Rocinante and the Nobel Prize

In the fall of nineteen sixty, John Steinbeck loaded a camper truck he had named Rocinante, after Don Quixote's horse, and drove it out of his driveway in Sag Harbor, New York, with his standard poodle Charley as his only companion. He was fifty-eight years old. He had not driven across America in a very long time, and he felt that he had lost touch with the country he had spent his career writing about. He wanted to see it again.

The journey that resulted became Travels with Charley: In Search of America, published in nineteen sixty-two. It is not his greatest work. Critics then and now have noted that the book has a carefully managed quality, that Steinbeck seems to have shaped his encounters for literary effect. But it is a book written by a man who understood this landscape from the inside, and who was trying, in the last decade of his life, to reckon with what the country had become.

In October of nineteen sixty-two, while Travels with Charley was on the bestseller list and critics were debating whether his best work was behind him, the Nobel Committee in Stockholm announced that John Steinbeck had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was sixty years old.

The announcement was met, in some literary quarters, with skepticism. Several critics argued that there were more deserving American writers. Steinbeck himself was ambivalent. He suspected that some of the committee's reasoning had to do with his earlier work, with The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men and East of Eden, rather than with Travels with Charley. He was probably right.

At the award ceremony in Stockholm in December of that year, Steinbeck gave an acceptance speech that has outlasted much of the criticism. He said that the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit, for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. He said that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.

Rocinante, the actual truck camper from that final journey, now sits in a permanent exhibit at the National Steinbeck Center on Main Street in Salinas, a few blocks from the house where Steinbeck was born. He never moved back to Salinas. He died in New York in December of nineteen sixty-eight. The truck made it home.