East of Eden
John Steinbeck, 1952
★ 4.46 from 765.6k ratings on Goodreads
Two generations of a California family, a retelling of Cain and Abel, and one Hebrew word that means 'thou mayest.' The Salinas Valley comes through in long, lyrical stretches, with family drama that swings between quiet awe and open melodrama.
Feels like awe, passion and serenity. About family, freedom and home.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy multigenerational family sagas with moral weight and rich, difficult characters. Some readers find the good-and-evil symbolism heavy and the book uneven, so it may suit you best when you have patience for its slower, dramatic stretches.
Why read it
Pick it up for a large, serious look at choice and inheritance; Steinbeck's lyrical writing gives the Salinas Valley a vivid, lived-in presence.
A page from the book
What it feels like in the body when the world suddenly glows.
Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then — the glory — so that a cricket song sweetens the ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. What readers say
Readers are deeply moved and often awed by the multigenerational family saga, praising its rich characters and moral seriousness. Many find the good-and-evil struggle and choice theme powerful, though some call the book pretentious, melodramatic, and uneven.
John Steinbeck.Steinbeck wrote much of East of Eden in 1951 while filling notebooks with letters to his editor Pascal Covici, and set it in the Salinas Valley where he was born in 1902.
Books that feel like this
The Secret History
Donna Tartt, 1992
A California scholarship boy is taken up by a circle of Greek students at an elite Vermont college — and by the thing they have done. A novel about beauty, envy and the cost of belonging.
More by John Steinbeck
Of Mice and Men
John Steinbeck, 1937
Two migrant workers drift through Depression-era California, trading a shared dream of a small farm against the cost of staying together.
Travels with Charley
John Steinbeck, 1962
At fifty-eight, Steinbeck loads a camper with a poodle and drives across America, looking for the country he remembers and testing his own restlessness.
The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck, 1931
A raw, epic chronicle of displacement and despair that examines what happens when the American dream meets the harsh realities of the Dust Bowl.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is East of Eden for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy multigenerational family sagas with moral weight and rich, difficult characters. Some readers find the good-and-evil symbolism heavy and the book uneven, so it may suit you best when you have patience for its slower, dramatic stretches.
- What is East of Eden like?
- The Salinas Valley comes through in long, lyrical stretches, with family drama that swings between quiet awe and open melodrama. Feels like awe, passion and serenity. About family, freedom and home.
- What should I read after East of Eden?
- If you liked East of Eden, try The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoevsky), The Secret History (Donna Tartt) and Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë).
A taste of the feed
The night sky as a door that suddenly opens in you.
He did not stop on the steps either, but went quickly down; his soul, overflowing with rapture, yearned for freedom, space, openness. The vault of heaven, full of soft, shining stars, stretched vast and fathomless above him. The Milky Way ran in two pale streams from the zenith to the horizon. The fresh, motionless, still night enfolded the earth. The white towers and golden domes of the cathedral gleamed out against the sapphire sky. The gorgeous autumn flowers, in the beds round the house, were slumbering till morning. The silence of earth seemed to melt into the silence of the heavens. The mystery of earth was one with the mystery of the stars.
The Brothers Karamazov · Fyodor Dostoevsky
The idea that a life has one crack running down it, decided in advance.
DOES SUCH a thing as “the fatal flaw,” that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn’t. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.
The Secret History · Donna Tartt
Grief does its healing underground, months before anyone notices.
She did not know and would not have believed it, but beneath the layer of slime that covered her soul and seemed to her impenetrable, delicate young shoots of grass were already sprouting, which taking root would so cover with their living verdure the grief that weighed her down that it would soon no longer be seen or noticed. The wound had begun to heal from within.
War and Peace · Leo Tolstoy
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