As East of Eden becomes a Netflix series, Steinbeck’s sprawling Californian saga still holds power through its moral ambition, regional depth and slow contest between destiny and choice.

John Steinbeck is now most famous as author of The Grapes of Wrath (1938), a novel about agricultural workers displaced from Oklahoma during the Great Depression. But he regarded East of Eden (1952), a saga depicting the lives of two Californian families, as his favourite and most significant work.

Despite being a long novel, nearly 600 pages in paperback, it sold very well on its first publication. It was given a subsequent boost in 2003 by being selected for Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club.

It is now a seven-part Netflix series directed by Zoe Kazan, granddaughter of Elia Kazan, who directed the 1955 film version of the novel. Steinbeck’s novel was also adapted as a shorter miniseries by the US ABC network in 1981.

Steinbeck’s popularity with the general public and some academic critics has always been a source of controversy. When he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, the New York Times remarked frostily that it was a pity the Swedish Academy had not awarded it to a writer whose work had ‘made a more profound impression on the literature of our age’.

The literary establishment on the US east coast tended to regard him as a lumbering populist. ‘Steinbeck’s people’, the literary critic Alfred Kazin complained, ‘are always on the verge of becoming human but never do’.

Part of this critical condescension arose from what New York critics saw as Steinbeck’s folksy style. Indeed, East of Eden combines its family saga with manifold Biblical parallels.

Samuel Hamilton, the patriarch of one family, cites passages from the Bible on ‘original sin and the story of Cain and Abel’. He describes how ‘Cain went out from the presence of the Lord and dwelt in the land of Nod on the east of Eden’.

Adam Trask, patriarch of the other family, and his recalcitrant wife, Cathy, create various moral dilemmas for their sons Caleb and Aaron, a none-too-subtle echo of Cain and Abel. Cathy actually absconds from her marriage to take on a second life as a prostitute.

The plot turns not only on murder and deception but, more fundamentally, questions of ethical virtue and the nature of evil. Steinbeck places particular emphasis on an individual’s capacity to choose the right path.

Such a proselytising trajectory may have recommended Steinbeck to the Nobel Prize committee, which always prefers a high moral tone. It also found favour with Oprah’s audience, which is traditionally attached to the idea of spiritual regeneration.

But it damaged Steinbeck in the eyes of New York critics of the 1960s, who saw the author’s tendency towards didacticism as reprehensibly old-fashioned. Lionel Trilling at Columbia University followed the novelist Henry James in believing authors should grant their fictional characters a........

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