Tinged with biblical echoes of the fall of Adam and Eve and the rivalry of Cain and Abel, this sprawling saga has captivated audiences everywhere for generations. Part allegory, part autobiography, and part epic, East of Eden was an ambitious project from the start – a gift to Steinbeck’s sons that was meant to teach them about identity, grief, and what it means to be human. From this plot emerged some of Steinbeck’s most fascinating characters – many of whom are modeled after people in his own life. In his journal, Journal of a Novel (often read as a companion to the novel) he notes that “this is the book I have always wanted and have worked and prayed to be able to write Set primarily in the Salinas Valley in the early twentieth century, the novel traces three generations of two families – the Trasks and the Hamiltons – as they grapple with the ever-present forces of good and evil. Steinbeck considered East of Eden to be his masterpiece. A masterpiece of Steinbeck's later years, East of Eden is a powerful and vastly ambitious novel that is at once a family saga and a modern retelling of the Book of Genesis.Īmerican fiction (fictional works by one author), One boy thrives nurtured by the love of all those around him the other grows up in loneliness enveloped by a mysterious darkness.įirst published in 1952, East of Eden is the work in which Steinbeck created his most mesmerizing characters and explored his most enduring themes: the mystery of identity, the inexplicability of love, and the murderous consequences of love's absence. But the birth of his twins, Cal and Aaron, brings his wife to the brink of madness, and Adam is left alone to raise his boys to manhood. Set in the rich farmland of California’s Salinas Valley, this sprawling and often brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two families-the Trasks and the Hamiltons-whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.Īdam Trask came to California from the East to farm and raise his family on the new rich land.

In his journal, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck called East of Eden “the first book,” and indeed it has the primordial power and simplicity of myth.

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