Read-along

East of Eden

John Steinbeck, 1952. Fifty-five chapters, each with a summary and a short analysis, illustrated throughout as if the Salinas Valley had been worked over by a pictorialist photographer printing dark on platinum paper.

55 chapters · 459 plates · Soft-focus platinum print, about 1905 — warm grey-brown, printed dark, shadows near black.

Chapter 1 3 plates

The valley between two ranges

An overture chapter. The narrator remembers the Salinas Valley in Northern California, a long swale between two ranges: the Gabilans to the east, "light gay mountains full of sun and loveli…
Chapter 2 3 plates

Samuel and Liza homestead the hills

The narrator introduces his own family, depending on "hearsay, on old photographs, on stories told". Samuel Hamilton comes from the north of Ireland about thirty years before the turn of th…
Chapter 3 10 plates

Cyrus drills his two sons

Adam Trask is born on a Connecticut farm in 1862 while his father Cyrus is at the war. Cyrus comes home with his right leg off at the knee and the gonorrhoea he passes to his wife; she inve…
Chapter 4 3 plates

Adam enlisted from his sickbed

Charles is drinking with drummers at the village inn while his father hunts the road for him with a shotgun; warned in time, he hides out two weeks, and by his return "murder had sunk back…
Chapter 5 10 plates

Nine Hamiltons and no water

The nine Hamilton children are counted off. George is handsome and "sinless"; Will is stolid and conservative, formed early by the valley's distrust of his foreign, book-reading father, and…
Chapter 6 10 plates

Two brothers alone, two marks

Alone on the Connecticut farm, Charles works himself into exhaustion and visits the girls Mr. Edwards circulates through the rooms above Mr. Hallam's inn, two weeks at a time. Prising at a…
Chapter 7 10 plates

The inheritance and the discharge papers

Adam's second enlistment passes without event — "from nothing to nothing is no time at all" — and he is discharged with sergeant's stripes at the Presidio in 1890. Still unable to go home,…
Chapter 8 10 plates

Cathy Ames burns her parents

The narrator argues that psychic monsters are born as surely as physical ones, then introduces Cathy Ames of a Massachusetts tannery town: heart-shaped face, golden hair, tiny lobeless ears…
Chapter 9 10 plates

Mr. Edwards falls in love

Mr. Edwards runs his circuit of small-town whorehouses out of Boston like an accountant, keeping a respectable wife, two sons booked into Groton, and an unvarying rule never to believe a wo…
Chapter 10 10 plates

Two men and one farm

The brothers settle Cyrus's money at interest, stand together at his grave in Washington, and then find they cannot live together. Charles still fears the fortune will have to be given back…
Chapter 11 10 plates

The girl on the steps

A bundle of rags and mud drags itself up the Trask steps at night. Adam carries her in over Charles's objection that two men alone with a girl will have the county talking. The doctor count…
Chapter 12 3 plates

Slamming the lid on a century

An intercalary chapter, and the opening of Part Two. The narrator stops at the boundary of 1900 to listen to what people said about the century they were leaving. Old men remember it as swe…
Chapter 13 10 plates

The glory, and a knitting needle

The narrator opens with the "glory" that lights up a man's mind, and his creed: the free, exploring individual mind is the most valuable thing in the world, and any system that limits it mu…
Chapter 14 10 plates

Olive Hamilton declares her war

A family chapter about the narrator's mother. Country schools were the whole cultural apparatus of the valley — polls, dances, debates, May queens — and the teacher its intellectual paragon…
Chapter 15 10 plates

Water witched, and Lee explains himself

Adam sits on his land like a contented cat while carpenters rebuild the old Sanchez adobe for a dynasty — copper nails, hard wood, nothing to rust or rot — and the whole valley talks the sa…
Chapter 16 10 plates

What Samuel saw in Londonderry

Riding home under a flooding moon, Samuel probes at the world-sadness in his chest — "Welshrats" — until he finds where it started: Cathy's eyes at the supper table, which carry no message…
Chapter 17 10 plates

A meteorite and a bitten hand

The narrator reopens the question of whether Cathy was a monster, then returns to her waiting out the pregnancy, huge only in the belly, stealing the carpenters' chalk to crush between her…
Chapter 18 10 plates

The deputy asks the obvious questions

Deputy Sheriff Horace Quinn rides out with Julius Euskadi to look into the rumour that Adam Trask has shot himself. Adam, grey and shrunken in the four-poster, sticks to the story that he w…
Chapter 19 10 plates

Churches, whorehouses and a new girl

The narrator sets out how a new country fills up — openers first, then lawyers, then culture — and argues that the church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West together and did much th…
Chapter 20 10 plates

The will, the champagne, the ammonia

Faye tries to persuade Kate to stop working and manage the house instead, and Kate refuses, saying she must have the money. That night the Woodmen of the World never arrive — Clarence Monte…
Chapter 21 10 plates

