East of Eden.

John Steinbeck’s East of Eden is the sprawling American family saga that the Nobel laureate came to regard as his magnum opus and the book toward which, in his own words, all of his previous work had been pointing. Set in the Salinas Valley of California across the half-century between the Civil War and the First World War, the novel traces the intertwined fortunes of two families, the Trasks and the Hamiltons, through three generations of love, labor, inheritance, and betrayal. At its heart stands a sustained retelling of the story of Cain and Abel, played out first in the troubled brotherhood of Adam and Charles Trask and then, more terribly, in the rivalry between Adam’s twin sons Caleb and Aron, as the biblical pattern of the beloved and the rejected brother reasserts itself across the generations. Woven through the Trask story is the parallel chronicle of the Hamilton family, modeled closely on Steinbeck’s own maternal relatives, and the figure of Lee, the Trasks’ Cantonese-American cook and the novel’s quiet philosophical conscience, whose meditations on the Hebrew word timshel, “thou mayest,” give the book its central argument about the possibility of moral freedom in a fallen world. Of the novel the New York Herald Tribune wrote that it is “a novel planned on the grandest possible scale...One of those occasions when a writer has aimed high and then summoned every ounce of energy, talent, seriousness, and passion of which he was capable...It is an entirely interesting and impressive book,” a judgment generations of later readers have confirmed. Adapted memorably by Elia Kazan in 1955 as the vehicle for James Dean’s screen debut, and chosen by Oprah’s Book Club in 2003 for a reintroduction that returned it to the bestseller lists more than half a century after publication, East of Eden stands today as one of the essential American novels of the twentieth century and the fullest expression of Steinbeck’s lifelong preoccupation with the moral landscape of his native California.