East of Eden (LONGMAN LITERATURE STEINBECK) - Hardcover

Steinbeck, John; Burton, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0582461529 ISBN 13: 9780582461529

Publisher: Longman, 2003

Synopsis

“I mean to make a garden of my land. Remember my name is Adam. So far I’ve had no Eden, let alone been driven out.”

Adam has high hopes for the future when he settles on a new farm with his wife, Cathy. But Cathy is no ordinary woman. As soon as their twin boys, Cal and Aron, are born, the Californian Dream begins to sour...

Hardback (including notes) 762pp 

 

 

About this title

Review:

John Steinbeck knew and understood America and Americans better than any other writer of the twentieth century. ("The Dallas Morning News") A man whose work was equal to the vast social themes that drove him. (Don DeLillo)"
"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."
--The New York Herald Tribune
"A fantasia and myth...a strange and original work of art."
--The New York Times Book Review
"A moving, crying pageant with wilderness strengths."
--Carl Sandburg

"When the book club ended a year ago, I said I would bring it back when I found the book that was moving...and this is a great one. I read it for myself for the first time and then I had some friends read it. And we think it might be the best novel we've ever read!"
--Oprah Winfrey
"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."
--The New York Herald Tribune

"A fantasia and myth...a strange and original work of art."
--The New York Times Book Review

"A moving, crying pageant with wilderness strengths."
--Carl Sandburg

"When the book club ended a year ago, I said I would bring it back when I found the book that was moving...and this is a great one. I read it for myself for the first time and then I had some friends read it. And we think it might be the best novel we've ever read!"
--Oprah Winfrey
-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.-
--The New York Herald Tribune

-A fantasia and myth...a strange and original work of art.-
--The New York Times Book Review

-A moving, crying pageant with wilderness strengths.-
--Carl Sandburg

-When the book club ended a year ago, I said I would bring it back when I found the book that was moving...and this is a great one. I read it for myself for the first time and then I had some friends read it. And we think it might be the best novel we've ever read!-
--Oprah Winfrey

About the Author:

John Steinbeck, born in Salinas, California, in 1902, grew up in a fertile agricultural valley, about twenty-five miles from the Pacific Coast. Both the valley and the coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. In 1919 he went to Stanford University, where he intermittently enrolled in literature and writing courses until he left in 1925 without taking a degree. During the next five years he supported himself as a laborer and journalist in New York City, all the time working on his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929).

After marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, he published two California books, The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and To a God Unknown (1933), and worked on short stories later collected in The Long Valley (1938). Popular success and financial security came only with Tortilla Flat (1935), stories about Monterey's paisanos. A ceaseless experimenter throughout his career, Steinbeck changed courses regularly. Three powerful novels of the late 1930s focused on the California laboring class: In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and the book considered by many his finest, The Grapes of Wrath (1939). The Grapes of Wrath won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1939.

Early in the 1940s, Steinbeck became a filmmaker with The Forgotten Village (1941) and a serious student of marine biology with Sea of Cortez (1941). He devoted his services to the war, writing Bombs Away (1942) and the controversial play-novelette The Moon is Down (1942).Cannery Row (1945), The Wayward Bus (1948), another experimental drama, Burning Bright(1950), and The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951) preceded publication of the monumental East of Eden (1952), an ambitious saga of the Salinas Valley and his own family's history.

The last decades of his life were spent in New York City and Sag Harbor with his third wife, with whom he traveled widely. Later books include Sweet Thursday (1954), The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication (1957), Once There Was a War (1958), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962), America and Americans (1966), and the posthumously published Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters (1969), Viva Zapata!(1975), The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976), and Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath (1989).

Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962, and, in 1964, he was presented with the United States Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Steinbeck died in New York in 1968. Today, more than thirty years after his death, he remains one of America's greatest writers and cultural figures.

About this edition

• Publisher: Longman
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0582461529
• ISBN 13: 9780582461529
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 768