How well do you know America? John Steinbeck, author of Travels With Charley, thought he knew this country pretty well. But when he takes a step back to look at his life he discovers that he didn’t know America as well as he thought. On his journey across America, Steinbeck hopes to rediscover America and experience it as an observer as opposed to disrupting it. John Steinbeck felt the need to discover America because he believed that he did not truly now his country as it used to be. Steinbeck found that he was writing about something in which he did not know about. He complains that he “was writing of something [he] did not know about, and it seems to [him] that in a so-called writer this is criminal” (Steinbeck 5). In order to write about
