Of Mice and Men

Key Takeaways

John Steinbeck’s 1937 novella of George and Lennie, two migrant ranch hands in Depression-era California. Kyle marked it read for 2026 on 2026-09-13.

• Base theme: try to understand each other. Steinbeck wrote in 1938: “Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love.” This was the one aim beneath all his writing of the late 1930s.
• Non-teleological / “is thinking.” The original working title, “Something That Happened,” captures Steinbeck’s stance: accept life on its own terms without imposing order or judging by outcomes. The term was coined by Steinbeck’s best friend, Edward F. Ricketts, and emphasized seeing clearly, “like a scientist.”
• The itinerant farmworker’s world. From 1870 to 1930, California’s crops were harvested by single men for whom roving became habitual—denied wives, families, and friends, they found partial satisfaction in “partners.” Of Mice and Men is set in this historicity of rootlessness and powerlessness.
• The blasted American Dream. “Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land.” The dream of a little piece of land to live on—Lennie and George’s central hope—is the universal longing of every farmworker, and none ever achieves it. Just like heaven: everyone wants it, no one gets it.
• Belief in human potential, not progress. A distinction Steinbeck had to master over his career: he believed not in the incantatory American dream of a new beginning, but in the unflinching possibility of what people could become—heterodox faith.
• Loneliness and anger as political reality. The novel is set “a few miles south of Soledad”—Spanish for solitude—because the intense loneliness and anger born of hopelessness is the political condition Steinbeck is examining.
• “I’m not afraid of them because I know them.” Slim’s observation: “I don’t know why. Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.” Friendship and being known are the only antidote.

Connections

No cross-book interconnections identified yet.

Highlights

• But Steinbeck’s vision of camaraderie is less markedly an escape from marriage, home, and commitment than an exploration of the parameters of society and self. “In every bit of honest writing in the world,” he noted in a 1938 journal entry, ”… there is a base theme. Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love. There are shorter means, many of them. There is writing promoting social change, writing punishing injustice, writing in celebration of heroism, but always that base theme. Try to understand each other.”

  Kyle: Writing to understand each other is the greatest service any of us can render to the human race.

• To read Of Mice and Men as Steinbeck intended is to keep firmly in mind its original title, “Something That Happened,” a phrase expressing the non-judgmental acceptance that imprints his best work of the 1930s and early 40s. In the novel Steinbeck in effect tells us that this is the way things are; he called his approach non-teleological thinking, or “is thinking.” The term non-teleological was coined by Steinbeck’s best friend, Edward F. Ricketts; and as the two men articulated their shared philosophy, they emphasized the need to see as clearly as a scientist: that is, to accept life on its own terms. “Is thinking” focused not on ends but on the process of life, the Aristotelean efficient cause of nature.

  Kyle: We see things not as THEY are but as WE are. Super Uno Pluribus

• From 1935 to 1940, exiles from the drought-plagued Southwest poured into the Golden State, drawn by Americans’ long-held conviction that the West was the promised land-the place to begin anew-and by the more concrete expectation of employment in the orange groves and lettuce fields.

  Kyle: How did this impact Luna?

• 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.

  Kyle: The year Pat and Helen Thompson started having kids

• Of Mice and Men is in one sense an anachronistic text, insisting on its artistry, not its historicity. Never a true social chronicler, Steinbeck deliberately de-historicizes each novel of the late 1930s.
• The committed writer, he asserted, must not become ensnared in political ideologies: Communists are devils who want to steal the little stucco house of the grocery clerk and rationalize his wife and steal his children for a state baby factory… . Industrialists are fat greedy, cruel beasts who take pleasure in bombing their workers. The paralysing process is well along. In Spain the loyalists are shooting rifles at the figure of Christ, if you are an insurgent, and the insurgents are shooting babys [sic] if you are a loyalist. The pressure will come fast now. Some writers will get caught in the process, will write tellingly in aid of the process and when it is over they will come back to consciousness groggy… . Others will stand clear, carrying on their ancient cry. Try to understand each other. You can’t hate men if you know them. These latter will be silenced. This is no recommendation that you follow the last course. You will do it because that is your craft, that is what your lives are about.
• From the 1870s until about 1930, California’s wheat and fruit crops were harvested in large part by itinerant workers, mostly single men for whom roving became habitual. Some toted blanket rolls or bindles on their backs; others slept unprotected in the roadside “jungles.” Wages were low, living quarters squalid, and opportunities for advancement practically nonexistent. Even the most resolute and ambitious worker typically met with failure and perforce took to roving. One study concluded that about twenty-five percent were feebleminded, forced out on the road. To be a farmworker was to be among California’s dispossessed, a powerless, degraded, illpaid fraternity. “It is the constant craving for human company, for friends, that is so strong among the floating class,” noted researcher Frederick C. Mills in a journal kept early in the century. “Denied wives, or families, or circles of sympathetic friends, this feeling can only be partially satisfied thru the institution of ‘partners.’ Most men hate to travel alone on the road.” The isolated and rootless existence of the itinerant is the historicity that Steinbeck represents.