Never hurry: Faye's long illness

Kate never hurries. She fixes the end, forgets it, and works only on the means. She lets Alex the cook believe he leaked the will, then manoeuvres the girls into asking Faye about it in per…
Chapter 22 10 plates

Naming the twins from Genesis

A year on, Adam is still grey and the Sanchez house stands open to the rain. Lee tells Samuel in a King City barroom that the twins have no names — Adam calls them "they" — and Samuel, sent…
Chapter 23 10 plates

Una comes home in a box

Part Three opens on the Hamiltons, "tuned too high", and the ones who snapped. Una, Samuel's cleverest daughter, married a silent photographic chemist who took her north to the Oregon borde…
Chapter 24 10 plates

Timshel, and the medicine for Adam

Samuel makes his farewell calls, keeping the Trask place for last. Lee has cut off his queue and describes the twins as two sides of a medal: Cal sharp, dark and fighting for his life, Aron…
Chapter 25 10 plates

Adam walks into Kate's office

A telegram of four words reaches Tom alone at the ranch; he lays out his dark suit and turns his face to the wall. After the burial Adam stays behind among the white violets, walks the mudd…
Chapter 26 10 plates

Free at last, and Lee asks

Adam rides home from Salinas expecting grief and finds instead "a hungry gaiety". He stops at Will Hamilton's new garage to order an automobile — the last man in the valley Will would have…
Chapter 27 10 plates

Abra, the rabbit and the rain

The twins, eleven now and wearing turkey feathers at their temples, kill a rabbit in the river bottom. Cal manoeuvres over who gets the credit, then tries out his sharpest new weapon: he ha…
Chapter 28 10 plates

Lee's mother on the shale

At supper the twins discover that their father has begun to listen to them, and are made timid by it. Cal steers the talk to their mother's grave; Adam lies smoothly and instantly — she is…
Chapter 29 10 plates

Learning to start a Ford

Adam waits impatiently for a reply from Charles, forgetting how long a letter takes, and busies himself bungling fatherhood — quizzing the twins about school, taking back his pocketknife to…
Chapter 30 10 plates

Charles's money, a wreath of ice

The Ford makes it to King City, where the postmaster hands Adam a letter from Connecticut lawyers: Charles is dead, buried under no stone, and has left over a hundred thousand dollars to be…
Chapter 31 10 plates

Adam brings Kate the letter

Adam takes the afternoon train and lays the lawyers' letter on Kate's account book. She offers to be bought off for forty-five thousand, accuses him of a trick, then of being advised by the…
Chapter 32 10 plates

Dessie comes home to Tom

Dessie was the beloved of the family: an afternoon of fittings at her little house by Reynaud's Bakery would leave Agnes Morrison laughing all the way home and the whole household happy for…
Chapter 33 10 plates

A glass of salts for Dessie

Through a fat green year Tom labours at the ranch — the forge ringing, the house whitewashed, a flush toilet built out of bent tin, a windmill that turns in the slightest wind — manufacturi…
Chapter 34 3 plates

One story, and three deaths

An intercalary chapter, opening Part Four. The narrator answers the child's question — what is the world's story about? — with a single answer: there is one story only, the net of good and…
Chapter 35 3 plates

Lee leaves and comes back

Lee moves the family into Dessie's little house in Salinas, invents jobs to delay the moment, and then gives notice — his prepared speech spoiled because Adam has already guessed. At breakf…
Chapter 36 10 plates

The willow tree and Abra's secret

The twins enter the seventh grade at the West End school, under the picture of Laocoön wrapped in snakes. Cal works out a system of raising and withholding his hand until the teacher stops…
Chapter 37 10 plates

Six carloads of ruined lettuce

February 1915. Lee, having given up the bookstore, furnishes a home for himself for the first time and spends Adam's money on a gas stove, electric light, a telephone and a big icebox. Adam…
Chapter 38 10 plates

Cal asks Lee about his mother

Cal has always competed for affection by imitating Aron, and what charms in his brother is suspect in him, so he has built a wall of self-sufficiency with one weak place: leaning against hi…
Chapter 39 10 plates

Jailed, trusted, and shown the grey room

One of Salinas's periodic anti-gambling raids scoops Cal up at a fan-tan game, and Adam collects him from the jail. Over a long silence at the breakfast table Adam does not punish him but s…
Chapter 40 10 plates

Kate discovers there are clever people

Shaken by Cal's parting line, Kate checks the capsule of morphine she keeps on a chain with her safe-deposit keys and Faye's gold watch, and remembers the only other person who ever made he…
Chapter 41 10 plates

Cal and Will contract for beans

The country slides toward war: Wilson is re-elected on a promise to stay out of it, British purchasing agents rove the country buying food and metals, and prices rise. Cal offers to help Ar…
Chapter 42 3 plates

The war arrives on Main Street

An intercalary chapter on how the war reached Salinas. The town believed every American was a rifleman by birth and worth ten or twenty foreigners, a myth Pershing's expedition after Villa…
Chapter 43 3 plates

