This is one more issue that is brought out in the novel. Still, the same concept can hardly be applied to such a problem of the novel as racism. Though the reader is provided with the author’ personal view on the problems suggested and the author’s position is not imposed on the reader, he or she is unwillingly taking the same position as it is a rather sustained one. All of them are skillfully depicted by the author and are given his careful consideration.

A gilt top and ribbon marker complete this stunning edition.The major problems of the novel are: the perpetual contest between good and evil, the freedom to overcome evil, the pain of paternal rejection, fortunes and inheritances.

His striking binding design uses natural imagery native to the Salinas Valley – an oak tree and rattlesnake, which is echoed on the slipcase – to reinforce the novel’s thematic symbolism. The result is a richly layered novel that one lives rather than reads, experiencing the story as it builds to one of literature’s most powerfully resonant endings.Įdward Kinsella has contributed 11 arresting illustrations that heighten both the novel’s more dramatic scenes, as well as its poignant, intimate moments. Ignoring ‘rigidly formed strictures’, he interweaves his plot with autobiography, authorial intrusions and mini-essays to enthralling effect. In his introduction, Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Dirda writes of Steinbeck’s refusal to be restrained by genre. Rich in symbolic artistry and sweeping in scale, the narrative explores universal themes of love, identity and free will to reveal the primordial passions that govern us all, emotional patterns that are repeated, revised or reversed as one generation passes to the next. Blending family history and biblical allegory, he draws on the stories of the fall of Adam and Eve and the fatal rivalry of Cain and Abel to recount the intertwined fates of two families living in California’s idyllic Salinas Valley, the Trasks and the Hamiltons, from the beginning of the twentieth century to the close of the First World War. With his masterwork, Steinbeck aimed to tell ‘perhaps the greatest story of all – the story of good and evil, of strength and weakness, of love and hate, of beauty and ugliness’.

East of eden novel