Of Mice and Men
John Steinbeck (1937)
“A lean, brutal masterpiece about two broke men and one impossible dream — and what happens when the world is designed to crush people like them.”
At a Glance
George Milton and Lennie Small are Depression-era migrant workers who drift from ranch to ranch, George small and sharp, Lennie enormous and intellectually disabled. They share a dream: a small farm of their own, rabbits, independence. At a ranch in the Salinas Valley, that dream briefly expands to include other outcasts — old Candy, crippled Crooks, lonely Curley's wife. Then Lennie accidentally kills Curley's wife, and George shoots his best friend in the back of the head to spare him a worse death. The dream dies. The ranch goes on.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
Written in 1936, published January 1937, staged as a Broadway play by April 1937 — the fastest adaptation from novel to stage in American literary history. It was the first book by a then-unknown Steinbeck to be a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. It helped establish his reputation that led to The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and the Nobel Prize (1962). It remains the most frequently banned book in American high schools — challenged more consistently than nearly any other title for language, sexual content, and its treatment of disability.
Diction Profile
Deliberately low — Depression-era ranch worker vernacular, dropped g's, double negatives, regional idiom throughout dialogue. Narration is spare and precise but never literary for its own sake.
Low in dialogue, moderate in narration