There is a very small canon of books about young American men who went broke moving west and wrote about it afterward with a straight face and a crooked grin. Mark Twain’s Roughing It is one of them. John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley is the other. They were written a century apart. Read them back to back and you learn something about the country that neither book quite says alone.
Roughing It is Twain in 1872, looking back at his 1861 stagecoach trip from Missouri to Nevada and the six years he spent after that pretending he was going to be a silver millionaire and failing, usefully, at everything. He signs up as the unpaid secretary to his brother Orion, the newly appointed Secretary of the Nevada Territory. He gets to the Comstock Lode. He stakes claims. He holds an actual million-dollar share in his hand for ten days and then watches the paperwork lapse because he went out of town and forgot to pay a fee. That’s the book in miniature. The fortune passes through him. He is too honest or too distracted to hold it. What remains is the telling.
Travels with Charley, written by Steinbeck in 1960, is the same book inside out. Instead of youth going west to grab at something and missing, it is age going everywhere to see if anything is left. Steinbeck drives a custom camper called Rocinante, named after Don Quixote’s horse, with a standard poodle named Charley for company. He drives from Long Island to Maine down to New Orleans across to California up to Seattle and back home. He is almost sixty. He has heart trouble he hasn’t told anyone about. He wants to see whether the America he spent his life writing about still exists.
It doesn’t. He finds that out in Louisiana, watching white women scream racial slurs at six-year-old Black girls being integrated into a school. Twain had seen the same country before the war. He had ridden stagecoach past the same land when it was still possible to believe the country was just figuring itself out. Steinbeck rides through it when the figuring has produced this.
Both men are unreliable narrators. Twain admits it openly; half the book’s charm is watching him inflate a story and then pause to let you catch up. Steinbeck is unreliable in a quieter way — scholars have since demonstrated that large sections of Travels with Charley were fabricated or composed from secondhand reports, which infuriated a certain kind of reader and should have infuriated nobody. The book is a novel about America wearing the skin of a travelogue. Twain did the same thing in reverse.
Read them together and here’s what you find. Twain’s West is a country where a broke man can still get rich by accident. Steinbeck’s is one where a rich man cannot find his country anymore. Between the two of them, you get the whole arc — the one where the frontier promise is extended, and the one where the bill comes due.
The passages that stay with me from Roughing It are not the prospecting chapters. They are the small ones. Twain describing the overland stage’s rigid daily rituals, because the mail had to move and the coach had to stop at the right station at the right hour or the whole system collapsed — an early picture of what we would later call logistics, written before the word existed in English. Twain describing a coyote for the first time, with such affection and precision that you realize he is describing himself — lean, hungry, unimpressed, surviving by looking poorer than he is. Twain on the Hawaiian Islands in the last third of the book, which is often dismissed by critics who did not know the work held together as “travel, interrupted.” It is my favorite part. He is finally too far from home to be useful to himself, and he starts telling the truth.
Steinbeck does the same thing at the end of Travels with Charley. He is back in Manhattan. He cannot drive anymore. Charley is asleep in the passenger seat. He sits in traffic and realizes the journey is over because he has decided it is, and whatever America he was looking for was finished before he left. He writes: Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. That is the line both books are secretly about. The journey decides what it means. You do not.
Read Roughing It for the young-man comedy and the frontier-camp detail. Read Travels with Charley for what that young man looked like at seventy. Then go for a walk.
A related vagobond.com thread: A Lit-Nerd Road Trip Adventure Through the Beautiful Northeast USA — a modern echo of both books, compressed.
Readers and fans of Roughing It will really enjoy Rough Living: Tips and Tales of Vagobond — my own going-broke-in-a-VW-bus book. First written in 2003, updated in 2026 — both versions included. Twain had the Comstock Lode. I had the Pacific Northwest and a broken-down bus. Similar math. Have a look and let me know what you think.
CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA
CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.
