#east of eden
Follies of God
Photo of Barbara Baxley and James Dean on the set of “East of Eden”
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“There is not enough cocaine in the world that could provide as much energy and wild happiness as that set [of “East of Eden”], those people, that feeling that everything was possible. [Elia] Kazan gave us freedom and Jimmy [Dean] was the bright comet we all had prayed we could be, or that we could be near.“
–Barbara Baxley/Interview with James Grissom
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reading East of Eden and just imagining the Cathy apologists there would be if john steinbeck books were like, a widespread tumblr fandom
The Genius of John Steinbeck’s The Pearl
Today I’m discussing a prescient novel which analyses the subtleties of social order and stability, and the place we each accept within it. John Steinbeck’s The Pearl is a brilliantly insightful work about a pearl diver named Kino, who lived in a poor area of Mexico in 1940. He acquires the most valuable pearl he, or anyone he has ever known, has ever seen. The acquisition of this pearl, rather…
“There’s more beauty in truth, even if it is dreadful beauty.” –John Steinbeck (East of Eden)
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East of Eden
Cal x Abra
what is everyone currently reading
Happy Birthday, John Steinbeck!
“The direction of a big act will warp history, but probably all acts do the same in their degree, down to a stone stepped over in a path or a breath caught at sight of a pretty girl or a fingernail nicked in the garden soil.”
~ John Steinbeck, East of Eden
[First Steps, Rembrandt]
• John Steinbeck (1902-1968), born in Salinas, California, came from a family of moderate means. He worked his way through college at Stanford University but never graduated. In 1925 he went to New York, where he tried for a few years to establish himself as a free-lance writer, but he failed and returned to California. More: https://www.nobelprize.org/…/1962/steinbeck/biographical/
• A prolific painter, draftsman, and etcher, Rembrandt van Rijn is usually regarded as the greatest artist of Holland’s “Golden Age.” He worked first in his native Leiden and, from 1632 onward, in Amsterdam, where he had studied briefly (ca. 1624) with the influential history painter Pieter Lastman. More: https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/rmbt/hd_rmbt.htm
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I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one… . Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil… . There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?
John Steinbeck, East of Eden
