left in a hurry, my clothes barely buttoned/ And 'Travels With Charley' tucked under my arm." In 1973 The Beach Boys wrote a song for their Holland album called California Saga a three part song with the following lyrics: [Verse 2] Have you ever been down Salinas way Where Steinbeck found the valley? And he wrote about it the way it was in his travelin's with Charley And have you ever walked down through the sycamores Where the farmhouse used to be? There, the monarch's autumn journey ends On a windswept cyprus tree Veracity Steinbeck's narrative has been challenged as partly fictionalized. Bill Steigerwald, a former staff writer for Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and an associate editor for Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, followed the route as it is laid out in the Travels with Charley, and wrote about it in a 2011 article titled "Sorry, Charley," published in Reason magazine. He later self-published his analysis in a 2012 book, titled Dogging Steinbeck. Steigerwald concluded that Travels contains such a level of invention, and Steinbeck took such great liberty with the truth, that the work has limited claim to being non-fiction. He uses the dialogue with the itinerant Shakespearean actor near Alice, North Dakota, to exemplify his point. On October 12, Steinbeck wrote a letter to his wife describing a motel in the Badlands where he was staying, on the same date (October 12) as the supposed conversation in Alice. Given that the Badlands are some 350 miles away from Alice, Steigerwald concluded that the conversation with the actor was unlikely to have occurred. Steigerwald also challenges the idea that Steinbeck was "roughing it" during his journey, or that it was a solo voyage, save for Charley. Steigerwald wrote: Steigerwald was not the only person to claim Steinbeck did not write a purely nonfictional travelogue; Steinbeck's son believed that his father invented much of the dialogue in the book, saying: "He just sat in his camper and wrote all that [expletive]." Steinbeck scholars generally have not disputed Steigerwald's findings, but they have disputed their importance. For example, Susan Shillinglaw, a professor of English at San Jose State University and scholar at the National Steinbeck Center, told the New York Times: "Any writer has the right to shape materials, and undoubtedly Steinbeck left things out. That doesn't make the book a lie." In regard to the supposed conversations, she said: "Whether or not Steinbeck met that