East of Eden

A book written for his sons

Steinbeck wrote East of Eden for his two young sons, Thom and John, so they would know their family's history and the valley where he grew up. He began researching in 1948, going back to California and reading old issues of the Salinas Index-Journal. He started writing in January 1951 and finished the draft that November.

He wrote in a big notebook. On each left-hand page he wrote a letter to his editor, Pascal Covici, as a warm-up. On the right-hand pages he wrote the novel. The letters were published in 1969, the year after his death, as Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters.

In one letter he told Covici he wanted to describe the valley in sparse detail, simply enough that the boys could read it. In another he called the Salinas Valley a microcosm of the whole nation.

When he finished, he wrote to a friend that this was the book he had always had waiting to be written. If it was not good, he said, he had been fooling himself all along.

Steinbeck's own family

The Hamiltons are real people lightly fictionalized. Samuel and Liza Hamilton are Steinbeck's grandparents. Their fourth daughter, Olive, a schoolteacher, is his mother. The narrator is a member of the family, and Steinbeck appears as a minor character.

The Penguin reading guide notes that the novel calls Samuel a shining man. Liza, his wife, is strict and religious. Steinbeck writes that Liza Hamilton and the Lord God held similar convictions on nearly every subject.

The Trasks, by contrast, are invented. Many critics thought the two family stories did not fit together. The scholar Louis Owens wrote that the Hamilton chapters add little to the novel's central theme. Jackson Benson, Steinbeck's biographer, noted that the parts critics attacked most, including the narrator's family history, were often the parts readers liked best.

Timshel

The title comes from the book of Genesis. After Cain kills his brother Abel, he is sent to live in the land east of Eden. The novel runs the story twice. First Charles attacks Adam, and later Adam's twin sons, Cal and Aron, compete for their father's love.

The idea at the center of the book comes from Lee, the Trasks' Chinese American cook. When the twins are small, Lee, Adam and Samuel talk about Cain and Abel while choosing names for the boys. Lee keeps thinking about one verse, in which God speaks to Cain about ruling over sin.

Bibles translate the Hebrew word in that verse, timshel, in different ways. Some make it an order, "Do thou." Others make it a promise, "Thou shalt." Lee studies it for years with a group of elderly Chinese scholars. They decide it means "thou mayest," which leaves the choice to each person.

The word returns on the last page. Adam, dying after a stroke, has learned that Cal's actions drove Aron to enlist and die in France. Lee begs him to forgive his son. Adam raises his hand and whispers timshel.

Lee is the character many readers remember. He speaks pidgin English to strangers because it is what they expect, and plain English to people he trusts. The Penguin reading guide calls him one of the most remarkable characters in American literature.

Critics, readers, James Dean and Oprah

Reviewers in 1952 were divided. The New York Times called the novel clumsy in structure and melodramatic, but a serious and mostly successful attempt at a major theme. The Washington Post answered that Don Quixote and Tom Jones are not neatly made either.

Readers were less divided. Steinbeck told a friend that letters were arriving in flocks, written as though the book belonged to the people writing them.

Elia Kazan's film came out in 1955. The film was James Dean's first major picture, and he played Cal, which earned him an Academy Award nomination after his death. Jo Van Fleet won the Oscar for best supporting actress as Kate. Paul Osborn's script used only a small part of the novel, the rivalry of the twins for their father's love, set against the First World War.

On 18 June 2003, Oprah Winfrey brought back her television book club with East of Eden. She told viewers she thought it might be the best book she had ever read. Within a day the paperback rose from about 2,356,000th place on Amazon's sales list to second. Penguin, which normally shipped 40,000 to 50,000 copies a year, printed 600,000 more.

East of Eden in Paris

The French translation appeared in Paris in 1954, the year Steinbeck himself lived there. Del Duca published À l'est d'Éden in a translation by J.-C. Bonnardot, running to 751 pages.

That summer the Steinbecks took a house at 1 avenue de Marigny, in the 8th arrondissement, and he wrote regularly for the Paris daily Le Figaro.