This book will be the most difficult of all I have ever attempted,” John Steinbeck wrote on January 29, 1951, when beginning to work on East of Eden.
At the time, Steinbeck had published an astounding 19 books in 22 years, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Grapes of Wrath (1939). This relentless tempo prepared him well. After just nine months, he completed his manuscript of East of Eden. The 600-page magnum opus was published the following year, became a National Book Award finalist, and helped set him up to later win a Nobel Prize. “It has everything in it I have been able to learn about my art or craft or profession in all these years,” Steinbeck told the Saturday Review upon the book’s publication. “I think everything else I have written has been, in a sense, practice for this.”
This article appears in Issue 31 of Alta Journal.
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In this sweeping California epic, Steinbeck retells nothing less than a portion of the book of Genesis, reworking the story of Cain and Abel across two generations of the Trask family. In the years following the Civil War, Charles and Adam are two half brothers on a Connecticut farm who experience jealousy and rivalry because their father favors one of them: Adam (Abel). At his father’s insistence, Adam joins the army and serves in the Indian wars. Years later, he returns home, marries Cathy Ames, and—ignoring her protests—moves them west to pursue the California dream. Backed by his family’s wealth, Adam and newly pregnant Cathy settle in the Salinas Valley. After giving birth to fraternal twins, Cathy shoots her husband and flees, abandoning him and the newborns. She moves to the town of Salinas, changes her name, and becomes a prostitute.
Meanwhile, inconsolable and listless, Adam abandons his dreams of creating a monumental home and of farming land for which he has paid top dollar. He’s so bereft that more than a year passes before he bestows the names Caleb and Aron on his sons.
The privileged inactivity of the Trask family starkly contrasts with the situation of their distant neighbors the Hamiltons. Steinbeck modeled the latter industrious family of Irish immigrants, Samuel, Liza, and their nine children, after his maternal ancestors. Whereas Adam can afford to wallow in depression, Samuel must toil from dawn to dusk to avoid poverty. The Trasks’ soil is rich, with reliable access to water; the Hamiltons’ land is poor and dry.
In addition to farming and smithing, Samuel invents time-saving gadgets, spends what little money he has on filing patents, and moves on from each failure. Adam, too, tries his hand at the innovation business by developing refrigerated railcars. When the time comes to launch his product, he has the means to fund it himself, but it fails. Steinbeck’s portrayal of entrepreneurship and subtle indictment of the way immigrants are denied access to capital remain relevant today.
Another point of difference between the Trasks and the Hamiltons: Adam employs a servant. Lee is a Chinese immigrant who often serves as the novel’s moral compass. Steinbeck slowly reveals Lee’s backstory, inner life, and aspiration to one day run a bookstore in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Lee becomes more fully realized when he abandons the stereotypical pidgin he utters in the presence of white people—“Me talkee Chinese talk”—and begins using speech reflective of his intelligence and learning. Steinbeck depicts Lee’s code-switching to brilliant effect, much as Percival Everett later will in James (2024).
Eventually, Lee and Samuel free Adam from his despair and inspire him to care for his boys and participate in life. Yet World War I is soon visited on Salinas Valley. Cathy, now Kate, runs a brothel known for sadism, and her vocation seals the Cain-and-Abel destiny of Adam’s sons. Seemingly echoing his father’s and Samuel’s industriousness, Caleb secures funding and enters into a war-profiteering partnership with one of Samuel’s sons. But in keeping with Steinbeck’s biblical tropes, when Caleb vies for his father’s love by offering him a gift of his profits, his father rejects it, and Caleb’s subsequent actions lead to tragedy for Aron.
Here, Salinas Valley represents a fallen world, one that lies beyond the Garden of Eden. It’s a place that supposedly brims with promise, even as it contains prejudice, hardship, and violence. Yet Steinbeck, writing from personal knowledge, lovingly describes the land, rivers, and mountains in memorable set pieces devoted to wind, topsoil, and the importance of rain. He creates a tableau of biblical proportions well suited to his exploration of human nature, of good and evil, and it’s there that Lee, Samuel, and Adam wrestle with the meaning of the Hebrew word timshel. They translate it as “thou mayest,” and in its meaning, they find the free will granted by God that can lead people to choose lightness over darkness.•
Blaise Zerega is Alta Journal's editorial director. His journalism has appeared in Conde Nast Portfolio (deputy editor and part of founding team), WIRED (managing editor), the New Yorker, Forbes, and other publications. Additionally, he was the editor of Red Herring magazine, once the bible of Silicon Valley. Throughout his career, he has helped lead teams small and large to numerous honors, including multiple National Magazine Awards. He attended the United States Military Academy and New York University and received a Michener Fellowship for fiction from the Texas Center for Writers.
