“This is the book,” John Steinbeck declared in a letter to a friend after completing East of Eden. “If it is not good I have fooled myself.” Set in California’s Salinas Valley, the narrative follows the fraught histories of Charles and Adam Trask and Adam’s twin sons, Cal and Aron (Cain and Abel). But upon publication in 1952, the novel divided critics. Time called it “a huge grab bag” in which preposterous events “pop up as frequently as good storytelling.” Readers loved it, however, and the director Elia Kazan took the narrative to Hollywood three years later, casting James Dean as Cal. The film snagged four Oscar nominations. Now, Kazan’s granddaughter Zoe has reimagined the American epic to make it her own. For the first time, the limited series extends sympathy to its enduring antihero Cathy Ames, who Steinbeck described as a “psychic monster” with a “malformed soul.” She “was unlike anyone I’d ever read before,” Kazan told Vanity Fair. A refreshed retelling for the modern era, just as Steinbeck did with the Bible decades before, the show is wholly its own. —Maggie Turner