East of Eden

In the year of 1952, John Steinbeck published the novel that "I have been practicing for all my life" (McCarthy, p.117), East of Eden. He decided to hold nothing back from the reader and scrutinize the very aspect of human nature using the Biblical stories of Adam and Eve, and Cain and Abel as a backdrop. This story of good and evil and man's downfall is centered on the dark and twisted figure of Cathy Ames, …

…one, that has frightened and inspired us…Humans are caught…in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence…There is no other story" (p. 413). He chooses to tell this story of the world once again in the novel East of Eden and in so doing wrote the book that he was practicing for his entire life.