Description:

A controversial tale of friendship and tragedy during the Great Depression Over seventy-five years since its first publication, Steinbeck’s tale of commitment, loneliness, hope, and loss remains one of America’s most widely read and taught novels. An unlikely pair, George and Lennie, two migrant workers in California during the Great Depression, grasp for their American Dream. They hustle work when they can, living a hand-to-mouth existence. For George and Lennie have a plan: to own an acre of land and a shack they can call their own. When they land jobs on a ranch in the Salinas Valley, the fulfillment of their dream seems to be within their grasp. But even George cannot guard Lennie from the provocations, nor predict the consequences of Lennie's unswerving obedience to the things George taught him. Of Mice and Men represents an experiment in form, which Steinbeck described as “a kind of playable novel, written in a novel form but so scened and set that it can be played as it stands.” A rarity in American letters, it achieved remarkable success as a novel, a Broadway play, and three acclaimed films. This edition features an introduction by Susan Shillinglaw, one of today’s leading Steinbeck scholars.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

From the Trade Paperback edition.

Review

Near the end of Of Mice and Men, the heron that stood motionless at the Salinas River pool through the opening pages returns. It plucks a small water snake from the shallows, swallows it headfirst, and resumes its silent vigil. The book’s entire moral architecture is compressed into that instant. John Steinbeck framed his six-chapter novella inside a natural order that is beautiful, indifferent, and lethal—a world where the same water that lets a snake swim also delivers it to the predator. Everything the book has to say about the migrant workers who pass through it is contained in the relation between those two animals. To be gentle is to be soft, and to be soft is to be killed. To have a friend is to become vulnerable. To need a dream is to deliver yourself into the hands of what will destroy you. Steinbeck wrote a tragedy that does not ask us to judge its catastrophe; it asks us to see exactly how the same tenderness that makes life endurable makes violence inevitable. The novella’s position—and this is the argument it defends with relentless economy—is that companionship and the dream of land are not antidotes to loneliness but rather the vehicle through which loneliness completes itself, and that the only mercy available in such a world is to kill what you love yourself, deliberately, with the same pistol that shot an old dog.

The premise looks simple: two bindle stiffs, George Milton and the childlike giant Lennie Small, travel together because they have a shared fantasy of a little farm with rabbits and because Lennie cannot survive alone. But the novella is not really about whether they will get the farm. George’s confession after the death of Curley’s wife—

I think I knowed from the very first. I think I knowed we’d never do her. He usta like to hear about it so much I got to thinking maybe we would

—admits that the dream was always a ritual, not a plan. Steinbeck’s subject is what that ritual does: how it binds two men into a provisional “us” and briefly gathers other dispossessed people into its light before the social facts of the ranch crush it. The book’s six chapters move not toward a possible future but toward the point at which the dream’s function as consolation is exposed as identical to its function as anesthetic, and the man who has recited it a hundred times picks up a Luger and puts the dream to death.

The first chapter establishes the litany that will be repeated until it becomes unbearable. By the river pool, George recites the speech he has clearly delivered many times before:

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.

Then the turn: “With us it ain’t like that. We got a future. We got somebody to talk to that gives a damn about us.” The speech is incantatory, almost scripted, and Lennie prompts it like a child demanding a bedtime story. Its force is not in its plausibility but in its power to carve a temporary “us” out of the great mass of solitary men. The dream is the counter to “guys like us,” and that counter-identity is the only thing that distinguishes George from the hundreds of men Crooks will later catalogue as “the same damn thing in their heads.” Steinbeck is already showing us that the dream’s real value is not the land but the belonging it conjures into existence. The farm is an object of longing, but the longing itself is the social tie. When George kills Lennie, he does not merely abandon a plan; he dissolves the “us” that the litany performed, and he walks away toward the solitude he once claimed he and Lennie were exempt from.

The ranch the men enter in chapter two is a microcosm of Depression-era dispossession, arranged as a ladder of powerlessness. Candy, the swamper with one hand, is living in terror of the moment his usefulness runs out—a fear made flesh when Carlson shoots his ancient, stinking sheep dog and Candy mutters that he ought to have done it himself. Curley, the boss’s son, is a pocket bully with a Golden Gloves past and a fury that threatens to detonate at any perceived slight. Curley’s wife has no name, only a role and a reputation, and the men treat her as a danger before she has spoken a word. Crooks, the crippled black stable buck, lives alone in a harness room off the barn with his books and his copy of the California civil code—the law that gestures at rights while the social order denies him the standing to claim them. Steinbeck arranges these figures so that each one knows exactly what they are losing and knows, too, that they have no power to stop it. The bunkhouse is a room full of men waiting to be discarded, and the only thing any of them has to offer against that fate is the dream.

The dream becomes concrete in chapter three because Candy hears George and Lennie naming a price and realizes he has a price of his own.

