Why does lit hate this guy so much? I thought East of Eden was a great book

Steinbeck is great, Grapes of Wrath is full of love and light.

I read Tortilla Flat last week. It's terribly comfy, with its descriptions of drinking wine around a warm fire. Even sleeping in a ditch was comfy. The ending was interesting, with one of the characters giving in to despair concerning his lifestyle; he was perhaps a bit too aware of the emptiness of it to enjoy it.

It was in a volume of Steinbeck's short novels/novellas, and I'll definitely be reading the rest.

Meanwhile, check this shit out (copied from Wikipedia):

>Philip D. Ortego, for example, wrote in 1973: "Few Mexican Americans of Monterey today see themselves in Tortilla Flat any more than their predecessors saw themselves in it thirty-four years ago." Ortego also charged that Mexican Americans do not speak as Steinbeck's characters do, either in Spanish or English. Arthur C. Pettit (Images of the Mexican American in Fiction and Film, 1980) was equally clear: "Tortilla Flat stands as the clearest example in American literature of the Mexican as jolly savage... [T]his is the book that is most often cited as the prototypical Anglo novel about the Mexican American..the novel contains characters varying little from the most negative Mexican stereotypes." Susan Shillingshaw quoted Steinbeck critic Louis Owens as saying that Steinbeck "doesn't offer a great deal to multiculturalism. His treatment of color leaves a lot to be desired. He was a white, middle class male from Salinas. He was a product of his times."[1] In his essay, Steinbeck's Mexican Americans, Charles Metzger largely defended the writer's views of the paisanos but observed the following: "Steinbeck's portrayal of paisanos in Tortilla Flat does not purport to do more than present one kind of Mexican-American, the paisano errant, in one place, Monterey, and at one time, just after World War I."[2]

this

I loved East of Eden. Anyone seen the film version starring James Dean? I have not.

THOU

MAYEST

>comfy father son stuff
>has some moments of real excitement where I was on edge
>strong sense of place and interesting descriptions of the west
>prose is pretty good
>life affirming philosophy

It's pretty long, not meme level but it's 225,000 words.

East of Eden was really promising.

Then I got to the part where the guy gives the speech to his kid. I took a glance at the novel's title... a bible reference (how modest!)... and realized I was reading the bloated vanity project of an author who had let praise go to his head, and couldn't find an editor with the nerve to question the guy who wrote Grapes of Wrath.

It was the phoniest dialogue I've ever read. And I've read McCarthy.

It aged terribly, it's a real sleeping pill, unfortunately.

Cannery Row is easily his best book

seconded.

*Unsheathes katana*

NOTHING PRESONAL, KIDDO.

honestly this

this. i know we crucify folks on Veeky Forums for muh plot, but the biblical structure of EoE causes any reader of above average education and emotional intelligence to see the last 1/4 of the book coming from a mile away.

besides muh plot complaints, it can be said (and fairly I think) that Steinbeck lacks the abstraction and prose complexity that rewards returning readers; hell, even Hemingway thought that Faulkner was below him because a lot of the big moments of his novels come in way of 'le big reveal!', as opposed to the sort of sublimity that we see throughout something like Old Man (and the type of thing that Bloom will tell you lies at the core of all great artistic endeavors).

Steinbeck was kicking at a time when many more people read, and the accessibility of his work--in combination with the stagnant period before 1954 (EoE was seen as his last hurrah, a redemption)--means that Steinbeck might be rightly viewed as more of a 'pop' writer than some of the folks that considered themselves 'pure' artists

Is EoE comfy as hell? yeah

Would I ever read it again? hell no