I mentioned a little while back that I'd wanted to write about Steinbeck's incredible ability to introduce a character, and, as I've moved deeper into East of Eden and felt my love for Samuel Hamilton grow and grow, I've flipped back to his introduction over and over again.

This is the third paragraph of Chapter 2, which is a quick five pages on the Hamiltons, welcoming them into the story:

Why Samuel left the stone house and the green acres of his ancestors I do not know.  He was never a political man, so it is not likely a charge or rebellion drove him out, and he was scrupulously honest, which eliminates the police as prime movers.  There was a whisper - not even a rumor but rather an unsaid feeling - in my family that it was love drove him out.  But whether it was too successful love or whether he left in pique at unsuccessful love, I do not know.  We always preferred to think it was the former.  Samuel had good looks and charm and gaiety.  It is hard to imagine that any country Irish girl refused him.

Not facts.  Only conjecture.  Impressions.  Shared but unspoken assumption.

I think that's an incredibly creative and compelling way to write a character into readers' minds.

And, as for Samuel, a couple hundred pages later, he is just as fascinating as that third paragraph suggests, just as brilliant as Steinbeck reveals another two pages into that second chapter:

It was a bad day when three or four men were not standing around the forge, listening to Samuel's hammer and his talk.  They called him a comical genius and carried his stories carefully home, and they wondered at how the stories spilled out on the way, for they never sounded the same repeated in their own kitchens.

Makes me wonder about containers that can hold precious stories: who has them, how to build them, and if they even exist.