Of Mice and Men

by John Steinbeck

Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other.

The year 1936 was, in fact, about the time that many resident Californians began waking up to the acute problem on their hands: the steady influx of white families who were homeless, hungry, poor but proud.

“It is strange how this goes on. The struggle to get started. Terrible. It always happens. . . . I am afraid. Among other things I feel that I have put some things over. That the little success of mine is cheating. I don’t seem to feel that any of it is any good. All cheating.”

Lennie who was not to represent insanity at all but the inarticulate and powerful yearning of all men.”

Book, play, and film—coming in quick succession—disturbed many Americans in part because they chipped away at the nation’s faith in the incantatory dream: a new beginning, a tidy home.

“For too long,” Steinbeck wrote his godmother late in 1939, “the language of books was different from the language of men. To the men I write about profanity is adornment and ornament and is never vulgar and I try to write it so.”

There is a path through the willows and among the sycamores, a path beaten hard by boys coming down from the ranches to swim in the deep pool, and beaten hard by tramps who come wearily down from the highway in the evening to jungle-up near water.

a giant sycamore there is an ash pile made by many fires; the limb is worn smooth by men who have sat on it.

“Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world. They got no family. They don’t belong no place. They come to a ranch an’ work up a stake and then they go inta town and blow their stake, and the first thing you know they’re poundin’ their tail on some other ranch. They ain’t got nothing to look ahead to.”

George cut the cards again and put out a solitaire lay, slowly and deliberately. “Purty?” he asked casually. “Yeah. Purty . . . but——”

“Jus’ tell Lennie what to do an’ he’ll do it if it don’t take no figuring. He can’t think of nothing to do himself, but he sure can take orders.”

“You seen what they done to my dog tonight? They says he wasn’t no good to himself nor nobody else. When they can me here I wisht somebody’d shoot me.

“He was so little,” said Lennie. “I was jus’ playin’ with him . . . an’ he made like he’s gonna bite me . . . an’ I made like I was gonna smack him . . . an’ . . . an’ I done it. An’ then he was dead.”

For the first time Lennie became conscious of the outside.

Curley’s wife

Interesting he never named her, probably for this very moment.