In the fall of 1960, author John Steinbeck (1902-1968) along with his poodle, Charley, visits Seattle in his pickup truck. Steinbeck was on a journey across the U.S. and recorded his experiences in Travels with Charley (1961).
The Yellow Smoke of Progress
Of Seattle he wrote:
"I remembered Seattle as a town sitting on hills beside a matchless harborage -- a little city of space and trees and gardens, its houses matched to such a background. It is no longer so. The tops of hills are shaved off to make level warrens for the rabbits of the present. The highways eight lanes wide cut like glaciers through the uneasy land. This Seattle had no relation to the one I remembered. The traffic rushed with murderous intensity. On the outskirts of this place I once knew well I could not find my way. Along what had been country lanes rich with berries, high wire fences and mile-long factories stretched, and the yellow smoke of progress hung over all, fighting the sea winds' efforts to drive them off. "
In another passage about Seattle, he observes:
"The old port with narrow streets and cobbled surfaces, smoke-grimed, goes into a period of desolation inhabited at night by the vague ruins of men, the lotus eaters who struggle daily toward unconsciousness by way of raw alcohol. Nearly every city I know has such a dying mother of violence and despair where at night the brightness of the street lamps is sucked away and policemen walk in pairs. And then one day perhaps the city returns and rips out the sore and builds a monument to the past."
John Steinbeck was the author of 31 books, the best known of which is no doubt Grapes of Wrath. In 1962, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, the fifth American to be so honored.
