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He remained, nonetheless, a prolific writer, publishing The Moon Is Down, Cannery Row, The Wayward Bus and A Russian Journal. In 1962, feeling that he had perhaps lost touch with his nation, Steinbeck undertook a crosscountry trip in a camper, accompanied by his poodle named Charley. Travels with Charley became a bestseller, but it was, in the '60s of Norman Mailer, a somewhat bloodless travelogue. It reflected Steinbeck's traditional love of the land and anger at the society, but the criticism was mellow.
Edmund Wilson has observed that Steinbeck tended to diminish humans to the condition of animals, to reduce his characters to their simple biological needs and desires. His people were often stage Americans and cartooned folk. Yet if his stories "animalized" characters, they also animated them with the elemental life of their time and condition. The preacher in The Grapes of Wrath mumbles over Grandpa load's grave: "He was alive, an' that's what matters. An' now he's dead, an' that don't matter. Heard a fella tell a poem one time, an' he says, 'All that lives is holy.' "
* The others: Sinclair Lewis, Pearl S. Buck, William Faulkner, Eugene O'Neill, Ernest Hemingway.