East of Eden

Have just finished reading East of Eden, John Steinbeck's ambitious and ultimately impressive novel of life in the Salinas Valley, first published in 1952, though I have to say the lapse in time is, for me, puzzling. Why did it take me sixty years to get around to it? One thought is that I might have been put off by the 1950s film of the book, starring James Dean and Julie Harris, though I cannot put hand on heart and say I actually watched it. At least, I can't remember it in any detail.
Steinbeck was one of the first 'grown up' novelists I turned to once I left school, and had already devoured The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, Cannery Row and To a God Unknown by the time I left South Lincolnshire for Norfolk, or more precisely Norwich, where, it was widely rumoured, the streets were paved with gold. So in that sense Steinbeck was representative of a particular time in my life, and when that time ended I simply left him behind.
On reflection, I may also have caused this to happen to Thornton Wilder (The Bridge of San Luis Rey) and to Dylan Thomas and Under Milk Wood, a tape recording of which I heard for the very first time in 1955 in the basement lounge of Urchfont Manor, in Wiltshire, during a 'Writing for the Radio' course run by a BBC producer and thankfully paid for by the RAF. Ever since then I have had a recording (LPs, tapes, and now CDs) of this classic piece, forever linked in my mind with approaching demob.
Is this what happens? Does a book, a piece of music or prose, listened to or read at a particular time, forever lock one's memory into that time? If it happened to me with Steinbeck, then it certainly also happened with Richard Addinsall's Warsaw Concerto, a piece of film music often criticised as a 'pastiche' but one which always makes me think of the last War, and in particular of those grainy black and white photographs in the News Chronicle of columns of refugees or troops struggling for survival during the long Russian winter.
What - or rather, who - happened in leisure reading terms post-Steinbeck, was HE Bates (particularly Fair Stood the Wind for France, and his titles from Burma, followed by his English rural stories), followed by Nevil Shute, whose titles I loved and many of which still sit on my shelves.
There were many others, of course, often of a similar genre, and things did not really change again to any great extent until about 1960, when I discovered Ernest Hemingway. Then, of course, everything changed.