The great bank of fiction is memory, and Steinbeck was constantly revisiting his past, by trying to conjure and revise it. One of his later novels, East of Eden, began as an attempt to remember his past, and the history of his family. He intended to write a true historical account of his family's westward migration from New England to California. Steinbeck was a romantic at heart and liked to see himself as someone who came from a long line of adventurers. .
Steinbeck portrays the character Samuel Hamilton in the novel East of Eden. " He came to the Salinas Valley full-brown and hearty, full of inventions and energy. His eyes were very blue, and when he was tired one of them wandered outward a little. He was a big man but delicate in a way. His hands were clever. He was forever inventing a new way of doing an old thing and doing it better and quicker." (Steinbeck 8-9). .
The voice that opens the novel portrays a visionary event that John Steinbeck had in his childhood memories. " The Salinas Valley is in Northern California. It is a long narrow swale between two ranges of mountains, and the Salinas River winds and twists up the center until it falls at last into Monterey Bay. I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers. I remember where a toad may live and what time the birds awaken in the summer - and what trees and seasons smelled like - how people looked and walked and smelled even. The memory of odors is very rich." (Steinbeck 3).
In John Steinbeck's childhood memories he remembers blaming the economic problems of the region of Salinas Valley, more on the land than on the people who worked it. John Steinbeck's family is portrayed as the Hamilton family in the novel East of Eden and he describes a memory of his life in the Salinas Valley, "If the land had been good the Hamilton's would have been rich people. But the acres were harsh and dry. There were no springs, and the crust of topsoil was so thin that the flinty bones struck through.