April 2024: East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Please join us in April when we discuss "East of Eden” by John Steinbeck

Image above: John Steinbeck

Location: ZOOM. If you are signed up for this meeting, the link to this event is found by scrolling down to the bottom right-hand side of this webpage. The correct link will not appear until RSVPs are closed.

We are now meeting once a month, almost always the last Tuesday of the month, online via Zoom. [On occasion we might have a meeting at an accessible restaurant in Oakland, probably on a Saturday afternoon.]

The discussion will start at the normal 6:30 PM time. Please sign in 5 minutes early so that we are all ready to start promptly on time. If you have not used Zoom before, it is suggested you download it sometime before the meeting starts.

Steinbeck considered East of Eden to be the best novel he ever wrote.

It’s a long book. Get started on it early.

From the dust jacket of the Library of America edition:

Ambitious in scale and original in structure, East of Eden (1952) recounts the violent and emotionally turbulent history of a Salinas Valley family through several generations. Drawing on Biblical parallels, encompassing a period stretching from the Civil War to World War I, and incorporating, as counterpoint to the central story, some of the actual history of Steinbeck’s mother’s family, East of Eden is an epic that explores the writer’s deepest and most anguished concerns within a landscape that for him had mythic resonance.