Where I ever got such an idea I cannot say, unless it could be that the morning came over the peaks of the Gabilans and the night drifted back from the ridges of the Santa Lucias. I always found in myself a dread of west and a love of east. The Santa Lucias stood up against the sky to the west and kept the valley from the open sea, and they were dark and brooding–unfriendly and dangerous. They were beckoning mountains with a brown grass love. “I remember that the Gabilan Mountains to the east of the valley were light gay mountains full of sun and loveliness and a kind of invitation, so that you wanted to climb into their warm foothills almost as you want to climb into the lap of a beloved mother. Leave it alone, and a lot of books will fade into obscurity).Īnyway, I started to love this from the first page. (See, book challengers? You are only hurting your case and giving authors publicity. It would probably have languished for a few more years in my stacks if I hadn’t decided to read it for Banned Books Week. I have several friends on GoodReads comment on how much they love this book, so when I found this edition with this cool retro cover at a library book sale, I went ahead and picked it up. Either way, I was left with bad memories of Steinbeck. Of course, I hated almost everything I had to read for school, so I don’t know if that says more about Steinbeck or about me. I had to read Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath for school, and I pretty much hated them both. I am surprised by how much I liked this book.

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. 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 Aron, 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, John Steinbeck called East of Eden “the first book,” and indeed it has the primordial power and simplicity of myth.

East of eden book