  Kyle: How did Pat Thompson’s vagrancy shape him? His “partners” spoke at his funeral.

• Of Mice and Men was thus the first book Steinbeck began with a sense of artistic independence born of personal security. “Maybe with this security,” he wrote to his literary agent, Elizabeth Otis, late in 1935, “I can write a better book. Maybe not. Certainly though I can take a little longer and write a more careful one.”
• Even when financially secure, Steinbeck wrote out of a kind of liminal zone: on the one hand confident in his art, secure in his expression; while on the other doubtful of his abilities, puritanically wrestling with a sluggish will. Over and over in the journals he kept while composing his novels, he records his angst, easing the self-doubt, so it seems, in the very process of writing the revelatory words: “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.” And after that cleansing passage, he moves into the text of Mice, marshaling that entropic will: “I can do anything when my will is clean and straight. Anything.”
• Anticipating the postmodernists, Steinbeck was to declare with greater and greater frequency in the late 1930s and ’40s that the novel was dead, whereas the theater was “waking up,” was fresh and challenging. Of Mice and Men is thus poised on the cusp of two genres, one moribund, the other alive. And perhaps Steinbeck’s intentions are best appreciated with this point in mind. The play/novelette is his democratic chant, a hybrid that embraces an elite and popular audience, perhaps as fully an American genre as Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

  Kyle: Second time this book has come up this year in my reading.

• The political reality Steinbeck examined in Of Mice and Men, set a “few miles south of Soledad”Spanish for “solitude”-is the intense loneliness and anger engendered by hopelessness.
• “Something That Happened” is resolved not in what the characters do next, not in an order imposed on life, but rather in the reader’s comprehension of the doomed appeal of Lennie and George. That appeal is shaped both by their friendship and by their dream. The title that Steinbeck finally selected underscores the unpredictability of existence as well as its promise, Lennie and George’s blasted dream to “live off the fatta the lan’.” Taken from a poem by Robert Burns, the novel’s title suggests the transitory quality of even “best laid schemes.” The poem tells of an unfortunate field mouse whose home is flattened by a plow: But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane, In proving foresight may be vain: The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men Gang aft a-gley An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain For promised joy.
• It is perhaps the nearness of resolution that makes that vision, the text itself, indeed nearly all of Steinbeck’s books, so universally appealing. “My earliest memories,” he wrote to a college friend in 1924, “are of my mother’s telling me how men could become bright shining creatures with great white wings and all through the chanting of simple incantations.” To greater and lesser degrees, residual strains of that romanticism cut through Steinbeck’s work, particularly in his apprentice fiction. The story of his early years charts his gradual ability to use rather than to be controlled by that romantic impulse. By 1936, in what many critics declare his best novel, Of Mice and Men, the writer had mastered his craft and had discovered a voice for his unflinching faith, not in progress, but in human potential.

  Kyle: Fascinating distinction. Believing NOT in progress, but rather human potential.

• 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. And in part Steinbeck’s naturalistic dialogue offended and continues to offend (the novel is one of the most frequently banned by school boards throughout the country). The lines, even those delicately censored for the stage and film, are gritty. Yet Steinbeck adamantly defended his dialogue, both in Of Mice and Men and, two years later, in The Grapes of Wrath. “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.” Tough yet lyrical, realistic yet symbolic: These words describe both the prose that Steinbeck perfected in the late 1930s and the artistic vision that produced his most unsettling trio of novels, In Dubious Battle, Of Mice and Men, and The Grapes of Wrath.
• A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green. The water is warm too, for it has slipped twinkling over the yellow sands in the sunlight before reaching the narrow pool.

  Kyle: Never begin a novel with lecture.