S’pose I went in with you guys. Tha’s three hunderd an’ fifty bucks I’d put in. I ain’t much good, but I could cook and tend the chickens and hoe the garden some. How’d that be?

Until this moment the farm was a shared fantasy, an endlessly deferred “someday.” Now it has a budget and a timeline. Steinbeck turns the key: he lets us believe, for a few pages, that the impossible might happen. And he does this in the same chapter where Carlson shoots the dog in the back of the head with his Luger while Candy lies on his bunk facing the wall, unwilling to watch because he knows the killing is necessary and cannot bring himself to participate. The structural parallel is as clean as a thrown blade. The dog is dead because it was old, useless, and stank; Lennie will be dead because he is dangerous and cannot be contained. Candy’s regret—that he let a stranger pull the trigger on his own companion—becomes George’s reasoning when he takes Carlson’s pistol himself. Mercy, Steinbeck insists, is personal. Outsourcing it is the real abandonment.

Saturday night empties the bunkhouse and allows Steinbeck to stage his most concentrated diagnosis of loneliness in Crooks’s harness room. Crooks is the only character who can articulate the structural nature of the dream’s impossibility. When Lennie wanders in and begins talking about rabbits, Crooks replies with a speech that is the book’s intellectual core:

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, an’ nobody gets no land. It’s just in their head.

He is right, and he also wants to be wrong. For a brief moment Crooks lowers his defenses and asks if he might join the farm, but Curley’s wife enters and reminds him what he is with a casual threat of lynching: she could get him strung up on a tree so fast it would make his head spin. Crooks withdraws instantly, his face going “stiff with pride,” and retracts the wish. What Steinbeck shows here is that the dream is not simply a lie; it is a luxury distributed along lines of race, able-bodiedness, and gender. Crooks is not allowed even the consolation of self-deception. He knows the odds, and knowing them, he must police his own hope. The book’s most damning claim is not that the dream is false but that the social order pre-selects who may entertain it and who must remain outside, reading law books alone.

Curley’s wife appears in the same scene and delivers the monologue that cracks open the “tart” caricature the men have assigned her.

I could of went with shows. Not jus’ one, neither. An’ a guy tol’ me he could put me in pitchers. Sat’iday night. Ever’body out doin’ som’pin’. Ever’body! An’ what am I doin’? Standin’ here talkin’ to a bunch of bindle stiffs—a nigger an’ a dum-dum and a lousy ol’ sheep—an’ likin’ it because they ain’t nobody else.

Her dream of stardom is the same shape as the men’s dream of land: a story about a future that would make the present bearable. Steinbeck’s structural point is that she is just as lonely as George and Lennie, just as needy, just as trapped in a social role that forecloses the tenderness she craves. The men fear her precisely because her loneliness so closely mirrors their own, and they keep their distance from her not out of moral clarity but out of the terrified recognition that acknowledging her need would force them to acknowledge their own. She will die before her name is ever spoken.

The catastrophe arrives in the barn, the same space where Lennie’s new puppy has already been killed by the very hands that meant to comfort it. Lennie sits in the hay, mourning the small brown-and-white body and whispering to himself, and Curley’s wife finds him and offers her hair. Steinbeck has built the entire novella toward this sequence: every soft thing Lennie has touched—the dead mouse, the girl’s red dress in Weed, the crushed hand of Curley, the broken-necked puppy—has been an escalation toward the human body. The tragedy is not that Lennie is violent; it is that he is incapable of violence in any conscious sense. He does not want to hurt anyone. When she begins to struggle and scream, he panics and covers her mouth:

I don’t want ta hurt you, but George’ll be mad if you yell.

The line is devastating because it is perfectly accurate. His motivation is not anger but terror of losing George’s approval—the same approval that has sustained the dream. And when he realizes what he has done, the only words he can produce are the same whispered self-accusation he has carried since Weed: “I done a bad thing. I done another bad thing.” The repetition reduces moral categories to a child’s vocabulary because Lennie has no other. He has killed a woman, and he understands it only as a transgression against the pact with George.

The aftermath in the bunkhouse is an exercise in the death of hope. Candy stands over the body and repeats the dream in a singsong, as if saying it could restore the future that the broken neck has foreclosed:

If they was a circus or a baseball game… we would of went to her… jus’ said ‘ta hell with work,’ an’ went to her. Never ast nobody’s say so. An’ they’d of been a pig and chickens… an’ in the winter… the little fat stove… an’ the rain comin’… an’ us jus’ settin’ there.

The verb tenses tell the whole story. The conditional has already collapsed into an impossible past. Candy is mourning not a woman but the death of the farm, because the farm was never primarily about land—it was about being the kind of man who could say “ta hell with work” and do what he pleased. Without Lennie, there is no “us” to do the pleasing. George confirms this when he tells Candy, with the clipped finality of a man who has stopped pretending, “I think I knowed from the very first.” The confession is at once an admission of self-deception and a claim of responsibility: he knew the dream was impossible and he kept reciting it anyway because Lennie needed to hear it, and because he himself needed to believe he was not just another lonely drifter.

