Chapter 1
Steinbeck’s California
The Valley of the World

n 1951, when John Steinbeck had been a resident of New York City for about a year, he sat down at his desk to write East of Eden (1952), his ode to California. Nearly twenty years earlier, he had declared his intention to tell “the story of this whole valley . . . so that it would be the valley of the world.” Epics take time to incubate. Certain forces coalesced when he moved East and ended a cycle of personal despair: a new marriage, a new home, distance from California. As he worked on his manuscript, he wrote in his journal, “My wish is that when my reader has finished with this book, he will have a sense of belonging in it. He will actually be a native of that Valley.” John Steinbeck was ready to unravel his intertwined heritage of place, history, and people—and to retie it with a knot of his own invention.

Steinbeck’s “valley of the world” is an enticing notion, particularly irresistible for anyone concerned with marketing the pleasures of the Salinas Valley. But, for the writer, the words undoubtedly suggested something closer to what D. H. Lawrence proposed when he tackled the subject of American writing in 1923: “Different places on the face of the earth have different vital effluence, different vibration, different chemical exhalation, different polarity with different stars: call it what you like. But the spirit of place is a great reality,” he wrote in the introduction to Classic American Writers. John Steinbeck grew up sensing that spirit of place, feeling that the whole of Monterey County was in his blood. From age fourteen on, his passion was to set it down right and true. “My country is different from the rest of the world,” he wrote to his publisher in 1933.

It seems to be one of those pregnant places from which come wonders . . . I was born to it and my father was. Our bodies came from this soil—our bones came . . . from the limestone of our own mountains and our blood is distilled from the juices of this earth. I tell you now that my country—a hundred miles long and about fifty wide—is unique in the world.

Steinbeck spent a long career shaping the contours of that unique land in words. His Monterey County is not Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, more fabricated than real, but the landscape of his childhood, often more real than fabricated. His valley of the world is historically rich, beautiful, and peopled with migrants. Steinbeck wanted to carve prose so exacting that the places of his heart—the bronze hills of the Salinas Valley and the churning Pacific Ocean nearby—would be fully rendered for any reader. But it’s not just his descriptions that bring forth the spirit of place. His authorial grasp was ambitious and holistic. He wrote about nature’s impact on the eye and the heart.

He wrote about the history and geography of place. He wrote about the people who lived in the towns and valleys of Monterey County. He showed how each place he loved—Jolon, Soledad, Pacific Grove, Monterey, Salinas—had a different energy. Steinbeck’s fiction is a rich tapestry of land, history, and human experience.

East of Eden, part autobiography, part myth, part historical survey, part anecdote, part pure creation, was the “big book” that would strike the symphonic chords of Steinbeck’s life. He considered the novel his War and Peace, written with “the great word sounds of speech not writing,” with “song” in it. “I will make my country as great in the literature of the world as any place in existence,” he wrote.