IT WAS SALINAS VALLEY, NOT EAST OF EDEN, that was the initial title of John Steinbeck’s 1952 magnum opus, his War and Peace, that he wrote after moving away from the West Coast, the one he was crafting in his head for over 20 years. The novel was an homage to his family – the Hamiltons, their neighbors and their stories, and is, to date, the best literary biography of this “long narrow swale between two ranges of mountains” – the Gabilans to the east and the Santa Lucias to the west – with the Salinas River winding through its center.
Thanks to a new Netflix TV series, East of Eden is now being widely read and reread again, especially here in Monterey County, where many claim Steinbeck as their own, and the differences between the book and the show are a subject of countless discussions.
One difference is that the 2026 series was filmed largely in New Zealand, supposedly because the Salinas Valley of today is a landscape that became too industrial to capture the openness of the land that could be found when fictional Adam Trask arrived in 1900, and meets the very real and not fictional at all Samuel Hamilton, John Steinbeck’s own grandfather.
At the Weekly, we decided to track down some real places (and imagine some real places on which fictional destinations may have been modeled) in East of Eden. We found locations that are still biblical in their remoteness and slow pace of life, as it seems on the pages of the novel. Our journey, guided by scholars and historians, is detailed below from south to north. (A warning: This story includes spoilers.)
East of Eden is “a sort of autobiography of the Salinas Valley,” Steinbeck wrote in a letter to Pascal “Pat” Covici, Steinbeck’s close friend and editor at The Viking Press in 1951.
The place, in turn, helped shape Steinbeck as a man and storyteller.
“In a private journal, Steinbeck wrote: ‘I keep the tone of Salinas in my head like a remembered symphony,’” says Susan Shillinglaw, the leading expert on Steinbeck.
“I think comparing it to music is a tribute to a place he loved, despite its struggles.”
Shillinglaw’s new book, Steinbeck’s Landscapes, has a whole chapter devoted to East of Eden, including the landscape’s people, flora and fauna. In it, she attempts to address the question: How does place form a person?
Trask Ranch
Adam Trask and his reluctant wife, Cathy Ames, never came to California and never purchased land a few miles south of King City. They were fictional characters, but so many others did come and settle in Salinas Valley in those years.
In the book, the Trask ranch is described as the former Bordoni ranch, which, as Steinbeck writes in the book, consisted of 900 acres left from a grant issued by the Spanish crown. Adam and Cathy settle in what is described as the old Sanchez house.
Karen and John Jernigan run historical tours in King City; over the years they came up with their own impressive guide to places in East of Eden. According to them, Steinbeck could be inspired by the Trescony ranch he must have known, even if in the book the ranch is located almost equidistant between San Lucas and King City. Today, Trescony ranch is part of Rancho San Lucas, which is situated approximately eight miles southeast of King City, between San Lucas and San Ardo, and home to wine company KrushWerks, operated by J&L Farms Inc. (Shillinglaw is skeptical of this theory.)
The TV series skips through the ordeals and agonies of Adam Trask before he eventually obtains the land. Before that happens, he relies heavily on the wisdom of Samuel Hamilton, who seems to foretell the in-depth hydrological knowledge of groundwater that is so much a part of life, business and governance today: “They say it was a strange valley… Something went on under it – maybe still is going on. There’s an ocean bed underneath, and below that another world.”
That said, the land is good and has water, Samuel assures Adam, except for his own plot, since the Hamilton ranch is situated in dry mountain foothills. We never find out how successful Adam could be as a rancher if his wife and brand-new mother of their twins, Cal and Aron, didn’t leave him heartbroken and unable to thrive.
Hamilton Ranch
Samuel and Liza Hamilton, characters based on Steinbeck’s real maternal grandparents, settle in the foothills east of King City, on land described as rugged and marginal.
“If the land had been any good the Hamiltons would have been rich people,” Steinbeck wrote in Chapter 2. “But the acres were harsh and dry. There were no springs and the crust of topsoil was so thin and flinty bones stuck through. Even the sagebrush struggled to exist, and the oaks were dwarfed from lack of moisture.”
Nearby Hamilton Canyon and Peachtree Valley, in the foothills of the southern Salinas Valley, is the real-life setting of the Hamiltons, where they lived in the late 19th century. The ranch was bought from the Hamiltons by Robert Grabb and was known until 2016 as the Grabb Ranch, according to Shillinglaw. Now the area is covered partly in a solar array.
The Hamiltons are more than neighbors to the Trasks in the Salinas Valley. They help give the novel its moral and emotional center. Samuel Hamilton is resourceful, curious and generous, even though his family has little money and the land is difficult to work. “He was a big man but delicate in a way,” according to the novel. “In the dusty business of ranching he seemed always immaculate. His hands were clever. He was a good blacksmith and carpenter and woodcarver, and he could improvise anything with bits of wood and metal.”
Samuel’s kindness offers a contrast to the Trasks’ struggles with inheritance, resentment, and the question of whether people can choose who they become.
That contrast is especially important to the novel’s idea of timshel – the possibility of choice, a central theme.
