Preliminary Material -- Steinbeck Knew Dad Better Than I Did / Tom Gage -- “Literary Landmarks” of East of Eden / David A. Laws -- “Mapping the Land of Nod”: The Spatial Imagination of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden / Florian Schwieger -- Bio-Politics and the Institution of Literature: An Essay on East of Eden, its Critics and its Time / Henry Veggian -- Out of Eden: Dualism, Conformity, and Inheritance in Steinbeck’s “Big Book” / Jeremy S. Leatham -- Mimesis, Desire and Lack in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden / Elisabeth Bayley -- An Image of Social Character: Elia Kazan’s East of Eden / Scott Dill -- East of Eden County: John Steinbeck, Joyce Carol Oates and the Afterlife of Cathy Trask / Gavin Cologne-Brookes -- The Status of East of Eden in Slovenia and the Former Yugoslavia / Danica Čerče -- A Paradoxical World in East of Eden: The Theory of Free Will and the Heritage of Puritanism / Yuji Kami -- The Unconventional Morality of East of Eden / Bruce Ouderkirk -- A Steinbeck Midrash on Genesis 4:7 / Alec Gilmore -- Contributors -- Index.

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This volume includes one dozen new and recent essays on John Steinbeck’s East of Eden (1952). First commissioned by the late Professor Michael J. Meyer, a renowned Steinbeck scholar, the volume was originally designed to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the novel’s publication. The collection contains critical writings from a variety of literary fields. These include the biographical essay, travel essay, essays on varied themes in Steinbeck’s works, writings on critical approaches to Steinbeck and also a new essay on Elia Kazan’s film adaptation of the novel. This volume is of interest for the Steinbeck scholar, the literary critic and also the casual reader seeking new ways to understand Steinbeck’s novel.