East of Eden: A City's Bible

Steinbeck called East of Eden the big one, the novel he had been working up to his entire career. He wrote it in nineteen fifty-one and fifty-two, composing it as a letter to his two young sons, trying to give them the valley where he had grown up and the story of his own family alongside the biblical story of Cain and Abel. The book opens with a description of the Salinas Valley that reads like a love letter to a place he could not stop thinking about even from three thousand miles away in New York.

The valley, Steinbeck wrote, lies in California between two mountain ranges. The Gabilans he called bright and open, the light mountains. The Santa Lucias he wrote were dark and brooding, inhabited by outlaws and strange happenings. He was forty-nine when he wrote that description, and the mountains had not changed at all from the ones he had watched from the windows of the house on Central Avenue as a child.

The novel uses the valley as the setting for a story that spans roughly four decades, from the late nineteenth century through the First World War. Two families, the Trasks and the Hamiltons, the latter drawn directly from Steinbeck's own maternal family, play out a retelling of Genesis in the farmhouses and along the roads of a valley his readers mostly knew only as a place where lettuce came from.

The book is long and not entirely comfortable. Its central concern is a Hebrew word, timshel, which a group of Chinese scholars in the novel's world spend two years studying before concluding that it means thou mayest. Not thou shalt, which is a commandment. Not thou wilt, which is a prediction. Thou mayest, which is a choice. Steinbeck built a five-hundred-page novel around the argument that human beings are not condemned by their nature, that the capacity for choosing is the thing that makes us human.

Many of his neighbors in Salinas took offense at the book. Some felt it had betrayed the town's gossip, spread private family stories into public literature. Some were offended by its portrayal of a brothel madam. The agricultural establishment had not forgiven The Grapes of Wrath and saw East of Eden as a second attack.

What remains is a novel that the National Steinbeck Center, which opened on Main Street here in June of nineteen ninety-eight, calls the preeminent American novel of its generation. The center is among the most significant museums in the United States dedicated to a single American author. Whatever Salinas thought of Steinbeck, the world has been voting with its attention ever since.