“Steinbeck took the word and he very much in some ways made it what he needed it to mean,” says Lisa Josephs, archivist at the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas. “And even in the biblical story of Cain and Abel, we surely do get a point of choice. It’s because God is telling Cain, ‘You can be its master. You have the choice. You have the capacity.’ Steinbeck is reflecting the overall values in some of the biblical stories.”
The Hamiltons’ actions show kindness as something people can choose and practice. Liza and Olive Hamilton also help broaden the family portrait. Their presence gives the book a wider view of women’s lives and choices, rather than making Cathy the only example of womanhood.
While the Netflix series keeps Samuel Hamilton, he gets much less room to develop as a character.
“They don’t really give much of a backstory. They don’t really give much of a connection,” says Salinas resident Gracie Garcia, who volunteers at the Steinbeck House and has read the book and watched the Netflix series. “The Hamiltons come across as supporting characters instead of a family whose values help illuminate the Trasks’ choices.”
Ultimately, the Hamiltons matter because they show that goodness is not merely an idea, it’s expressed through everyday choices, relationships and acts of care. The book gives those choices room to resonate. The series preserves the family, but its compressed storytelling leaves less time to feel how deeply their presence shapes the world around them.
Geographically, the Hamiltons’ story reaches beyond South County. The Garden of Memories cemetery in Salinas holds real graves associated with the Hamilton family and Steinbeck. Together, the ranch country, town streets, station and cemetery form a landscape where family history and fiction overlap. To follow the Hamiltons through East of Eden is to travel through Steinbeck’s imagined world – and through the real Salinas Valley that helped shape it.
King City
In the book, King City is more than a dot on the map. It’s a place where many of the characters travel to for news, medicine, work and the railroad. Downtown King City is a destination where characters gather, trade, seek help and board trains for Salinas.
It’s a small town set against the broad, changing landscape of the Salinas Valley. There are 48 mentions of King City in Steinbeck’s novel (and four in the TV series).
At the turn of the 20th century, King City is remote, and its remoteness matters. Travel takes time; the train station and sparse town life remind readers how far the characters are from help, company and modernity.
“In the book, King City was there to create the aspect of isolation; [Adam Trask] is emotionally isolated. He doesn’t want to interact with anyone due to the fact that his light, the love left. He doesn’t even want to work the land because his wife left him,” Garcia says.
After Cathy leaves, Adam is left with his baby sons and household servant Lee, and grief draws him inward. The land he has acquired (relatively near King City, or a day’s horseback journey from Salinas) does not become a refuge or a fresh start. Instead, the difficult work of farming and the vastness around him echo the emotional emptiness he cannot overcome, which is also presented in Episode 5 of the Netflix series.
The screen adaptation preserves some of this atmosphere, but its quick transitions and sweeping views can make the region feel less isolated. The book gives distance a weight of its own. King City therefore becomes part of Adam’s story: a demanding place where physical solitude mirrors the loneliness of a man trying to rebuild his family and himself.
Salinas River
The Salinas River “winds and twists up the center” of Salinas Valley “until it falls at last into Monterey Bay,” readers learn in the first sentence of the book. With little streams slipping out of the hill canyons, in the winter of wet years, it overflows. It can carry a cow or a pig to the sea. In the summer, the Salinas River becomes an underwater river, and the blue ribbon that cuts the valley disappears from the landscapes completely.
As Shillinglaw observes in Steinbeck’s Landscapes, this “sometimes” river is the source of life – and death – in Salinas Valley. The dilemma if after purchasing the land, there will be enough water underneath it to have a house and a ranch, is a central problem in East of Eden.
In the TV series, executive producer Zoe Kazan decided to film in New Zealand’s South Island to recreate natural waterways and landscapes of Salinas Valley. They drew on the region’s rivers, lakes, mountain ranges and pastoral terrain, using settings like Central Otago and the Hawkdun Range to evoke the untouched environment.
Gabilan Mountains and Santa Lucia Mountains
In the novel, the setting is not just scenery. It reflects the characters’ inner lives and helps carry the story’s concerns with choice and the struggle between good and evil.
“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,” reads the introduction to the novel. “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.”
That description grounds the story in terrain Steinbeck knew from childhood. “The valley’s grasses, plants, animals and changing seasons shaped [Steinbeck’s] experience and his observation of nature,” Josephs says.
By Chapter 3, the narrative expands beyond California, moving from the Hamilton family to Adam Trask’s childhood home in Connecticut.
Steinbeck was writing with his young sons in mind, hoping to convey not just a literal family history, but something of where he came from and what formed him. The Salinas Valley gives that personal inheritance a physical shape: a place where memory, family, and the natural world meet, Josephs says.
The Salinas Valley establishes the novel’s emotional and autobiographical ground, inviting readers to see landscape as part of identity and as a force that continues to echo through the families’ choices, which is a central theme of East of Eden.
While the original Steinbeck text starts with the valley and ultimately describes the valley as a character, the Netflix series – featuring English actress Florence Pugh as Cathy and American actor Christopher Abbott as Adam Trask – does not start with the valley or describe the land.