The gold watch nobody claims

Lee, now immaculate in black broadcloth, comes home to make a winter melon soup while Adam reports what he has learned by accident: Aron has covered a whole year's work and will sit his col…
Chapter 44 10 plates

Abra works out what Aron wants

With Aron away at Stanford, Abra attaches herself to the rest of the Trasks, trusting Adam and loving Lee more than her own parents. She spends her afternoons in the kitchen stringing beans…
Chapter 45 10 plates

Joe Valery finds Ethel dead

Joe Valery, Kate's assistant and executioner, lives by a private code — believe nobody, keep your mouth shut, put your faith in dough — and by a protective love for Joe. He fears Kate becau…
Chapter 46 3 plates

What Salinas did to Mr. Fenchel

An intercalary chapter on Salinas in wartime. The town drilled a Home Guard of men over fifty — William C. Burt died on the armory floor in the middle of a push-up — mustered Minute Men to…
Chapter 47 3 plates

Adam's draft board, Aron's disappointment

Adam and Lee follow the western front on a pinned map, and when Mr. Kelly dies Adam is appointed to the draft board. He works at it hard and sadly, unable to shake the sense that every youn…
Chapter 48 3 plates

A funeral, and Kate turns kind

The Nigger dies and is buried exactly as her will demands: an ebony and silver casket, four candles, no flowers, no sermon, no grief, and only her small black husband, who fills the grave h…
Chapter 49 10 plates

Fifteen thousand dollars refused

The whole household meets the Lark to see Aron home for Thanksgiving. That night he tells Cal he wants to leave college and take over the ranch, and Cal talks him into sleeping on it. Cal s…
Chapter 50 10 plates

Kate drinks the whole bottle

Kate sits without moving, seeing the blond boy's shocked face and his dark brother laughing in the doorway. Joe, pushing for his break, invents a stranger who mentioned Faye — and gives him…
Chapter 51 10 plates

The sheriff burns the photographs

Sheriff Horace Quinn goes through the papers from Joe Valery's pockets and finds the two-line will and the envelopes of photographs. He confirms the will is good, shows one picture to a fri…
Chapter 52 10 plates

Abra burns Aron's letters

The winter of 1917–18 is a frightened time, with Ludendorff unbeaten and the war seeming hopeless. Adam is given leave from the draft board. He rubs and soaks his numb left hand, cannot tie…
Chapter 53 3 plates

A jade hand and a promise

Adam sleeps in snatches now and needs help with buttons and shoelaces. He wakes from a dream to tell Lee, calmly and in tears, that his father was a thief who stole from the Grand Army — an…
Chapter 54 3 plates

Waiting for the azaleas to open

The winter hangs on cold and wet, the May Day picnic is rained out, and the azaleas will not open — and Cal, having made them the signal for his picnic with Abra, refuses to go without them…
Chapter 55 10 plates

Adam's blessing: one whispered word

Cal comes home to every light burning: Aron is dead, and reading the telegram aloud has burst something in Adam's brain. Dr. Murphy explains the paralysed left side and says Adam may live a…

The valley between two ranges

Samuel and Liza homestead the hills

Cyrus drills his two sons

Adam enlisted from his sickbed

Nine Hamiltons and no water

Two brothers alone, two marks

The inheritance and the discharge papers

Cathy Ames burns her parents

Mr. Edwards falls in love

Two men and one farm

The girl on the steps

Slamming the lid on a century

The glory, and a knitting needle

Olive Hamilton declares her war

Water witched, and Lee explains himself

What Samuel saw in Londonderry

A meteorite and a bitten hand

The deputy asks the obvious questions

Churches, whorehouses and a new girl

The will, the champagne, the ammonia

Never hurry: Faye's long illness

Naming the twins from Genesis

Una comes home in a box

Timshel, and the medicine for Adam

Adam walks into Kate's office

Free at last, and Lee asks

Abra, the rabbit and the rain

Lee's mother on the shale

Learning to start a Ford

Charles's money, a wreath of ice

Adam brings Kate the letter

Dessie comes home to Tom

A glass of salts for Dessie

One story, and three deaths

Lee leaves and comes back

The willow tree and Abra's secret

Six carloads of ruined lettuce

Cal asks Lee about his mother

Jailed, trusted, and shown the grey room

Kate discovers there are clever people

Cal and Will contract for beans

The war arrives on Main Street

The gold watch nobody claims

Abra works out what Aron wants

Joe Valery finds Ethel dead

What Salinas did to Mr. Fenchel

Adam's draft board, Aron's disappointment

A funeral, and Kate turns kind

Fifteen thousand dollars refused

Kate drinks the whole bottle

The sheriff burns the photographs

Abra burns Aron's letters

A jade hand and a promise

Waiting for the azaleas to open

Adam's blessing: one whispered word