Maurice Dolbier.

“World of Books.”

New York World Journal Tribune,

24 October 1966, p. 37.

A little over five years ago John Steinbeck went off in a truck with a tall dog named Charley to rediscover America. He traveled over 10,000 miles and through 34 states, and he wrote a book about the places he saw and the people he met and what they said.

“From start to finish,” he summed up in Travels with Charley', “I found no strangers… For all of our enormous geographic range, for all of our sectionalism, for all of our interwoven breeds drawn from every part of the ethnic world, we are a nation, a new breed… This is not patriotic whoop-de-do. It is a carefully observed fact.… It is astonishing that this has happened in less than 200 years and most of it in the last 50. The American identity is an exact and provable thing.”

In his new book, Steinbeck makes a deeper examination of that identity— what historical institutions and accidents have helped to create it, what paradoxes are present in it, what dangers threaten it, what powers of survival it may have against them. It is, he writes, a book of “opinion, conjecture and speculation” about a country that is “complicated, bullheaded, shy, cruel, boisterous, unspeakably dear, and very beautiful.”

Steinbeck is not a patriotic whoopde- doer. There are shameful pages in our national history; he does not overlook them. There are symptoms in today's society of an illness that could bring us to the verge of moral collapse; he describes them in grim detail.