Juniper’s review of Dogging Steinbeck: How I Went in Search of John Steinbeck's America, Found My Own America, and Exposed the Truth about 'Travels with Charley' > Likes and Comments
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Your review is spot on. This is not a likeable guy, and this is not a likeable book.
Sorry you -- and so many others -- didn't get my sarcasm, self-deprecating humor and 'angry' op-ed style of writing. Can't help it. It's what happens when you are a newspaper journalist for 30 years. (if you really want to hate me, check out my substack. And I'm not really sorry you didn't like my libertarian spin (as opposed to the standard-issue liberal-Democrat New York City-centric spin you prefer and which I criticize in the book; I'm a newspaper columnist, a rare libertarian one). I have my faults. It's not a perfect book. But what I found out -- and exposed, after 50 years, on my own dime -- has changed, forever, the way "Charley" will be read: Not as nonfiction, but as a heavily fictionalized work by a great writer who undertook an ambitious project that he himself said had failed. "Charley" was marketed, sold, reviewed and taught for 50 years as a true and honest work. It wasn't. You may not care about that, or think it was important to discover that, or think like I do that maybe the Steinbeck 'scholars' should have pointed it out, but Paul Theroux, Steinbeck biographer William Souder and Dutch intellectual Geert Mak thought otherwise. They all approved and/or praised what I did. You can hate me and my book all you want. But after 50 years, the publisher of 'Charley' was forced to re-write the intro of 'Charley' to clearly warn future readers that what they were about to read was not nonfiction and should not be taken literally. It would have been nice if that fact had been acknowledged in 1962, before 1.5 million people bought the book thinking they were reading a true or honest account of Steinbeck's search for America.
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Cindy
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Jan 30, 2021 09:17PM
Your review is spot on. This is not a likeable guy, and this is not a likeable book.
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Sorry you -- and so many others -- didn't get my sarcasm, self-deprecating humor and 'angry' op-ed style of writing. Can't help it. It's what happens when you are a newspaper journalist for 30 years. (if you really want to hate me, check out my substack. And I'm not really sorry you didn't like my libertarian spin (as opposed to the standard-issue liberal-Democrat New York City-centric spin you prefer and which I criticize in the book; I'm a newspaper columnist, a rare libertarian one). I have my faults. It's not a perfect book. But what I found out -- and exposed, after 50 years, on my own dime -- has changed, forever, the way "Charley" will be read: Not as nonfiction, but as a heavily fictionalized work by a great writer who undertook an ambitious project that he himself said had failed. "Charley" was marketed, sold, reviewed and taught for 50 years as a true and honest work. It wasn't. You may not care about that, or think it was important to discover that, or think like I do that maybe the Steinbeck 'scholars' should have pointed it out, but Paul Theroux, Steinbeck biographer William Souder and Dutch intellectual Geert Mak thought otherwise. They all approved and/or praised what I did. You can hate me and my book all you want. But after 50 years, the publisher of 'Charley' was forced to re-write the intro of 'Charley' to clearly warn future readers that what they were about to read was not nonfiction and should not be taken literally. It would have been nice if that fact had been acknowledged in 1962, before 1.5 million people bought the book thinking they were reading a true or honest account of Steinbeck's search for America.
