Caroline Fraser

“What are Americans like today?” John Steinbeck set out to answer that question in Travels with Charley, his 1962 travelogue, but it had been a theme of his fiction, as it had been a theme of many works by American writers loosely labeled naturalists. It was not a query of merely local interest. America was to be the world’s great experiment in freedom and self-reliance. How its people adapted to their conditions and expectations—whether they would thrive or wither in the great spaces given to them—could be understood to suggest something about human nature itself. --from The New York Review of Books, 27 May 2010