This October, Netflix spirited us away to the Salinas Valley, California, sometime around 1900—where a man's worst nightmare was still the wrath of God, and the closest he came to a tyrant was his own father. Yes, we’re talking about Zoe Kazan’s celebrated East of Eden TV adaptation—which is by far one of the year’s best shows. (And full of incredible performances, by the way, especially the incomperable Hoon Lee as Lee.) East of Eden is widely considered to be one of the greatest American novels. It was certainly John Steinbeck’s masterpiece, and the most ambitious and autobiographical of all his novels.
"It has everything in it I have been able to learn about my craft or profession in all these years," he once said of it, later adding: “I think everything else I have written has been, in a sense, practice for this." You may like to also know that, yes, published in 1952, it is an early example of autofiction—although that term wasn’t coined until 1977. But also, no, none of Steinbeck’s relatives shot their husband, walked out on their newborn twins, and reinvented herself as a brothel madam by poisoning the woman who took her in. None of Steinbeck’s letters identifies a real person as the inspiration for Cathy Ames—played in the miniseries by Florence Pugh.
But what was true, almost disappointingly so by comparison, was the other family in the book. While the Trasks were invented, the Hamiltons (who are largely backgrounded in the Netflix series) were barely disguised at all—Steinbeck basically put his own relatives on the page. The Hamiltons are the novel's other family—an Irish immigrant clan who settle a neighboring ranch to the Trasks in the Salinas Valley, and whose lives run alongside the main Cain-and-Abel plot rather than inside it.
Where the Trasks provide the drama, the Hamiltons provide the texture: a large, loving, perpetually broke household who never do anything as dramatic as murder or betrayal, but whose ordinary joys and griefs anchor the book in something real. Steinbeck uses them almost as a chorus—commenting on, and occasionally intervening in, the Trasks's unfolding tragedy. In a letter to his editor Pascal Covici (published in Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters), Steinbeck wrote of the Hamiltons: The Hamiltons were Steinbeck’s grandparents, who—just as in the novel—moved to California, via New York, from Ireland in 1846.
The reason for Samuel’s emigration was more opaque: Samuel spent his life farming dry, unforgiving land, and never struck it rich—but was, by every account, adored by his large family. Steinbeck barely fictionalizes him at all. Samuel met Liza in New York around 1848, soon after they had arrived from Ireland.
Soon they were married, and traveled to California in 1850 to make a new life in the Wild West. She, too, had emigrated from Ireland, but didn’t have—in Steinbeck’s recollection—quite the same finesse as her husband. Here’s how Steinbeck described them in an article for Collier’s Magazine in 1953: Steinbeck's own mother appears in the novel as one of Samuel's daughters, drawn straight from life rather than invented.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
