Probably the best of John Steinbeck's novels, "East of Eden," is long but not "big," and anyone who, deceived by its spread in space and time (c. 1860–1920), says that it is "epical in its sweep," is merely in the usual grip of cliché. Its dramatic center is a narrow story of social horror that rests quite disarmingly on the proposition that "there are monsters born in the world to human parents." But through the exercise of a really rather remarkable freedom of his rights as a novelist, Mr. Steinbeck weaves in, and more particularly around, this story of prostitution a fantasia of history and of myth that results in a strange and original work of art.

"East of Eden" is different from any of the earlier Steinbeck novels. It is, in a sense, more amorphous, less intent on singleness of theme and effect….

Mr. Steinbeck's tightly constructed short novels, in fact, and even such longer work as "The Grapes of Wrath," have given us no preparation for this amplitude of treatment that enables him now to develop, within this single work, not only a number of currents of story, but a number of different modes of tracing them….

[The] novelist reconstructs the history of his maternal grandfather, Samuel Hamilton, who came to the Salinas Valley in about 1870 with his wife, and there produced a brood of children. From the history of Samuel Hamilton, which, although it is a story of economic failure is also a sunny and exhilarating account of a rich and various family life set against the rigorous background of a recalcitrant land, we move into the dark and violent story of Adam Trask.

In about 1900, Trask arrives in Salinas with a strange and very pretty wife. His own home was a Connecticut farm which he could not share with his brother, Charles, the Cain to Adam's Abel, and when he finds the girl, Cathy, beaten nearly to death on his doorstep, he nurses her back to health, marries her, and takes her to the West…. It is her story that seems most to concern the novelist.

These stories in themselves are less interesting than the whole that they compose, and more especially, than the various ways in which the novelist creates that whole. There is, to begin, the speculative voice of Mr. Steinbeck himself, a kind of democratic chorus that broods on implications of the action but is itself, in this role, entirely separate from the action…. Then there is the narrator when he sinks into the narrative, involved in his own ancestral history and even, fleetingly, in his boyhood. (p. 1)

Then there is that family history, particularly of Samuel Hamilton, through whom we are taken into the social history of Salinas County. Hamilton, an eloquent Irishman, and his friend, Lee, an eloquent Chinese servant, are the most moving characterizations in the novel, and both are ancillary to the story.

As we come into that story, we observe further varieties of method: the rapid, impersonal narration of which Mr. Steinbeck is a positive master, a method that has not found much room in the contemporary novel with its Jamesian emphasis on the dramatic unit; then the narrative method constantly erupting into the jagged intensities of the dramatic, or rather, the melodramatic method….

With Adam Trask, we move … into the core story, the incredible story of his wife, the "monster" Cathy Ames, most vicious female in literature, whose story, if we accept it at all, we accept at the level of folklore, the abstract fiction of the Social Threat, of a Witch beyond women.

This account may suggest a kind of eclectic irresolution of view which is, in fact, not at all the quality of the book. I have hoped to suggest, instead, a wide-ranging, imaginative freedom that might save the life of many an American novelist.

There are defects in Mr. Steinbeck's imagination, certainly. He has always been fascinated by depravities that he seems helpless to account for; hence the melodrama. Inversely, he has always accepted certain noble abstractions about human nature that his melodrama is hardly designed to demonstrate; hence the gap between speculative statement and novelistic presentation, or sentimentalism. These qualities cause familiar discontinuities in "East of Eden," yet the tone of this book, the bold ease with which the "I" takes over at the outset and appears and disappears and reappears throughout, both holds it together and gives it its originality, the relaxations of its freedom. (pp. 1, 22)

I am trying to praise the audaciousness with which this novelist asserts his temperament through his material, and the temperamental means by which he defines that material for us. (p. 22)