Description:

Steinbeck John 1902 - 1968 Nobel Prize laureate, John Steinbeck types a letter on his personal stationary about "Travels With Charley"

Single page TLS, 8.5" x 11" signed by John Steinback and typed on his personal stationary with his New York address letterhead. Date "February 13, 1963", and signed "John Steinbeck". Accompanied by the matching post marked envelope, neatly slit along the top edge. The letter will include a LOA from James Spence. Both letter and envelope are fine/near fine.


A lovely typed letter from John Steinbeck, written shortly after Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for literature. John Steinbeck wrote to Rev. Gordon Gilsdorf, on his personal New York address stationary thanking him for his thoughts on, "Travels With Charley".

Travels With Charley had hit the bookstores and the nonfiction bestseller lists in the summer of 1962.

Steinbeck opened the book by describing his lifelong wanderlust and his preparations to rediscover the country he felt he had lost touch with after living in New York City and traveling in Europe for 20 years. He wrote of having many questions going into his journey, the main one being, "What are Americans like today?" However, he found that he had concerns about much of the "new America" he witnessed. Steinbeck tells of traveling throughout the United States in a specially made camper he named Rocinante, after Don Quixote's horse. His over 10,000 mile journey brought him awareness how peoples attitude and beliefs changed, and how much difference existed between the locals within the country, and how all states differ by how people may talk to one another or treat people.

Perhaps one aspect which he noted back then in the early 1960's has gone on to become more of an issue today. Steinbeck discovered that technology was advancing so quickly as to give Americans more and more instant gratification, whether it was soup from vending machines or mobile homes (little would he know just how this accelerated with the advance of cell phones, the internet and gaming). With another central concern Steinbeck realized was that Americans are often oblivious to their immediate surroundings and their own culture. He also complained that Americans have put "cleanliness first at the expense of taste". He lamented that "It looks as though the natural contentiousness of people has died" and he worried that Americans had grown too comfortable and no longer interested in risk-taking and rebellion, two of the traits that made the country great. It is astonishing that only 55 years later we would be see these traits magnify to proportions that impact society on a grand level.

In the book, Steinbeck spent a good deal of his journey lost, however it becomes evident at the end of the story that being lost is a metaphor for how much America has changed in Steinbeck's eyes. America, it seems, is in a sense directionless and therefore endangered as it moves into an uncertain future marked by huge population shifts, racial tensions, technological and industrial change, and unprecedented environmental destruction, all of which are at the forefront of our issues as a nation today but just in their infancy when

Steinbeck reported on his experiences.

A wonderful TLS typed and signed by John Steinbeck referencing one of his last books which resonates so thoroughly with the issues of the current day.




LOA from James Spence.

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