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** spoiler alert ** East of Eden came into my life by virtue of a classics book club I belonged to seven years ago. Published in 1952, this is the best novel that group assigned. It remains my favorite novel. John Steinbeck's magnum opus tells the tale of two families in the Salinas Valley of California who at the turn of the 20th century, find their capacity for good opening the doors to prosperity, while their potential for evil threatens to hurtle some of them into darkness.

The novel is narrated by an author surrogate who is grandson to one Samuel Hamilton, an Irishman whose gifts for invention are weighted by his lack of business acumen. Samuel and his God fearing, indestructible wife Liza relocate their family from San Jose to the foothills east of King City in 1873. The only land Samuel can afford is useless for farming, but the family is fertile in love. They bear nine children, many of whom play small roles in the unfolding narrative.

Adam Trask's story begins in Connecticut. He's a kind hearted boy drilled into obedience by his father Cyrus, a hellraiser who returns from the Civil War with the clap. His first wife, Adam's mother, blames her social disease on her own sin and drowns herself, while Cyrus' second wife gives birth to Adam's half-brother Charles and ultimately succumbs to tuberculosis. Cyrus grossly inflates his war experience and as a result, gains prominence and fortune in Washington as a military adviser.

Charles is a manipulator who covets the love of his father. The boy is also given to a violence that disqualifies him from soldiering as far as his father is concerned. Cyrus' hopes fall onto Adam, who does not love his father and abhors military discipline. Charles attempts to buy his father's love by diligently saving to buy him a pocketknife. Cyrus never uses it, while a stray puppy that Adam carries home becomes the old man's loyal companion for life. Profoundly rejected, Charles beats and almost murders his brother.

Adam serves two tours in the Army, making every effort in the Indian Wars to not shoot an Indian. He rambles around the country, restless, until his father's death and a large inheritance reunite him with Charles. Sorely missed by his brother, now a miserly farmer, Adam co-exists on the farm with Charles for a time. He tries to sell his bachelor brother on coming with him to California, where the fields have no rocks and offer endless bounty to those willing to work hard.

If the story is already good, it gets even better.

Cathy Ames has been endowed with considerable physical gifts and charisma and no empathy for other human beings whatsoever. Having burned her parents up in a house fire, she's beaten to near death by her lover, a Boston pimp, and left to die when the Trasks find her. Adam nurses Cathy back to health and asks her to marry him. Penniless but plotting, she agrees. Charles recognizes in Cathy a devil even more manipulative than him. Adam ignores his brother's warning and head west with his bride.

In Salinas Valley, Adam Trask purchases fertile land, plans for the future and awaits the birth of his first child. Samuel Hamilton is hired to drill a well and is left unsettled by his encounter with Cathy. He delivers her twin boys and is bitten for his trouble. Cathy makes good on her promise to leave Adam and when he takes too long to get out of her way, she plugs him with a .44. The twins are raised by Adam's servant, a second generation Chinese named Lee, while Adam drifts through their lives until Samuel knocks sense into his despondent neighbor.

Cathy settles in Salinas, where she changes her name and rises to power in the criminal underworld as the madam of a whorehouse. Lee ultimately confides in Adam where Cathy can be found. After confronting his wife in her den of inequity, Adam elects to keep Cathy's sinister existence hidden from his boys, who Samuel and Lee have helped name Caleb (Cal) and Aaron (Aron). Seventeen years old when the Great War breaks out in 1917, Cal & Aron covet the acceptance of their father and their estranged mother, as good and evil duke it out in each of them.

The 1955 film version of East of Eden was directed by Elia Kazan and skimmed the source material, focusing on the Cain and Abel struggle between Cal and Aron. Paul Osborn's adaptation eliminated the Hamilton family history and left Adam and Cathy's lurid past to the imagination. James Dean starred as Cal Trask in the second of his three film roles. It's my favorite Dean performance because Steinbeck created a character in Cal with the richest past and the most to lose in the future.

Rich in history, psychology, sociology, criminology and folk wisdom, East of Eden is big (602 pages) but whenever Steinbeck threatens to become professorial and turn the book into a lecture, he slams the reader back into the life and death struggles of his characters with grandeur, urgency and wit. We remain in the hands of a master storyteller throughout. It's impossible to read this book and not come away with something about America, about farming, about family or about guilt.

This book has stayed within me and will continue to do so. Having a younger brother, I could relate to the competitiveness between Adam & Charles and Cal & Aron (my brother's name is Aaron) and the intense hurt you feel when you assume others are loved or given preferential treatment over you, which of course they are, but that love ebbs and flows, and if dwelled upon, can consume you. It's a masterful novel that achieves a perfection in its storytelling.