Of Mice and Men
by John Steinbeck
Summary
George Milton and Lennie Small, two itinerant ranch workers during the Depression, move from job to job across California sharing a single dream: a small farm of their own, with rabbits for Lennie, whose enormous strength sits alongside an intellectual disability he cannot always control. They find work on a ranch where Curley, the owner's son, resents Lennie's size and picks fights, and Curley's lonely, unnamed wife drifts toward the men's bunkhouse looking for anyone to talk to. In the barn one afternoon she lets Lennie stroke her hair, and when she panics at how hard he grips and starts to scream, he shakes her to silence her and accidentally breaks her neck. Knowing a mob will hunt Lennie down once the body is found, George finds him first at the river spot they had agreed on if anything ever went wrong, describes their farm and its rabbits one last time to calm him, and shoots him in the back of the head before the other men arrive, choosing the mercy of his own hand over what the mob would have done.
Steinbeck writes with spare, almost theatrical economy, scenes built like stage sets and dialogue doing nearly all the work, which is part of why the novella adapted so easily to Broadway the same year it was published. It reads in a single sitting and builds toward its ending with a dread that never announces itself outright; the mercy of George's final act and the horror of it arrive in the same instant, and readers still disagree about which one the book actually wants them to feel.
Steinbeck adapted the book himself for the stage, and it opened at Broadway's Music Box Theatre in November 1937 with Wallace Ford as George and Broderick Crawford as Lennie, running 207 performances. The novella has also drawn sustained censorship pressure since its publication, facing more than fifty challenges in American schools and libraries and regularly ranking among the American Library Association's most banned books, usually over its violence and its language.
Historical Context & Significance
Covici Friede published Of Mice and Men in 1937 as a Book of the Month Club selection, and Steinbeck's own Broadway adaptation won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for best play of 1938, a genuine prize, though one that belongs to the stage version rather than the novella itself. The 1938 Pulitzer for the novel went instead to John P. Marquand's The Late George Apley, a satire of Boston society now read far less than Steinbeck's short, spare tragedy of migrant labor.
Steinbeck would win the Pulitzer himself in 1940 for The Grapes of Wrath, but this shorter book has reached at least as many readers over the decades since, assigned in American classrooms for generations even as its violence and language have made it one of the most frequently challenged books in the country. Lewis Milestone's 1939 film earned four Academy Award nominations, and later adaptations, including Carlisle Floyd's 1970 opera, have kept George and Lennie's ending in front of new audiences roughly once a decade.