East of Eden Themes

When you talk about keeping it all in the family, usually you aren't talking about family curses. And while lots of people have a love-hate relationship with their family, most of us don't feel com...

We've got all the ingredients for a delicious jealousy pie in East of Eden, which makes sense since it's based on of the original master recipes for jealousy—the story of Cain hating Abel for get...

Wouldn't it be great if we could just buy another person's love? It sounds ridiculous, but people in East of Eden try to do it all the time. From Charles's birthday gift for his father to Adam's mi...

Steinbeck is all about stripping away taboos when it comes to talking about s-e-x. None of that oh-my-gosh-an-ankle stuffiness of the past here, folks; nope—think of him as the Salt-n-Pepa of the...

Write this down: East of Eden hinges on the word timshel. That's it. That's the entire explanation. As Lee points out, timshel is a Hebrew word meaning thou mayest, and it's in the original story o...

Here is the breakdown: Story of Genesis = How Evil Enters the World. Afterward, good and evil are constantly duking it out, and in East of Eden we've got front-row seats to the fight. Sometimes, th...

Remember the good old days when a stick of gum was a nickel and every single thing was better? Or remember back in our day when you had to walk ten miles to school in the snow uphill both ways? Nos...

By innocence we mean two things: Adam and Aron. Aron is his father's son through and through: he doesn't give two hoots for the opinion of his own father, and he is a sucker who just can't see the...

If you're going to title your book East of Eden, you're implying that there's a West, too. This novel loves to work the East-West thing: Back East (Connecticut) versus the Wild Wild West (Californi...