Did John Steinbeck fabricate "Travels with Charlie"?

According to one journalist who tried to recreate Steinbeck's journey, the answer is "yes":

According to Mr. Steigerwald, Steinbeck stayed in motels a lot — when he wasn’t at luxury hotels. On a night when he supposedly camped out on a farm near Lancaster, N.H., Steinbeck was actually at the Spalding Inn, a hotel so fancy that he had to borrow a coat and tie to eat in the dining room.


Nor was Steinbeck alone that much. On more than half of his trip he was accompanied by his wife, Elaine. All told Mr. Steigerwald estimates that Steinbeck spent no more than a couple of nights in the camper itself, and says, “Virtually nothing he wrote in ‘Charley’ about where he slept and whom he met on his dash across America can be trusted.”

This hasn't created much of a stir among Steinbeck scholars, which raises another questions:

“This is just grunt journalism,” Mr. Steigerwald said of his research methods. “Anyone with a library card and a skeptical gene in his body could do what I did.”


He added that he was a little surprised that his findings hadn’t made more of a ripple among Steinbeck scholars: “ ‘Travels With Charley’ for 50 years has been touted, venerated, reviewed, mythologized as a true story, a nonfiction account of John Steinbeck’s journey of discovery, driving slowly across America, camping out under the stars alone. Other than the fact that none of that is true, what can I tell you?” He added, “If scholars aren’t concerned about this, what are they scholaring about?”

Here is the Reason article on which the NYT article is based.