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.”
About John Steinbeck
John Ernst Steinbeck (1902-1968) was born in Salinas, California — the exact valley where Of Mice and Men is set. He worked alongside migrant laborers in his twenties, picking fruit, shoveling, living in the bunkhouses and labor camps he later wrote about. When he published In Dubious Battle (1936), a novel about a Communist-organized agricultural strike, California growers tried to run him out of the state. He wrote Of Mice and Men in 1936, reportedly losing the first manuscript when his dog ate it. He rewrote it in two months. He would win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, citing his ability to give voice to 'those who have no voice.' He was also an FBI surveillance target for years because of his political sympathies.
Life → Text Connections
How John Steinbeck's real experiences shaped specific elements of Of Mice and Men.
Steinbeck worked on Salinas Valley ranches as a young man and befriended itinerant workers, several of whom inspired characters
The physical and social detail of the bunkhouse, the hierarchy of ranch labor, and the vernacular speech patterns throughout
The novel reads as documentary because it is — Steinbeck was in these rooms, heard these conversations, knew men like George and Lennie.
Steinbeck was politically active during the Depression, writing journalism about migrant labor camps and lobbying for federal assistance to workers
The novel's unflinching depiction of the economic system that traps ranch workers — no savings, no stability, no future
Of Mice and Men is not just character study. It is an argument about what capitalist agricultural labor does to human beings.
Steinbeck witnessed the Dust Bowl migration firsthand, traveling with Okies who had lost their farms and driven west hoping for work
George and Lennie's dream of owning their own farm — which was the specific thing the Dust Bowl destroyed for hundreds of thousands of families
The farm dream is not sentimentality. In the 1930s, it was a specific, recent, destroyed reality. The audience knew what it meant to lose it.
Steinbeck was briefly fired from a job as estate caretaker in the 1920s and had to live on government relief; he understood economic precarity personally
George's fear — 'I could get a job an' not have you mess it up' — and his awareness of how close to nothing they always are
George's anxiety is autobiographical at one remove. Steinbeck knew what it felt like to be one bad day from destitution.
Historical Era
1930s America — Great Depression, Dust Bowl, California migrant labor camps
How the Era Shapes the Book
The Depression is not background in this novel — it IS the novel. George and Lennie's impossibility is the Depression's impossibility: men who work hard and own nothing, who move constantly because there is no stability to stay in, who dream of land because land was the specific thing the economy had stripped from people like them. Crooks's segregation is legally accurate — California enforced racial separation in labor housing. Curley's wife's entrapment is accurate — women of her class in rural California had almost no economic options outside marriage. The economic conditions are not setting; they are the active force that makes the tragedy inevitable.