Florence Pugh as Cathy Ames in Zoe Kazan's adaptation of East of Eden (2026) NetflixJohn Steinbeck is now most famous as author of The Grapes of Wrath (1938), a novel about agricultural workers displaced from Oklahoma during the Great Depression. But he regarded East of Eden (1952), a saga depicting the lives of two Californian families, as his favourite and most significant work. Despite being a long novel, nearly 600 pages in paperback, it sold very well on its first publication. It was given a subsequent boost in 2003 by being selected for Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club.It is now a seven-part Netflix series directed by Zoe Kazan, granddaughter of Elia Kazan, who directed the 1955 film version of the novel. Steinbeck’s novel was also adapted as a shorter miniseries by the US ABC network in 1981. Dust jacket of the first edition of East of Eden (1952). Viking Press, via Wikimedia Commons Steinbeck’s popularity with the general public and some academic critics has always been a source of controversy. When he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, the New York Times remarked frostily that it was a pity the Swedish Academy had not awarded it to a writer whose work had “made a more profound impression on the literature of our age”.The literary establishment on the US east coast tended to regard him as a lumbering populist. “Steinbeck’s people,” the literary critic Alfred Kazin complained, “are always on the verge of becoming human but never do.”Part of this critical condescension arose from what New York critics saw as Steinbeck’s folksy style. Indeed, East of Eden combines its family saga with manifold Biblical parallels. Samuel Hamilton, the patriarch of one family, cites passages from the Bible on “original sin and the story of Cain and Abel”. He describes how “Cain went out from the presence of the Lord and dwelt in the land of Nod on the east of Eden”. Adam Trask, patriarch of the other family, and his recalcitrant wife Cathy, create various moral dilemmas for their sons Caleb and Aaron, a none-too-subtle echo of Cain and Abel. Cathy actually absconds from her marriage to take on a second life as a prostitute. The plot turns not only on murder and deception but, more fundamentally, questions of ethical virtue and the nature of evil. Steinbeck places particular emphasis on an individual’s capacity to choose the right path. James Dean as Caleb Trask in Elia Kazan’s 1955 film adaptation of East of Eden. IMDB The freedom of the mindSuch a proselytising trajectory may have recommended Steinbeck to the Nobel Prize committee, which always prefers a high moral tone. It also found favour with Oprah’s audience, which is traditionally attached to the idea of spiritual regeneration. But it damaged Steinbeck in the eyes of New York critics of the 1960s, who saw the author’s tendency towards didacticism as reprehensibly old-fashioned. Lionel Trilling at Columbia University followed the novelist Henry James in believing authors should grant their fictional characters a degree of freedom. In East of Eden, Steinbeck is resolutely prescriptive and judgemental. “I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents,” he declares. He adds that, in Cathy, “some balance wheel was misweighted, some gear out of ratio”. This is the language of a preacher, rather than a novelist or psychoanalyst. And it risks, as Kazin suggested, turning Steinbeck’s characters into marionettes.Yet East of Eden remains a powerful novel. Its action unfolds slowly and relentlessly, like the cyclic flow of the Salinas River depicted in its first chapter. Edmund Wilson, not a natural fan of Steinbeck, accurately caught the book’s flavour when he commented on the author’s “unpanicky scrutiny of life”. The novel’s mythic infrastructure lends it an air of fatalism. Indeed, the key tension within the book derives from a conflict between patterns of inevitability and what Steinbeck, in another direct authorial commentary, describes as “the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected”. John Steinbeck c.1939. McFadden Publications, Public domain Steinbeck openly advocates a need to “fight against any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual”. In a paradox now becoming increasingly obvious to cultural historians studying the mid-20th century, his conception of such a free “individual” was fatally circumscribed by gender and race. Admittedly, the Chinese community in California plays a key role in the novel. But in what now seems an embarrassing aside, Steinbeck describes “Indians” as “an inferior breed without energy, inventiveness, or culture, a people that lived on grubs and grasshoppers and shellfish, too lazy to hunt or fish”. Californian heritageEast of Eden’s narrative spans two generations, moving from the US civil war in the 1860s to the end of the first world war in 1918. But its primary thematic concern is with the aftermath of the second world war: the era in which Steinbeck was writing the novel. Steinbeck complains that “the forces marshalled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man”. This alludes not just to the recent group racism of Nazi Germany, but to the rise of totalitarianism in its communist and socialist forms. These are the perils of conformity George Orwell complained about in his dystopian fiction 1984, published in 1949, three years before East of Eden. Steinbeck also touches on the rise of a potentially dehumanising military-industrial complex in America and the West. Again, he laments the potential loss of individualism. “When our food and clothing and housing are all born in the complication of mass production,” he writes, “mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking.”Yet the Californian heritage that permeates all of Steinbeck’s work means his fiction never quite accords with typically American postwar values. In 1947, the critic Freeman Champney accurately observed of Steinbeck: “more