East of Eden
by John Steinbeck
Summary
John Steinbeck follows two intertwined families through California's Salinas Valley from the Civil War to the First World War. Adam Trask settles there with his new wife Cathy Ames, a woman Steinbeck reveals early to be a manipulative sociopath who has already killed her own parents and run a brothel before marrying him under false pretenses; days after giving birth to twin sons, she shoots Adam and leaves, resurfacing later under the name Kate as the town's most feared, and most profitable, madam. Adam raises the boys largely alone, with help from his servant Lee, and the sons grow into opposites: gentle, approval seeking Aron, and restless, guilt haunted Cal, who resents how easily his father favors his brother. During the First World War, Cal builds a fortune speculating on bean prices and offers the money to Adam as a gift; when Adam refuses it, comparing it unfavorably to Aron's plainer virtues, a wounded Cal takes Aron to meet their mother, shattering the sheltered image Aron has always had of his family. Aron enlists and is killed in France; Kate, having already willed her estate to the son who never knew she left it to him, poisons herself. As Adam lies dying from the stroke the news of Aron's death triggers, Lee begs him to bless Cal rather than curse him, and Adam manages only one Hebrew word before he dies, timshel, meaning thou mayest, the novel's answer to whether people are fated to repeat their parents' worst choices or free to choose otherwise.
Steinbeck writes on a much larger canvas than Of Mice and Men or The Grapes of Wrath, folding in his own family's history and long biblical digressions on the Cain and Abel story the plot deliberately mirrors, and the book reads slower and more discursive than his shorter work, closer to a nineteenth century family saga than to his usual spare style.
Steinbeck wrote the book as a long letter to his two young sons, addressing passages to them directly in early drafts so they would someday know what the Salinas Valley he grew up in had looked, sounded and smelled like.
Historical Context & Significance
Viking published East of Eden on September 19, 1952, and it split critics almost exactly down the middle. Orville Prescott in the New York Times called it clumsy in structure and too melodramatic, while conceding it a serious effort to grapple with a major theme, and Mark Schorer, reviewing it for the same paper's Sunday book section, called it probably the best novel Steinbeck had written. The 1953 Pulitzer for fiction went instead to Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, a much shorter book Steinbeck's own sprawling family saga could hardly have been more different from.
Ordinary readers ignored the critical split entirely and made it a number one bestseller within weeks, and it has sold roughly fifty thousand copies a year since, spiking again after Oprah Winfrey selected it for her book club in 2003. Elia Kazan's 1955 film, condensing the story to its final chapters and introducing James Dean in his first starring role, brought Cal's story to an even wider audience than the novel had, and Steinbeck himself called the finished book simply the one he had wanted to write all his life.