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Of Mice and Men is a 1937 novella written by American author John Steinbeck. [1] [2] It describes the experiences of George Milton and Lennie Small, two displaced migrant ranch workers, as they move from place to place in California, searching for jobs during the Great Depression.
- John Steinbeck
- 1937
- John Steinbeck Worked The Same Gig as Lennie and George.
- Lennie Was Based on A Real person.
- Steinbeck‘S Dog Ate A Draft of The Book.
- The Original Title of of Mice and Men Was Much More matter-of-fact.
- Of Mice and Men Was Arguably The First “Play-Novelette.”
- The Novella Was An Early Selection For The Book of The Month Club.
- Steinbeck Won A New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award For The Stage production.
- Of Mice and Men Is One of The Most Commonly Read Books in American Schools.
- It’S Also One of The Most Challenged Books.
- The Book Has Been Opposed For Some Strange reasons.
Although he was a Stanford University graduate and had published five books by the time he wrote Of Mice and Men, Steinbeck had more in common with his itinerant main characters than readers might have expected. “I was a bindle-stiff myself for quite a spell,” the author told The New York Times in 1937, employing the now archaic nickname for migran...
In the same New York Timesarticle, Steinbeck recalled a fellow laborer on whom Lennie Small’s arc was based: “Lennie was a real person. He’s in an insane asylum in California right now. I worked alongside him for many weeks. He didn’t kill a girl. He killed a ranch foreman. Got sore because the boss had fired his pal and stuck a pitchfork right thr...
Perhaps none too pleased with the ultimate fate of the canines featured in Of Mice and Men, Steinbeck’s dog, Toby, devoured an early draft of the story, which the author had written longhand on notepaper. “Minor tragedy stalked,” Steinbeck wroteto a friend in May 1936. “My setter pup, left alone one night, made confetti of about half of my manuscri...
Before he opted to make his title an homage to Scottish poet Robert Burns’s 1785 poem “To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough,” Steinbeck considered a far more deliberate option: Something That Happened.
The stage intrigued Steinbeck as much as prose did, and the book shares similarities with both media. Like a theatrical piece, Of Mice and Menmanifests in three acts. Its narration bears the character of stage direction, and its dialogue has the feel of something one might hear in a play.
In operation for 88 years between 1926 and 2014, the Book of the Month Club was the premier mail order book service operating in the United States. Before it was even officially published, Of Mice and Men was chosen for distributionby the organization and sold around 1000 copies a day for the first month.
In May 1937, Of Mice and Men made its way to the stage, debuting at the Theater Union in San Francisco, where it was performed as written. In the introduction to the deluxe version of Of Mice and Men, author Susan Shillinglaw notes that “Steinbeck’s experiment with novel-as-script ... must be deemed a failure. When, a few weeks after publication, G...
In the 1990s, the Center for the Learning and Teaching of Literature placed Steinbeck’s novella among the 10 most commonly taught booksin public schools, Catholic schools, and independent high schools.
Of Mice and Men proves that with such prevalence comes backlash. The novella ranked as the fifth most frequently challenged piece of literature on the American Library Association’s list of 100 Most Banned or Challenged Booksbetween 2000 and 2009.
By and large, the heat taken by Of Mice and Men has singled out the story’s strong language, sexual scenarios, and violence. But one organization in Chattanooga, Tennessee, was a little more creative, taking issue with the “anti-business attitude” it saw in Steinbeck’s text. The establishment also raised the issue that Steinbeck “was very questiona...
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The poem resonates with several of Of Mice and Men’s central themes: the impermanence of home and the harshness of life for the most vulnerable. The struggles of the mouse whose home is destroyed parallels with the struggles of George, Lennie, and other migrant workers whose dreams of purchasing land are destroyed by the trials of the Great ...
Summary. The story opens with the description of a riverbed in rural California, a beautiful, wooded area at the base of “golden foothill slopes.” A path runs to the river, used by boys going swimming and riffraff coming down from the highway. Two men walk along the path.
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Study guide for Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, with plot summary, character analysis, and literary analysis.
