Name: Of Mice and Men
Rating: 4.5 (46 reviews)
Author: John Steinbeck

What’s in it for me? Hear the poignant tale of Lennie and George – one of literature’s great friendships.

One day, when the Scottish poet and farmer Robert Burns was out in the field, he found he’d destroyed a mouse’s nest with his plough. His outpouring of sympathy for the defenseless little creature – his poem “To a Mouse” – contains these famous lines:

The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men

Gang aft agley,

An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,

For promis’d joy!

Or, in more familiar language, even the best of plans will often go wrong and cause us grief and pain.

This is where John Steinbeck found the title for his 1937 novella Of Mice and Men – a brief but profoundly moving book that’s long been a cornerstone of American literature.

Burns’s poem casts a long shadow over Steinbeck’s book – not only because the schemes of its two main characters, Lennie and George, are doomed to go awry, but also because of a stranger theme: inadvertent violence. Burns upended the mouse’s life by brute force – but completely by accident. As you’ll see in this Blink, Of Mice and Men repeatedly asks what happens when two unequal forces collide.

It’s set during the Great Depression – around the same time it was written – in rural California. Lennie and George, like many workers at the time, travel from place to place, eking out a living doing odd jobs on ranches and dreaming of a better life.

Of Mice and Men is one of Steinbeck’s best known works, alongside The Grapes of Wrath, which followed two years later in 1939, and East of Eden, published in 1952. It’s a subtly experimental novel which uses a lot of dialog – Steinbeck’s conception was that it could also be performed as a play, as it often has been.

George and Lennie

When we meet Lennie Small and George Milton, they’re stumbling, exhausted, into a beautiful, tranquil clearing in the California countryside – causing the rabbits and herons to make themselves scarce. There, near the Gabilan mountains and the Salinas river, among the willow and sycamore trees, they find a green pool.

And the first thing Lennie does is plunge his head straight into the pool and take huge, thirsty gulps of unclean water. Belying his last name, Lennie is an enormous man, a little like a bear.

George – the opposite, small and wiry – cautions his companion that he’ll make himself sick again.

It also turns out that Lennie’s been carrying a dead mouse so he can stroke it – not for the first time. He swears he didn’t kill it – he just found it dead – but George scolds him and hurls it into the undergrowth.

Straight away, it’s clear that Lennie has a serious mental disability. As well as routinely putting his health at risk, he struggles to remember almost anything – even the fact that they’re traveling to a ranch to get work. Lennie is hopelessly reliant on George, whose harsh tone toward him is borne of a deep affection.

They’re exhausted because they’ve had to walk miles – a bus was meant to take them all the way to the ranch, but it dropped them off in the wrong place. George decides they’ll sleep in the clearing and go to the ranch in the morning.

They bicker some more – Lennie wants ketchup with his beans, but they don’t have any. To make peace, George tells Lennie his favorite story: the one about the farm the two of them will live on one day, once they’ve saved up the money. They’ll grow their own food and keep animals – and Lennie will feed the rabbits. He loves hearing about the rabbits.

If they run into trouble again, George says, Lennie should come back to this place and hide. George will find him here.

ANALYSIS

Of Mice and Men is quick to establish friendship as a theme – George and Lennie are obviously deeply committed to each other despite their poverty and Lennie’s disability. But the theme is more than friendship – it’s dependency. It’s clear that Lennie would be lost without his quick-witted companion. George, too, seems dependent on Lennie for his company and affection – not to mention the fact that Lennie’s strength makes him an excellent worker.

Other aspects of dependency already have a darker hue. Think of those imaginary rabbits, and their dependency on lumbering, forgetful Lennie; think of that little mouse, which Lennie may well have killed after all. And Lennie makes himself dependent on that pool of mossy water too – another disturbing reminder of the fragility of life.

The ranch

At the ranch, George and Lennie meet a host of new companions. Candy, first of all, is an old handyman with only one hand – and a dog that seems even older than his master. Candy’s worried he’s outlasting his usefulness on the ranch; when he overhears George telling Lennie about their dream of owning a farm, he wants in. He offers them his life savings so he can have a place there too. With that money, they’d almost have enough to buy a farm – so George says yes.

The stable hand is called Crooks, on account of his crooked back. He’s Black, which isolates him on the ranch – he proudly keeps to his own quarters. He’s scornful of Lennie, George, and Candy’s dream to own property – that’s what everyone says, he tells them, and they never do. But when he hears they almost have enough money, he wants in too.

Curley’s wife

As the story reaches its climax, all the workers are playing horseshoes nearby – except for Lennie, who’s alone in the barn, with a puppy in his hands. It’s dead.

Lennie’s talking to the puppy, devastated, still giving it a few of those mighty strokes. He’s vacillating between sorrow and anger – if only you hadn’t gone and died, he shouts, hurling it across the barn before going over to pick it up again. Above all, Lennie’s worried this means George won’t let him tend their future rabbits anymore.

Final Summary

Of Mice and Men is the story of the close friendship between Lennie Small and George Milton. Lennie is a huge and absurdly strong man with a severe mental disability, and he’s dependent on George in almost every way. Despite his size, he loves to pet small creatures like mice and puppies – which seldom survive his uncontrolled force. George couldn’t be a greater contrast – he’s short and quick-witted, although he also leans on Lennie for companionship.

The two men are trying to earn a decent wage in California during the Great Depression. They travel from ranch to ranch to do odd jobs in the fields. George keeps Lennie motivated by telling him about the beautiful farm they’ll own someday, where they’ll be self-sufficient and Lennie can tend the rabbits.

Über den Autor

John Steinbeck was born in California in 1902, not far from where he set Of Mice and Men. He gained firsthand experience of farm labor during his teenage years, which informed his work. Steinbeck wrote at least 27 books – 16 of which were novels, including The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962.