“There’s almost zero-world mapping. The show stays in fictionalized spaces,” says John Holland, founder of The Steinbeck Experience in Monterey, noting most domestic scenes are set in the Trask home, omitting other houses described in the book. “There’s surprisingly little connection to physical historical Salinas.”
The closest physical link in the Netflix show to the book is when Kate (Cathy’s new name after moving to a Salinas brothel) visits Dr. Wilde’s office for medicine – and poison – in Episode 4. Historically his office was in the Monterey County Bank building, which still stands today.
Good and Evil
Cathy Ames enters the story surrounded by unanswered questions: What has shaped her, and how much of her cruelty is choice?
In the novel, she is presented as profoundly destructive – a person who can read other people’s needs and turn them to her advantage. “The one thing that may not be forgiven a witch is her ability to distress people to make them restless and uneasy and even envious,” Steinbeck wrote in Chapter 8. “Cathy learned when she was young that sexuality, with all its attendant yearnings and pains, jealousies and taboos, is the most disturbing impulse humans have… that by manipulation and use of this one part of people she could gain and keep power over nearly everyone. It was at once a weapon and a threat. It was irresistible.”
The Netflix adaptation gives more attention to the abuse she endures, adding context without erasing the harm she causes.
“I like how [the series] portrayed Cathy, how they gave her a little bit more substance than just saying she’s evil the way it is portrayed in the original text,” Garcia says.
By the time she leaves her family in Episode 4 and moves to Salinas, she becomes “Kate.” There, in her life in a brothel, her talent for reading people turns into a kind of power. She also stands up for the women who work there. That can look like compassion (and it may be compassion), but it also shows how Cathy can make herself indispensable. She offers help while building influence in a time where women have few safe ways to claim control.
That tension makes her more than a simple villain or victim. Cathy has endured exploitation, and the series asks viewers to see the forces that helped shape her. But understanding her past does not excuse her choices. Her decision to kill Faye, the woman who had offered her shelter, reveals the limits of Cathy’s sympathy: care and loyalty matter only when they serve her.
The brothel is both refuge and stage. It gives Cathy money and authority, but it also lets her disguise vulnerability. Her clothes, gestures and displays of mourning can persuade others that she feels what they feel. Yet, the performance cannot quiet what follows her; pain, fear and the consequences of her actions.
Played decisively by Oscar nominee Pugh, the character gains complexity. “Zoe inviting me to help create this world with them was such an honor,” Pugh said in a statement to Netflix. “It really stepped off with Cathy’s point of view of the world.”
Cathy’s story resists an easy verdict. The series invites empathy for the girl shaped by abuse and a society that treats women as property; the novel’s darker portrait insists that Cathy is responsible for the damage she inflicts. Together, those perspectives make the brothel more than a setting. It’s where Cathy’s survival, ambition and cruelty meet and where her power becomes hardest to separate from the harm it creates.
Salinas
When Cal and Aron became teenagers, Adam Trask decided to move the family to Salinas. He settles in Dessie’s Hamilton place. Dessie – Steinbeck’s real-life Aunt Dessie – doesn’t appear in the TV series at all, but plays a crucial role in the novel, the most beloved of the Hamilton girls and the one who never married and who opened a successful dressmaking business in Salinas – the big city, relatively speaking – instead. When ready-to-wear, store-bought clothes come to dominate the market, she decides to return to live back at the Hamilton ranch. Her house, set back in its little garden next to “Reynaud’s French Bakery,” becomes available, and that’s where the Trasks, including Lee, move later in the book.
That creates an opportunity for Cal and Aron to reconnect with their mother, now a madam who goes by the name Kate. In the book, Steinbeck described the house as being on Main Street, but historical records show Dessie Hamilton’s place was on Castroville Street, the same one on which fictional Kate ran her brothel. Both places would be in Chinatown.
Kate’s doctor, Dr. Wilde – from whom she steals drugs to poison her predecessor as madam – has his office upstairs in the Monterey County Bank building on Main.
Among urban Salinas scenes, a school not far from the Steinbeck House on Central Avenue plays a role in the plot of the book. What is now Roosevelt Elementary School, was formerly West End School on Capitol Street, described in detail in the book. It stunned the boys by its size and grandeur because they only knew a one-room country school. Having a different teacher for each grade seemed such a luxury the family saw it as wasteful. The West End was a huge building of two stories, fronted with gnarled poplars.
The only specific urban Salinas location shown in the TV series is the Abbott House, where Adam Trask drinks after his initial arrival to Salinas after Cathy leaves. This hotel on Main Street was named after one of the founders of the Monterey and Salinas Valley Railroad. The building still stands today.
Salinas is Steinbeck’s hometown. He loved it with utter loyalty and hated it with utter fury, as Shillinglaw suggests in Steinbeck’s Landscapes. “Place is dipped in amber,” she wrote about the Salinas scenes in the book, even if Steinbeck detested the “bleakness” of it, “the feeling of violence just below the surface.”