Written in his later years, Steinbeck's novel follows the intertwined affairs of two families in southern California. As the saga unfolds, it also becomes a retelling of two powerful stories from Genesis: the fall of Adam and Eve, and the rivalry of Cain and Abel. Steinbeck crafted East of Eden as a profound allegory and considered it, besides The Grapes of Wrath, his most important work.

Player Piano (1952), Vonnegut's first novel, embeds and foreshadows themes which are to be parsed and dramatized by academians for centuries to come. His future society—a marginal extrapolation, Vonnegut wrote, of the situation he observed as an employee of General Electric in which machines were replacing people increasingly and without any regard for their fate—is mechanistic and cruel, indifferent to human consequence, almost