John Steinbeck and the Derry connection - Our Space Week 16

Steinbeck won many awards, including the Nobel, for his writings. But he considered ‘East of Eden’ his masterpiece. The novel presents the struggle between good and evil. It borrows from Steinbeck’s mother Olive Hamilton’s family and Chapter 16 involves a public hanging in Derry. True or imagined?

“He saw himself, a very little boy, so small that he had to reach high for his father’s hand. He felt the cobbles of Londonderry under his feet and the crush and gaiety of the one big city he had seen. … The narrow street opened out to a square, and against the grey wall of a building there was a high structure of timbers and a noosed rope hanging down …

“His father’s lips were curiously blue and there were tears in his father’s eyes. ‘I’d never have brought you if I’d known. It’s not fit for any man to see, and sure not for a small boy’.

“‘I didn’t see any’, Samuel piped. ‘You held my head down. … What was it?’

“‘I’ll have to tell you. They were killing a bad man. And you must put no sorrow on him. He had to be killed. Not once but many times he did dreadful things - things only a fiend could think of. It’s not his hanging sorrows me but that they could make a holiday of it that should be done secretly in the dark’”.