Of Mice and Men

Steinbeck's full-scale Depression epic — same Salinas Valley labor world, same sympathy for the dispossessed, but a family saga instead of a two-man tragedy

Another American Dream autopsy in working-class vernacular — Willy Loman and George Milton are both men trying to hold a dream together with insufficient resources

Same era, opposite class — Gatsby's Dream has champagne and parties; George and Lennie's has rabbits and alfalfa. Both are destroyed by the same system.

Another Depression-era novel that uses disability and racial injustice to examine who the legal system protects and who it destroys

The other canonical American novel about intellectual disability — where Steinbeck shows the world's indifference, Keyes shows it from the inside

Steinbeck's Salinas Valley epic — the same landscape, the same moral seriousness, but generational scope rather than compression