivers, vivid descriptions of mobile homes, the nature of turkeys, the majesty of the Mojave Desert, and a yarn about how a tire blew out in a rain storm in Oregon.
Exactly 50 years after Steinbeck's journey, with over three decades of shoe-leather reporting behind him, Steigerwald retraced the 10,000-mile route the celebrated American writer took around the country in 1960, carefully checking, double-checking and fact-checking Steinbeck’s journey, meeting hundreds of ordinary Americans, often sleeping in the back of his car in Wal-Mart parking lots as he drove from Maine to California to Texas.
Interestingly, the original game plan of Steigerwald’s project was not to fling darts at Steinbeck’s credibility. Rather, it was intended to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Steinbeck’s U.S. tour and report and update readers how the vast landscape of the United States had changed since 1960. It was only through his scrupulous investigation that Steinbeck’s literary deception was uncovered.
In November 2012, Steigerwald published ``Dogging Steinbeck’’ , an e-book by Amazon.com, which made the book possible after he wasn’t able to secure a New York publisher; meaning, he didn’t have the perks normally extended to other authors. ``I completed the book’’, Steigerwald told me, `` with no editor, no copy editor, no fact-checker, no photographer, no publisher, no designer -- just me in charge of everything.’’ The book is also available in paperback form as a print-on-demand in which the customer orders it through Amazon; the book is then printed in South Carolina and mailed to the customer.
Did he experience any anxious moments flying solo without a publisher? Absolutely. `` All that editorial autonomy was scary for a newspaperman at times, but I didn't do too bad. So far, no lawsuits’’ Steigerwald says.
In the book, Steigerwald points out that when Steinbeck was supposed to have been roughing it, camped out on a farm near Lancaster, N.H., he actually booked a room at a luxury hotel. He also discovered that Steinbeck spent precious little time in campers, and was hardly alone, as he led readers to believe; but traveled with his wife Elaine on more than half of the trip; other times he stayed at the Steinbeck family cottage in Pacific Grove, Calif., and another week at a Texas cattle ranch for millionaires. On other occasion, when Steinbeck was supposed to be camping in Alice, N.D., where he claimed to have met a Shakespearean actor, he was actually staying in a comfortable motel 326 miles farther west in the town of Beach.
In a published interview with The New York Times in 2011 Steigerwald was stunned his findings didn’t have more of an impact within literary circles. As he told the Times: ``Travels With Charley’ for 50 years has been touted, venerated, reviewed, mythologized as a true story, a nonfiction account of John Steinbeck’s journey of discovery, driving slowly across America, camping out under the stars alone. Other than the fact that none of that is true, what can I tell you? If scholars aren’t concerned about this, what are they scholaring about?’’
But in fairness to astute followers of Steinbeck's work, not everyone took ``Travels with Charley'' to be a work of pure nonfiction. In The New York Times book review on July 27, 1962, for example, Times’ reviewer Orville Prescott wrote of `Travels with Charley’: ``Relaxed, informal and chatty, he [Steinbeck] indulges in whopping exaggerations, tells tall stories, sketches odd characters he met and tosses off a series of capsule essays on scores of subjects. Since Mr. Steinbeck is an intelligent man and a facile writer the result is engaging.''
In addition to the national attention Steigerwald’s efforts received, he was thrilled to be interviewed by Brian Lamb on C-Span about his shocking discoveries.
As to a brief summary of his post-newspaper career, Steigerwald would only say ``it’s a long story with some trouble-making, a happy ending and a lot of fun on and off the road for an old newspaper hack.’’
-Bill Lucey
April 17, 2013