The final chapter returns to the pool where the book opened, and Steinbeck transforms the landscape into a courtroom. Lennie hides in the brush exactly as George instructed, and his mind conjures hallucinations of Aunt Clara and a giant rabbit—the dream’s mascot turned accuser—that tell him George will be angry, George will leave. The psychological realism of the scene is limited because Steinbeck is not writing psychology; he is writing a morality play in which Lennie’s innocence must be established and the reader must understand, before the shot is fired, that no other world is available. The lynch mob is coming, and they will not be merciful. George arrives, and instead of berating Lennie or explaining what has happened, he performs the litany one last time: the little house, the vegetable patch, the alfalfa for the rabbits. Lennie gazes across the green water toward the imagined farm, serene in his belief that the promise will be kept, and George raises Carlson’s Luger to the base of his skull. The dramatic irony is almost unbearable, and Steinbeck knows it; he has designed the moment so that the only kindness left is to let a man die inside the illusion that gave his life meaning. The shot erases the dream, the companionship, and the fragile distinction between George and every other drifter. It also confirms the parallel that the novella has insisted on from the first: George does for Lennie what Carlson did for Candy’s dog, and he does it himself, because he owes Lennie the same intimate finality that Candy owed his own animal and failed to deliver.

Slim, the jerkline skinner whose authority on the ranch is never questioned, is the only witness who understands.

You hadda, George. I swear you hadda. Come on with me.

The double “hadda” is not justification but recognition. Slim knows what George has done is both murder and mercy, and he knows the world of the ranch cannot parse that contradiction. Curley and Carlson stand baffled, unable to comprehend why two men would be grieving, and the book ends with George and Slim walking toward the highway for a drink while the heron’s kill watches them from the shallows. The indifference of the closing image is the novella’s final verdict: the men’s tragedy is natural, foreordained, and invisible to the social order that produced it.

Placing Of Mice and Men within its intellectual lineage is an exercise in watching Steinbeck work inside a tradition while quietly bending its joints. The book belongs unmistakably to the naturalist current in American realism, where character is shaped—and crushed—by economic forces and biological inheritance. Lennie’s disability is not a psychological condition but a brute material fact; his immense strength and childlike mind are what the narrative machinery needs to produce disaster, and Steinbeck treats them with the same impassive eye a naturalist would bring to a drought or a rockslide. The ranch is drawn with the granular detail of Depression-era social realism, from the bunkhouse apple-box shelves to the dollar amounts that make the dream seem tantalizingly close. And the whole edifice is framed as a pastoral tragedy, announced by the Burns epigraph about “the best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley,” which promises a tale of thwarted intention before a single character speaks.

But Steinbeck’s distinctive move is something the canonical vocabulary strains to capture. His non-teleological habit, shaped by his work with marine biologist Ed Ricketts, leads him to observe the ranch hands as a small animal population—a phalanx, to borrow his term—whose group dynamics are more important than any individual psychology. George and Lennie function as a composite organism: the brain and the body, the planner and the force, and when the body is destroyed the brain loses its organizing purpose. The Jeffersonian agrarian myth of the self-sufficient small landholder, which hovers behind the dream like a cultural memory, is invoked not as a viable alternative but as a thing that can only be remembered and mourned. Crooks’s copy of the 1905 California civil code stands as the bitterest irony in the book, a legal artifact that proclaims rights while the social order denies him the standing to exercise them—a cross-reference to a state that has written laws it will not enforce for a man of his color. Steinbeck’s novella is, in this sense, an anti-pastoral: the land is there, the labor is available, and the combination should yield Jeffersonian dignity, but the structural facts of class, race, disability, and gender guarantee that the promise stays exactly where Crooks says it stays—in the head.

The book’s weaknesses are inseparable from its strengths. Steinbeck’s characters often read less like rounded individuals than embodied social positions—Curley is pugnacious insecurity, Curley’s wife is stifled longing, Crooks is articulate bitterness—and the female lead is never given a name, a choice that underlines her objectification while also flattening her into a caution. The California civil code in Crooks’s room gestures toward a legal world the narrative never fully engages, and the hermetic structure leaves almost no room for contingency or resistance. The tragedy feels so inevitable that readers may feel the book is not observing a world but constructing a syllogism. But that is precisely the aesthetic bargain naturalism makes: it trades the messiness of human agency for the terrible clarity of a closed system. Steinbeck’s system shows us that tenderness without power is lethal, that hope without social footing is an anesthetic, and that the kindest thing one man can do for another is to take responsibility for the killing the world will otherwise do badly. The novella earns its darkness by refusing to let the dream die easily. It insists, instead, that the dream mattered—so much that its death requires a bullet, and so much that the man who fires it will spend the rest of his life walking away from the one person who made him different from every other lonely man.