perhaps than any other contemporary American writer, except William Faulkner, his writing has grown out of a special region”. East of Eden is immersed in the history and culture of Steinbeck’s home state. When he was writing the novel in New York, Steinbeck employed the editor of a local newspaper in Salinas to check various facts for him. Just as The Grapes of Wrath draws part of its power from depictions of Western landscapes, so East of Eden focuses on many different aspects of California life. Steinbeck portrays small towns of the Salinas Valley in the north of the state, as well as life at Stanford University, which Aron attends in the novel. This reflects the author’s time as a student there between 1919 and 1925, when he accumulated many “incompletes”. Workers in the Salinas Valley, California, May 1940. Rondal Partridge, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Steinbeck was also strongly drawn to the culture of the Pacific Ocean. He was deeply influenced by his friend and sometime neighbour Ed Ricketts, an eminent marine biologist. Ricketts’s work on “nonteleological” thought shaped Steinbeck’s interest in how humans interact with animals and with the natural environment. This emerges most clearly in Steinbeck’s novel Of Mice and Men (1937), but it is also apparent in his other fiction. It suggests the author was never so invested in the liberal humanism that Kazin and other New York intellectuals promoted. Steinbeck’s conception of life as a form of biological organism illustrates another dimension of his Californian aesthetics. In 1938, Ricketts introduced Steinbeck to his close friend John Cage, then just starting out on his career as a radical West Coast artist and musician. Cage in turn introduced Steinbeck to the French composer Edgard Varèse, who cannily observed how the American author deployed musical themes to interweave various strands of his writing. Steinbeck was also professionally invested in Californian popular culture, working initially as a journalist for the San Francisco News. He later moved to Hollywood, where he was a scriptwriter for Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat (1944) and Elia Kazan’s Viva Zapata! (1952). If he were alive today, it is not difficult to imagine him working for Netflix. A restless peopleSteinbeck’s reputation among intellectuals further declined during the last few years before his death in 1968, because of his support for the Vietnam War and close friendship with the increasingly unpopular president Lyndon Johnson. Nevertheless, he is a formidable figure in US literary history, someone who combined a journalist’s eye for contemporary social and political life with an intuitive feeling for the transcendental horizons of American mythic landscapes. In a diary entry for 1951, while writing East of Eden, Steinbeck noted: “The craft or art of writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for the wordlessness.” This “wordlessness” has some affinities with Cage’s aesthetic version of silence, articulated most clearly in his infamous musical composition 4’33", first performed in the year East of Eden was published. The work consists of four and a half minutes of silence, broken only by the pianist opening and closing the keyboard lid to signal the work’s three movements. Cage’s invocation of silence mirrors the always awkward interaction between language and environment in Steinbeck’s writing. Lying, the wilfulness involved in a deliberately deceptive use of language, is one of the central concerns in East of Eden. This is unpacked most explicitly in the double life of Cathy, or Kate Albey as her prostitute alter-ego calls herself. Kate believes everyone is “a liar and a hypocrite”, saying: “I love to rub their noses in their own nastiness.” But in a broader sense, such scepticism about verbal communication also speaks to the failure of language. In Steinbeck’s eyes, all words are inevitably deceptive in one form or another. The clumsiness of the narrator’s constructions in East of Eden create their own sense of pointedness and charm. While the structural repetitions and constant authorial intrusions might be regarded as cumbersome, they also reflect the way partial perspectives are constantly circling around an elusive centre. In Travels with Charley (1962), subtitled “In Search of America”, Steinbeck described Americans as “a restless people, a mobile people, never satisfied with where they are.” This is reflected in the trek from Oklahoma to California in The Grapes of Wrath, but it manifests itself in more formal fashion in East of Eden. Here, language itself seems to be in a state of exile, expelled from the original Garden of Eden. If the journey back to a state of innocence appears impossible, it is nevertheless a fateful quest of epic proportions. On one level, East of Eden offers a melodramatic conflict between good and evil. Adam tells his wife she doesn’t hate the “evil” in people, but rather “the good in them you can’t get at”. What is more remarkable, however, is the book’s sense of human relations evolving slowly over time, shaped by complex intersections between destiny and choice. Its long narrative presents perennial conflicts between sickness and health, in the broadest sense of those terms, and the cycles through which people fall sick or recuperate. The slow pace suits its theme. The Californian environment operates as a kind of chorus: “The summer progressed and the Salinas River retired underground or stood in green pools under high banks.” In this way, the lives of Steinbeck’s characters are played out against a specific regional history, in which the human mind is held in balance against larger ecologies of the natural world. Most of the forthcoming Netflix series was reportedly filmed in New Zealand. It will be interesting to see how it presents, or misrepresents, Steinbeck’s Californian world.Paul Giles does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.