Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck Review: A Lean Depression-Era Tragedy

Of Mice and Men is John Steinbeck's 1937 novella about George Milton and Lennie Small, two displaced migrant ranch workers drifting through California in search of jobs during the Great Depression. They are an unlikely pair: George, in the publisher's description, is "small and quick and dark of face"; Lennie is a man of tremendous size with the mind of a young child. What binds them is mutual dependence and a shared dream — a few acres of their own, a place where Lennie can tend the rabbits. That dream, fragile from the first page, is the engine of everything that follows when the two men take work on a ranch and collide with the people there: the boss's aggressive son Curley, Curley's restless and unnamed wife, the aging swamper Candy, and the isolated Black stable hand Crooks. The title itself is drawn from Robert Burns's poem "To a Mouse" — the best-laid schemes of mice and men often go awry — and the novella is built to prove the line.

Few books this short carry this much cultural weight. Steinbeck, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962, is remembered as one of the most celebrated American writers of the twentieth century, the author of The Grapes of Wrath, Cannery Row, and The Pearl — and Of Mice and Men remains among his most-read works, a fixture of school curricula for generations. Its setting is grounded in lived experience: as the introduction to Penguin's edition recounts, Steinbeck dropped out of Stanford and spent nearly two years roaming California, working ranches and harvesting wheat and sugar beets alongside the kind of men he would later write about. The book's very composition has entered literary folklore — Steinbeck's setter puppy famously chewed up roughly half of an early draft, forcing him to rewrite months of work from scratch. Its stature is also measured in opposition: it has appeared on the American Library Association's lists of banned and challenged books, which says something about how uncomfortable its honesty still makes some readers.

The novella's great strength is compression. At barely a hundred pages, it packs in the Depression, loneliness, race, sex, disability, and the economics of itinerant labor without ever feeling crammed — readers reviewing the book note how much Steinbeck manages to fit into so little time on the page. The structure is famously tight and stage-like, built from a handful of scenes that echo and tighten around one another. Above all, there is the central relationship: the publisher describes the book as "a parable of commitment, loneliness, hope and loss," and that is exactly its register. George's exasperated guardianship and Lennie's guileless devotion form one of the most affecting friendships in American fiction, and the novella's ending lands with the force it does because Steinbeck has made readers invest completely in both men. John Irving, in the endorsement carried on this Penguin edition, warns that "you can't prepare yourself for the magnitude and emotional impact of this powerful novel" — and the warning is fair.

Honesty requires noting what some readers find hard going. The book is bleak: its tragedy is heavily foreshadowed, and readers who prefer suspense or uplift may find the slide toward the ending oppressive rather than moving. Its period attitudes are also genuinely confronting. The novella depicts racism and sexism as lived realities of the ranch — Crooks is segregated and addressed with racial slurs, Curley's wife is never given a name — and while readers discussing the book recognize this as Steinbeck exposing the prejudices of his setting rather than endorsing them, the language and treatment can still jar modern readers, particularly younger ones encountering it in a classroom. Lennie's cognitive disability, similarly, is rendered through a 1937 lens, well before modern understanding or terminology. Finally, the same compression that gives the book its power leaves its supporting cast thin by design; Curley's wife in particular functions more as a catalyst than a fully realized person, a point of longstanding critical debate.

This listing is the Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century mass-market paperback reissue, published by Penguin Books on September 1, 1993 — a compact 107-page volume, sized to slip into a bag, with a customer-suggested reading age of 14 and up. It is a reading copy in the plainest sense: the full text of a landmark novella in an inexpensive, portable format. Who is it for? Students assigned it, certainly, but also any adult who never read it or hasn't returned since school; it repays a second reading enormously, and at this length it asks only an evening. Readers who want Depression-era America rendered with compassion and without sentimentality will find it here. Readers seeking comfort, or a story whose sympathies are expressed in contemporary language, should know what they are walking into — and will likely find the discomfort is the point.