• . A little stocky man stood in the open doorway. He wore blue jean trousers, a flannel shirt, a black, unbuttoned vest and a black coat. His thumbs were stuck in his belt, on each side of a square steel buckle. On his head was a soiled brown Stetson hat, and he wore high-heeled boots and spurs to prove he was not a laboring man.
• “You said I was your cousin, George.” “Well, that was a lie. An’ I’m damn glad it was. If I was a relative of yours I’d shoot myself.” He stopped suddenly, stepped to the open front door and peered out. “Say, what the hell you doin’ listenin’?”
• The swamper considered… . “Well… tell you what. Curley’s like a lot of little guys. He hates big guys. He’s alla time picking scraps with big guys. Kind of like he’s mad at ‘em because he ain’t a big guy. You seen little guys like that, ain’t you? Always scrappy?”
• He leaned over the table and snapped the corner of a loose card. “You guys travel around together?” His tone was friendly. It invited confidence without demanding it.
• Slim looked through George and beyond him. “Ain’t many guys travel around together,” he mused. “I don’t know why. Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.”
• “He ain’t no cuckoo,” said George. “He’s dumb as hell, but he ain’t crazy. An’ I ain’t so bright neither, or I wouldn’t be buckin’ barley for my fifty and found. If I was bright, if I was even a little bit smart, I’d have my own little place, an’ I’d be bringin’ in my own crops, ‘stead of doin’ all the work and not getting what comes up outta the ground.” George fell silent. He wanted to talk. Slim neither encouraged nor discouraged him. He just sat back quiet and receptive.

  Kyle: Difference between land and labor

• “He’s a nice fella,” said Slim. “Guy don’t need no sense to be a nice fella. Seems to me sometimes it jus’ works the other way around. Take a real smart guy and he ain’t hardly ever a nice fella.”
• They fell into a silence. They looked at one another, amazed. This thing they had never really believed in was coming true. George said reverently, “Jesus Christ! I bet we could swing her.” His eyes were full of wonder. “I bet we could swing her,” he repeated softly.
• George stood up. “We’ll do her,” he said. “We’ll fix up that little old place an’ we’ll go live there.” He sat down again. They all sat still, all bemused by the beauty of the thing, each mind was popped into the future when this lovely thing should come about.
• Crooks said, “I didn’t mean to scare you. He’ll come back. I was talkin’ about myself. A guy sets alone out here at night, maybe readin’ books or thinkin’ or stuff like that. Sometimes he gets thinkin’, an’ he got nothing to tell him what’s so an’ what ain’t so. Maybe if he sees somethin’, he don’t know whether it’s right or not. He can’t turn to some other guy and ast him if he sees it too. He can’t tell. He got nothing to measure by. I seen things out here. I wasn’t drunk. I don’t know if I was asleep. If some guy was with me, he could tell me I was asleep, an’ then it would be all right. But I jus’ don’t know.” Crooks was looking across the room now, looking toward the window.
• “You’re nuts.” Crooks was scornful. “I seen hunderds of men come by on the road an’ on the ranches, with their bindles on their back an’ that same damn thing in their heads. Hunderds of them. They come, an’ they quit an’ go on; an’ every damn one of ‘em’s got a little piece of land in his head. An’ never a God damn one of ‘em ever gets it. Just like heaven. Ever’body wants a little piece of lan’. I read plenty of books out here. Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land. It’s just in their head. They’re all the time talkin’ about it, but it’s jus’ in their head.”
• Crooks interrupted brutally. “You guys is just kiddin’ yourself. You’ll talk about it a hell of a lot, but you won’t get no land. You’ll be a swamper here till they take you out in a box. Hell, I seen too many guys. Lennie here’ll quit an’ be on the road in two, three weeks. Seems like ever’ guy got land in his head.”
• Candy cried, “Sure they all want it. Everybody wants a little bit of land, not much. Jus’ som’thin’ that was his. Somethin’ he could live on and there couldn’t nobody throw him off of it. I never had none. I planted crops for damn near ever’body in this state, but they wasn’t my crops, and when I harvested ‘em, it wasn’t none of my harvest. But we gonna do it now, and don’t make no mistake about that. George ain’t got the money in town. That money’s in the bank. Me an’ Lennie an’ George. We gonna have a room to ourself. We’re gonna have a dog an’ rabbits an’ chickens. We’re gonna have green corn an’ maybe a cow or a goat.” He stopped, overwhelmed with his picture.