Rereading the classics: Why John Steinbeck’s ‘East of Eden’ has always been controversial

John Steinbeck is now most famous as the 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.

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.”

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