18 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY NOVEMBER 5-11, 2026 www.montereycountynow.com A LOOK AT THE REAL SALINAS VALLEY PLACES AT THE HEART OF EAST OF EDEN. By Royvi Hernandez and Agata Popęda Character Study 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.” CELIA JIMÉNEZ A photo from 1928 of what is believed to be Trescony Ranch. Trescony Ranch is part of Rancho San Lucas on Paris Valley Road.
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