"John Steinbeck"

1952 · John Steinbeck · 601 pages · Literary Fiction

East of Eden is sprawling, imperfect, and enormously ambitious, the kind of novel where the author is clearly swinging for something larger than most writers attempt. Steinbeck considered it his life's work, and that investment shows on every page. The pacing drags, Cathy defies belief, and some passages read more like moral philosophy than fiction. None of that stops it from being one of the more powerful reading experiences in American literature for readers willing to commit to its scale.