Debunking Steinbeck's "Travels With Charley"

The line between fiction and nonfiction is often blurred. A good case in point is John Steinbeck's classic Travels With Charley. Earlier this year former Pittsburgh Post-Gazzette journalist Bill Stelgerwald hit the road to retrace Steinbeck's journey, 50 years after the iconic author made his journey. On his blog, Travels Without Charley, Stelgerwald finds much of what Steinbeck reported did not happen.

 This uncovering along with other celebrated cases, of late, including James Frey's notorious A Million Little Pieces, which was initially called nonfiction until it was uncovered that much of his book was fiction, have made publishers reassess what constitutes fiction and nonfiction. This is especially true in memoir and narrative non-fiction. As Stelgerwald alludes to, there can be good reasons for injecting fictional content into something that is supposed to be true. One reason is that finding true characters who are interesting to the reader can be a huge challenge. Another is that good writers know what elements are required to create good reading. In Steinbeck's case, he ventured out to find an America that did not really exist. Or, at least, one that was difficult to find. Since he was breezing across the country, traveling over 10,000 miles in less than 75 days, he did not have time to locate the characters he needed in the amount of time he had. So, like all good fiction authors, he made them up.

Should Steinbeck's book been identified as fiction. In my opinion, no. He did make the trip and the places he visited were also, for the most part, true. But, in order for him to tell the story as he envisioned it required him to invent certain characters and events. If there is any culprit it is the publisher. After all, they edited it and should have been checking for the need for permissions and any rights violations. We also do not know the story of what went on inside the publishing house. There may have been red flags raised by the editor that were ignored by the publisher. Or, perhaps, because it was John Steinbeck's work maybe they decided not to question him.

The important thing for our purposes is that facts need to be checked prior to publication and whoever is holding the rights (the publisher or author) should at least place a disclaimer on the copyright page. Often authors, especially those who self publish, overlook issues relating to the holder of rights and copyright as well as the need for professional copy editing whose job, in part, is to ask questions that help determine if there is culpability.

These days, where all have free access to information via the Internet, it is easy to copy and paste content from one website to another. Ultimately, however, that content is owned by someone who has the right to protect any copyrighted material where they own rights.

Had Steinbeck written his Travels With Charley in the digital age, his fictionalizing of content would have surely been discovered within days of publication.