East of Eden

A woman comes home to New York after years abroad and finds her old circle in the middle of the season's talk: Eva Litchfield's marriage, which her friends have already called a failure, and the mother-in-law whose look settled the verdict. Isa Glenn, who had lived the army wife's life in Manila before she wrote, turned here to the New York society she had come back to, and watched it with a cool, amused and rather unforgiving eye. Fifty-seven plates by painters from Thomas Cole to George Bellows trace the American scene from Yosemite to steaming New York streets, matching the novel's own passage between old New York and the wider country.