John Steinbeck
Your Comments: Can You Go Home Again?
We aired a story last week about John Steinbeck and Monterey, California. After returning to Monterey as an older man, Steinbeck wrote, “What we knew is dead…what’s out there is new, and perhaps good, but it’s nothing we know.” Kind of a downer. We asked what your experiences returning home were, and we’ll hear one […]
Travels with Charley: Monterey
John Steinbeck was nearing 60 when he decided to go on a road trip around the country with his poodle. That trip turned into his last major book, Travels with Charley. Fifty years later, we’ve been revisiting Steinbeck’s stops to see how life in America has changed. We wind up the trip in Steinbeck’s home […]
Travels with Charley: Spokane
In Washington State, on the western edge of the Rocky Mountains, John Steinbeck met a young man passionate about theater and hairdressing – and the kid’s furious father. Steinbeck wrote about the encounter in Travels with Charley. Fifty years later, in Spokane, we meet a proudly gay hairdresser and theater director. And we hear his […]
Sardines in Literature
As John Steinbeck’s popular novel Cannery Row turns fifty in 1995, reporter Bill Drummond explores the author’s passion for marine biology, and the ecological warning contained in this book. Steinbeck’s widow says her husband was among the first to foretell the collapse of California’s sardine fishery.