How John Steinbeck’s Family History Shaped East of Eden

5 min readThis October, Netflix spirited us away to the Salinas Valley, California, sometime around 1900—where a man's worst nightmare was still the wrath of God, and the closest he came to a tyrant was his own father. Yes, we’re talking about Zoe Kazan’s celebrated East of Eden TV adaptation—which is by far one of the year’s best shows. (And full of incredible performances, by the way, especially the incomperable Hoon Lee as Lee.)East of Eden is widely considered to be one of the greatest American novels. It was certainly John Steinbeck’s masterpiece, and the most ambitious and autobiographical of all his novels. "It has everything in it I have been able to learn about my craft or profession in all these years," he once said of it, later adding: “I think everything else I have written has been, in a sense, practice for this."You may like to also know that, yes, published in 1952, it is an early example of autofiction—although that term wasn’t coined until 1977.But also, no, none of Steinbeck’s relatives shot their husband, walked out on their newborn twins, and reinvented herself as a brothel madam by poisoning the woman who took her in. None of Steinbeck’s letters identifies a real person as the inspiration for Cathy Ames—played in the miniseries by Florence Pugh.But what was true, almost disappointingly so by comparison, was the other family in the book. While the Trasks were invented, the Hamiltons (who are largely backgrounded in the Netflix series) were barely disguised at all—Steinbeck basically put his own relatives on the page.The HamiltonsThe Hamiltons are the novel's other family—an Irish immigrant clan who settle a neighboring ranch to the Trasks in the Salinas Valley, and whose lives run alongside the main Cain-and-Abel plot rather than inside it. Where the Trasks provide the drama, the Hamiltons provide the texture: a large, loving, perpetually broke household who never do anything as dramatic as murder or betrayal, but whose ordinary joys and griefs anchor the book in something real. Steinbeck uses them almost as a chorus—commenting on, and occasionally intervening in, the Trasks's unfolding tragedy.Netflix//NetflixCiarán Hinds as Samuel Hamilton in Netflix’s East of Eden.Samuel HamiltonIn a letter to his editor Pascal Covici (published in Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters), Steinbeck wrote of the Hamiltons:They were a high-strung bunch, the Hamiltons. My father used to say they affectionately that they were all crazy. And I guess they were and I guess I am. I feel so some of the time, anyway.The Hamiltons were Steinbeck’s grandparents, who—just as in the novel—moved to California, via New York, from Ireland in 1846. “He was the son of small farmers, neither rich nor poor, who had lived on one land hold and in one stone house for many hundreds of years,” Steinbeck wrote in East of Eden.The reason for Samuel’s emigration was more opaque:There was a whisper—not even a rumor but rather an unsaid feeling—in my family that it was love drove him out, and not love of the wife he married. But whether it was too successful love or whether he left in pique at an unsuccessful love, I do not know. We always preferred to think it was the former.Samuel spent his life farming dry, unforgiving land, and never struck it rich—but was, by every account, adored by his large family. Steinbeck barely fictionalizes him at all.Liza HamiltonSamuel met Liza in New York around 1848, soon after they had arrived from Ireland. Soon they were married, and traveled to California in 1850 to make a new life in the Wild West. She, too, had emigrated from Ireland, but didn’t have—in Steinbeck’s recollection—quite the same finesse as her husband.Here’s how Steinbeck described them in an article for Collier’s Magazine in 1953:My grandfather … was really a great man, a man of sweet speech and sweet courtesy … His little bog-trotting wife, I am told, put out milk for the leprechauns in the hills behind King City, California, and when a groundling neighbor suggested the cats drank it, she gave that neighbor a look that burned off his nose.Olive HamiltonSteinbeck's own mother appears in the novel as one of Samuel's daughters, drawn straight from life rather than invented. She would grow up to become a schoolteacher, marry, and have four children, the last of whom was a boy, John, born in 1902.He confessed in a letter to a friend that the portrait of his mother was “not as well drawn as the others,” but felt that was natural, adding: “We cannot know objectively about one who is so close.”He did, however, include a story in the book about Olive. Furious after Germany killed a local boy she'd known, she talks her way into a stunt plane at a war-bond rally and goes up over Salinas to sell Liberty Bonds from the air—pure Olive, in other words: personally declaring war on the German Empire.As Steinbeck writes in East of Eden:If the Germans had known Olive and had been sensible they would have gone out of their way not to anger her. But they didn’t know or they were stupid. When they killed Martin Hopps they lost the war be-cause that made my mother mad and she took out after them. She had liked Martin Hopps. He had never hurt anyone. When they killed him Olive declared war on the German empire.“I think next I will go to my mother and do a sketch of her life ending with her airplane ride which I think is very funny,” he wrote in another letter to Covici.The funny part is the flight itself: with no training and only sheer nerve to go on, Olive insists on doing loops and stunts midair, terrifying the pilot rather than the other way round, before landing to sell bonds as though nothing had happened.NetflixFlorence Pugh as Cathy Ames.Cathy AmesIn his letters to Covici while writing the book, Stenbeck calls Cathy Ames "a tremendously powerful force" he needed to fully understand before he could write her. In the novel itself, he frames her almost as a case study rather than a character. He called her a "psychic monster" born, he writes through the character Lee, the way a "malformed egg can produce physical monsters." She has no redemption arc: She’s designed as evil from birth.For that reason, readers and critics have speculated that someone real must lie behind her—the detail feels too clinical and specific to be pure imagination. Many believe that Steinbeck channeled his scorn for his ex-wife, Gwyn Conger, into Cathy—she left him in 1948, which is around the time the author actively began researching East of Eden. In one letter to his business associate and partner Henry S. White, he wrote of Gwyn and his feelings post-divorce:There is no really valid reason for going to New York except the pleasure of seeing you and Betty and a few others. I still have a feeling of revulsion about the city which of course has to do with G[wyn]. That will take some time to get over. The cold blooded planning of that thing becomes more apparent all the time... I'm kind of used up Henry and will be for a little while until I get ironed out inside. The scars are deeper than I thought. The “cold blooded planning of that thing?” It’s easy to see why scholars have suggested Cathy wasn’t a complete invention. All we’ll say is that we prefer Steinbeck’s depiction of the Hamiltons.