书名：East of Eden伊甸之东
难度：Lexile蓝思阅读指数700L
作者：John Steinbeck
出版社名称：Penguin Classics
出版时间：2000
语种：英文
ISBN：9780141185071
商品尺寸：12.9 x 2.7 x 19.8 cm
包装：平装
页数：640
East of Eden《伊甸之东》是美国著名现实主义作家、诺贝尔文学奖获得者约翰·斯坦贝克的一部力作。描写了两个移民家族从美国南北战争直到第1次世界大战结束，长达半个世纪三代人的命运，运用象征和写实交融的手法，描绘了善与恶之间的斗争。

In his journal, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck called East of Eden "the first book," and indeed it has the primordial power and simplicity of myth. Set in the rich farmland of California's Salinas Valley, this sprawling and often brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two families—the Trasks and the Hamiltons—whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.
The masterpiece of Steinbeck’s later years, East of Eden is a work in which Steinbeck created his most mesmerizing characters and explored his most enduring themes: the mystery of identity, the inexplicability of love, and the murderous consequences of love's absence. Adapted for the 1955 film directed by Elia Kazan introducing James Dean, and read by thousands as the book that brought Oprah’s Book Club back, East of Eden has remained vitally present in American culture for over half a century.

Review
"A novel planned on the grandest possible scale...One of those occasions when a writer has aimed high and then summoned every ounce of energy, talent, seriousness, and passion of which he was capable...It is an entirely interesting and impressive book."—The New York Herald Tribune

"A fantasia and myth...a strange and original work of art."—The New York Times Book Review

"A moving, crying pageant with wilderness strengths."—Carl Sandburg

"When the book club ended a year ago, I said I would bring it back when I found the book that was moving…and this is a great one. I read it for myself for the first time and then I had some friends read it. And we think it might be the best novel we've ever read!"—Oprah Winfrey
特拉斯克家族的第1代赛勒斯伪造参加南北战争的经历，骗取了名誉和财产，并专横地送儿子亚当从军。生性善良的亚当收留了一个重伤的女子卡西，却不料她为人邪恶，抛下亚当和一对孪生子改名换姓开了妓院，后来孪生子又因发现她的秘密而走上不同的生活道路；而另一个家族的家长汉密尔顿却正直、勇敢、智慧，他教育成人的子女都秉承了他的善良性格并各有成就……
约翰·斯坦贝克，20世纪美国作家。代表作品有《人鼠之间》、《愤怒的葡萄》、《月亮下去了》、《伊甸之东》、《烦恼的冬天》等。1902年，斯坦贝克生于美国加利福尼亚。1925年，斯坦贝克曾在《纽约时报》担任记者。但是没过多久，他就对记者这种职业感到失望和厌烦。于是，他返回加州，投身到自己的创作中去，1962年获得诺贝尔文学奖。1966年初，斯坦贝克作为纽约报纸《新闻日报》的战地记者前往南越。斯坦贝克返回美国后，继续在家中写作。1968年5月，他的身体开始垮下来，1968年12月21日，他因心脏病发作逝世。
John Steinbeck, born in Salinas, California, in 1902, grew up in a fertile agricultural valley, about twenty-five miles from the Pacific Coast. Both the valley and the coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. In 1919 he went to Stanford University, where he intermittently enrolled in literature and writing courses until he left in 1925 without taking a degree. During the next five years he supported himself as a laborer and journalist in New York City, all the time working on his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929). Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962, and, in 1964, he was presented with the United States Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Steinbeck died in New York in 1968. Today, more than thirty years after his death, he remains one of America's greatest writers and cultural figures.
The Salinas Valley is in Northern California. It is a long narrow swale between two ranges of mountains, and the Salinas River winds and twists up the center until it falls at last into Monterey Bay.
I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers. I remember where a toad may live and what time the birds awaken in the summer— and what trees and seasons smelled like—how people looked and walked and smelled even. The memory of odors is very rich.
I remember that the Gabilan Mountains to the east of the valley were light gay mountains full of sun and loveliness and a kind of invitation, so that you wanted to climb into their warm foothills almost as you want to climb into the lap of a beloved mother, They were beckoning mountains with a brown grass love. The Santa Lucias stood up against the sky to the west and kept the valley from the open sea, and they were dark and brooding—unfriendly and dangerous. I always found in myself a dread of west and a love of east. ‘here I ever got such an idea I cannot say, unless it could be that the morning came over the peaks of the Gabilans and the night drifted back from the ridges of the Santa Lucias. it may be that the birth and death of the day had some part in my feeling about the two ranges of mountains.
From both sides of the valley little streams slipped out of the hill canyons and fell into the bed of the Salinas River. In the winter of wet years the streams ran full-freshet, and they swelled the river until sometimes it raged and boiled, bank full, and then it was a destroyer. The river tore the edges of the farm lands and washed whole acres down; it toppled barns and houses into itself, to go floating and bobbing away. It trapped cows and pigs and sheep and drowned them in its muddy brown water and carried them to the sea. Then when the late spring came, the river drew in from its edges and the sand banks appeared. Arid in the summer the river didn’t run at all above ground. Some pools would be left in the deep swirl places under a high bank. The tules and grasses grew hack, and willows straightened up with the flood debris in their tipper branches. The Salinas was only a part—time river. The summer sun drove it underground. It was not a line river at all, but it was the only one we had and so we boasted about it—how dangerous it was in a wet winter and how dry it was in a dry summer. You can boast about anything if it’s all you have. Maybe the less you have, the more you are required to boast.