Stoic and uncomplaining, Liza powers through her suffering with a religious conviction that she will be rewarded for it in the end. Liza, though does not share Samuel’s capacity for joy she is suspicious of fun and believes dancing invites the devil. Samuel’s wife, Liza, is probably even more hardworking, raising their nine children in these bare circumstances. The Hamilton children went barefoot, and their overalls were patched and food was sometimes scarce, to pay for the crisp blueprints with cogs and planes and elevations. But he had caught the patent fever, and year and year the money made by threshing and by smithing was drained off in patents. It was his first sharp experience with the rule that without money you cannot fight money. The next few years were kept lean by the suing, and the drain stopped only when he lost the suit. Samuel sent his models to a manufacturer, who promptly rejected the plans and used the method. The patent attorney ate up his little profit for the year. He invented a part of a threshing machine, better cheaper and more efficient than any in existence. He developed a very bad patent habit, a disease many men suffer from. Despite his intelligence and capacity for labour, Samuel’s family can never escape the threat of poverty that clings to them. He is also clever, inventive and hardworking able to innovate solutions to several obstacles but without a mind for business to profit from them. A big man, but delicate, Samuel is a laugher, a soother, a peacemaker, a man people open up to.
The narrator’s grandfather, Samuel Hamilton, arrived in California’s Salinas Valley neither rich nor poor, but with all the best land taken, he settles for the dry foothills that have little topsoil. Those who arrive poor will only be able to afford the most difficult land to work with and remain poor. Those who come with money, probably from selling land elsewhere, will get the best new land and remain wealthy. Land is still plentiful but it is not of equal quality. So much so that I did not have to read far before I began to wonder if this novel would become one of my favourites.Įarly in East of Eden, the narrator explains a misconception of America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as being the same country as frontier America, with plentiful land where a newcomer can make a new life, work diligently and aspire to provide a more prosperous life for his children. Steinbeck’s epic American family saga, East of Eden, played out in rural California between the Civil War and the First World War, is full of beautiful writing and tragedy.
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