Book Bearings
Of Mice and Men
- 119 pages · about 2 hours
- First published 1937
- 292 editions
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1 About this book
Of Mice and Men is a 1937 novella by John Steinbeck. George Milton and Lennie Small are migrant farm workers moving from job to job in California during the Great Depression. George is small and quick-witted; Lennie is a huge, strong man with an intellectual disability, who relies on George and does not know his own strength. Together they hold on to a dream of settling on a piece of land of their own. When they are hired at a ranch, that dream begins to draw in other lonely people there, and trouble follows. Steinbeck based the story on his own time working alongside migrant farm hands, and wrote it so that it could be staged as a play.
- Literary fiction
- Classics
- Psychological fiction
- Male friendship
- Goal (Psychology)
- Small Town & Rural
- Voyages and travels
- Contemporary fiction
2 What to expect
A short, plainly told story of two migrant farm workers in Depression-era California and their dream of a place of their own. Friendship, loneliness and the hopes of people with very little are the themes, and the mood darkens steadily. It is built almost like a play, in a few scenes with a great deal of dialogue, and it contains violence and the racist and coarse language of its setting.
Good for readers who want: a short American classic, friendship and loneliness, and a story that stays with you.
3 About John Steinbeck
Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
4 More by John Steinbeck
5 Similar books
- Three Men in a Boat (to say nothing of the dog) by Jerome K. Jerome
- James by Percival L. Everett
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
- Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
- Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
- Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott
- Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne