Of Mice and Men Literature Ladder
The Dream
'Well,' said George, 'we'll have a big vegetable patch and a rabbit hutch and chickens.
And when it rains in the winter, we'll just say the hell with goin' to work, and we'll build
up a fire in the stove and set around it an' listen to the rain comin' down on the roof...'"
Chapter 1, pg. 14-15.
"I could build a smoke house like the one gran'pa had... We could live offa the fatta the
lan'." Chapter 3, pg. 57.
"An' we'd keep a few pigeons to go flyin' around the win'mill like they done when I was a
kid." Chapter 3, pg. 58.
Steinbeck’s Life:
http://www.steinbeck.sjsu.edu/biography/briefbiography.jsp
I. Link the biography to the text:
Choose any four of the highlighted sections in this brief biography and discuss, in several
paragraphs for each of the four, the relevance of the section you chose in terms of the themes,
characters, or major ideas in the novel Of Mice and Men.
John Steinbeck, American Writer
by Dr. Susan Shillinglaw
John Steinbeck was born in the farming town of Salinas, California on 1902 February 27. His father, John Ernst
Steinbeck, was not a terribly successful man; at one time or another he was the manager of a Sperry flour plant,
the owner of a feed and grain store, the treasurer of Monterey County. His mother, the strong-willed Olive
Hamilton Steinbeck, was a former teacher. As a child growing up in the fertile Salinas Valley--called the "Salad
Bowl of the Nation"--Steinbeck formed a deep appreciation of his environment, not only the rich fields and hills
surrounding Salinas, but also the nearby Pacific coast where his family spent summer weekends. "I remember
my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers," he wrote in the opening chapter of East of Eden. I
remember where a toad may live and what time the birds awaken in the summer-and what trees and seasons
smelled like."
The observant, shy but often mischievous only son had, for the most part, a happy childhood growing up with two
older sisters, Beth and Esther, and a much-adored younger sister, Mary. Never wealthy, the family was nonetheless
prominent in the small town of 3 000, for both parents engaged in community activities. Mr. Steinbeck was a Mason,
Mrs. Steinbeck a member of the Order of the Eastern Star and founder of The Wanderers, a women's club that
traveled vicariously through monthly reports. While the elder Steinbeck’s established their identities by sending roots
deep in the community, their son was something of a rebel. Respectable Salinas circumscribed the restless and
imaginative young John Steinbeck and he defined himself against "Salinas thinking." At age fourteen he decided to
be a writer and spent hours as a teenager living in a world of his own making, writing stories and poems in his
upstairs bedroom.
To please his parents he enrolled at Stanford University in 1919; to please himself he signed on only for those
courses that interested him: classical and British literature, writing courses, and a smattering of science. The
President of the English Club said that Steinbeck, who regularly attended meetings to read his stories aloud, "had no
other interests or talents that I could make out. He was a writer, but he was that and nothing else" (Benson 69).
Writing was, indeed, his passion, not only during the Stanford years but throughout his life. From 1919 to 1925, when
he finally left Stanford without taking a degree, Steinbeck dropped in and out of the University, sometimes to work
closely with migrants and bindlestiffs on California ranches. Those relationships, coupled with an early sympathy for
the weak and defenseless, deepened his empathy for workers, the disenfranchised, the lonely and dislocated, an
empathy that is characteristic in his work.
After leaving Stanford, he briefly tried construction work and newspaper reporting in New York City, and then returned
to his native state in order to hone his craft. In the late 1920s, during a three-year stint as a caretaker for a Lake
Tahoe estate, he wrote several drafts of his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929) about the pirate Henry Morgan, and met
the woman who would become his first wife, Carol Henning, a San Jose native. After their marriage in 1930, he and
Carol settled, rent-free, into the Steinbeck family's summer cottage in Pacific Grove, she to search for jobs to
support them, he to continue writing. During the decade of the 1930s Steinbeck wrote most of his best California
fiction: The Pastures of Heaven (1932), To a God Unknown (1933), The Long Valley (1938), Tortilla Flat (1935), In
Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939).
To a God Unknown, second written and third published, tells of patriarch Joseph Wayne's domination of and
obsession with the land. Mystical and powerful, the novel testifies to Steinbeck's awareness of an essential bond
between humans and the environments they inhabit. In a journal entry kept while working on this novel - a practice he
continued all his life - the young author wrote: "the trees and the muscled mountains are the world - but not the world
apart from man - the world and man - the one inseparable unit man and his environment. Why they should ever have
been understood as being separate I do not know." His conviction that characters must be seen in the context of their
environments remained constant throughout his career. His was not a man-dominated universe, but an interrelated
whole, where species and the environment were seen to interact, where commensal bonds between people, among
families, with nature were acknowledged. By 1933, Steinbeck had found his terrain; had chiseled a prose style that
was more naturalistic, and far less strained than in his earliest novels; and had claimed his people - not the
respectable, smug Salinas burghers, but those on the edges of polite society. Steinbeck's California fiction, from To a
God Unknown to East of Eden (1952) envisions the dreams and defeats of common people shaped by the
environments they inhabit.
Undoubtedly his ecological, holistic vision was determined both by his early years roaming the Salinas hills and by his
long and deep friendship with the remarkable Edward Flanders Ricketts, a marine biologist. Founder of Pacific
Biological Laboratories, a marine lab eventually housed on Cannery Row in Monterey, Ed was a careful observer
of inter-tidal life: "I grew to depend on his knowledge and on his patience in research," Steinbeck writes in "About Ed
Ricketts," an essay composed after his friend's death in 1948 and published with The Log from the Sea of Cortez
(1951). Ed Ricketts's influence on Steinbeck, however, struck far deeper than the common chord of detached
observation. Ed was a lover of Gregorian chants and Bach; Spengler and Krishnamurti; Whitman and Li Po. His
mind "knew no horizons," writes Steinbeck. In addition, Ricketts was remarkable for a quality of acceptance; he
accepted people as they were and he embraced life as he found it. This quality he called non-teleological or "is"
thinking, a perspective that Steinbeck also assumed in much of his fiction during the 1930s. He wrote with a
"detached quality," simply recording what "is."
The working title for Of Mice and Men, for example, was "Something That Happened "- this is simply the way life is.
Furthermore, in most of his fiction Steinbeck includes a "Doc" figure, a wise observer of life who epitomizes the
idealized stance of the non-teleological thinker: Doc Burton in In Dubious Battle, Slim in Of Mice and Men, Casy in
The Grapes of Wrath, Lee in East of Eden, and of course "Doc" himself in Cannery Row (1945) and the sequel, the
rollicking Sweet Thursday (1954). All see broadly and truly and empathetically. Ed Ricketts, patient and thoughtful, a
poet and a scientist, helped ground the author's ideas. He was Steinbeck's mentor, his alter ego, and his soul mate.
Considering the depth of his eighteen-year friendship with Ricketts, it is hardly surprising that the bond acknowledged
most frequently in Steinbeck's oeuvre is friendship between and among men.
Steinbeck's writing style as well as his social consciousness of the 1930s was also shaped by an equally compelling
figure in his life, his wife Carol. She helped edit his prose, urged him to cut the Latinate phrases, typed his
manuscripts, suggested titles, and offered ways to restructure. In 1935, having finally published his first popular
success with tales of Monterey's paisanos, Tortilla Flat, Steinbeck, goaded by Carol, attended a few meetings of
nearby Carmel's John Reed Club. Although he found the group's zealotry distasteful, he, like so many intellectuals of
the 1930s, was drawn to the communists' sympathy for the working man. Farm workers in California suffered. He set
out to write a "biography of a strikebreaker," but from his interviews with a hounded organizer hiding out in nearby
Seaside, he turned from biography to fiction, writing one of the best strike novels of the 1900s, In Dubious Battle.
Never a partisan novel, it dissects with a steady hand both the ruthlessness of the strike organizers and the
rapaciousness of the greedy landowners. What the author sees as dubious about the struggle between organizers
and farmers is not who will win but how profound is the effect on the workers trapped in between, manipulated by
both interests.
At the height of his powers, Steinbeck followed this large canvas with two books that round-out what might be called
his labor trilogy. The tightly-focused Of Mice and Men was one of the first in a long line of "experiments," a word he
often used to identify a forthcoming project. This "play-novelette," intended to be both a novella and a script for a
play, is a tightly-drafted study of bindlestiffs through whose dreams he wanted to represent the universal longings for
a home. Both the text and the critically-acclaimed 1937 Broadway play (which won the 1937-1938 New York Drama
Critics' Circle Award for best play) made Steinbeck a household name, assuring his popularity and, for some, his
infamy. His next novel intensified popular debate about Steinbeck's gritty subjects, his uncompromising sympathy for
the disenfranchised, and his "crass" language.
The Grapes of Wrath sold out an advance edition of 19 804 by 1939 mid-April; was selling 10 000 copies per week
by early May; and had won the Pulitzer Prize for the year (1940). Published at the apex of the Depression, the book
about dispossessed farmers captured the decade's angst as well as the nation's legacy of fierce individualism,
visionary prosperity, and determined westward movement. It was, like the best of Steinbeck's novels, informed in part
by documentary zeal, in part by Steinbeck's ability to trace mythic and biblical patterns. Lauded by critics nationwide
for its scope and intensity, The Grapes of Wrath attracted an equally vociferous minority opinion. Oklahoma
congressman Lyle Boren said that the dispossessed Joad's story was a "dirty, lying, filthy manuscript.". Californians
claimed the novel was a scourge on the state's munificence, and an indignant Kern County, its migrant population
burgeoning, banned the book well into the 1939-1945 war. The righteous attacked the book's language or its crass
gestures: Granpa's struggle to keep his fly buttoned was not, it seemed to some, fit for print. The Grapes of Wrath
was a cause célèbre.
The author abandoned the field, exhausted from two years of research trips and personal commitment to the
migrants' woes, from the five-month push to write the final version, from a deteriorating marriage to Carol, and from
an unnamed physical malady. He retreated to Ed Ricketts and science, announcing his intention to study seriously
marine biology and to plan a collecting trip to the Sea of Cortez. The text Steinbeck and Ricketts published in 1941,
Sea of Cortez (reissued in 1951 without Ed Ricketts's catalogue of species as The Log from the Sea of Cortez),
tells the story of that expedition. It does more, however. The Log portion that Steinbeck wrote (from Ed's notes) in
1940 - at the same time working on a film in Mexico, The Forgotten Village - contains his and Ed's philosophical
musings, his ecological perspective, as well as keen observations on Mexican peasantry, hermit crabs, and "dryball"
scientists. Quipped New York Times critic Lewis Gannett, there is, in Sea of Cortez, more "of the whole man, John
Steinbeck, than any of his novels": Steinbeck the keen observer of life, Steinbeck the scientist, the seeker of truth, the
historian and journalist, the writer.
Steinbeck was determined to participate in the war effort, first doing patriotic work (The Moon Is Down, 1942, a playnovelette about an occupied Northern European country, and Bombs Away, 1942, a portrait of bomber trainees) and
then going overseas for the New York Herald Tribune as a war correspondent. In his war dispatches he wrote about
the neglected corners of war that many journalists missed - life at a British bomber station, the allure of Bob Hope,
the song "Lili Marlene," and a diversionary mission off the Italian coast. These columns were later collected in Once
There Was a War (1958). Immediately after returning to the States, a shattered Steinbeck wrote a nostalgic and
lively account of his days on Cannery Row, Cannery Row (1945). In 1945, however, few reviewers recognized that
the book's central metaphor, the tide pool, suggested a way to read this non-teleological novel that examined the
"specimens" who lived on Monterey's Cannery Row, the street Steinbeck knew so well.
Steinbeck often felt misunderstood by book reviewers and critics, and their barbs rankled the sensitive writer, and
would throughout his career. A book resulting from a post-war trip to the Soviet Union with Robert Capa in 1947, A
Russian Journal (1948), seemed to many superficial. Reviewers seemed doggedly either to misunderstand his
biological naturalism or to expect him to compose another strident social critique like The Grapes of Wrath.
Commonplace phrases echoed in reviews of books of the 1940s and other "experimental" books of the 1950s and
1960s: "complete departure," "unexpected." A humorous text like Cannery Row seemed fluff to many. Set in La Paz,
Mexico, The Pearl (1947), a "folk tale...a black-white story like a parable" as he wrote his agent, tells of a young man
who finds an astounding pearl, loses his freedom in protecting his wealth, and finally throws back into the sea the
cause of his woes. Reviews noted this as another slim volume by a major author of whom more was expected. The
Wayward Bus (1947), a "cosmic Bus," sputtered as well.
Steinbeck faltered both professionally and personally in the 1940s. He divorced the loyal but volatile Carol in 1943.
That same year he moved east with his second wife, Gwyndolen Conger, a lovely and talented woman nearly twenty
years his junior who ultimately came to resent his growing stature and feel that her own creativity - she was a singer had been stifled. With Gwyn, Steinbeck had two sons, Thom and John, but the marriage started falling apart shortly
after the second son's birth, ending in divorce in 1948. That same year Steinbeck was numbed by Ed Ricketts's
death. Only with concentrated work on a film script on the life of Emiliano Zapata for Elia Kazan's film Viva Zapata!
(1952) would Steinbeck gradually chart a new course. In 1949 he met and in 1950 married his third wife, Elaine
Scott, and with her he moved again to New York City, where he lived for the rest of his life. Much of the pain and
reconciliation of those late years of the 1940s were worked out in two subsequent novels: his third play-novelette
Burning Bright (1950), a boldly experimental parable about a man's acceptance of his wife's child fathered by
another man, and in the largely autobiographical work he'd contemplated since the early 1930s, East of Eden (1952).
"It is what I have been practicing to write all of my life," he wrote to painter and author Bo Beskow early in 1948,
when he first began research for a novel about his native valley and his people; three years later when he finished the
manuscript he wrote his friend again, "This is 'the book'...Always I had this book waiting to be written." With Viva
Zapata!, East of Eden, Burning Bright and later The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Steinbeck's fiction
becomes less concerned with the behavior of groups - what he called in the 1930s "group man" - and more focused
on an individual's moral responsibility to self and community. The detached perspective of the scientist gives way to a
certain warmth; the ubiquitous "self-character" that he claimed appeared in all his novels to comment and observe is
modeled less on Ed Ricketts, more on John Steinbeck himself. Certainly with his divorce from Gwyn, Steinbeck had
endured dark nights of the soul, and East of Eden contains those turbulent emotions surrounding the subject of wife,
children, family, and fatherhood. "In a sense it will be two books," he wrote in his journal (posthumously published in
1969 as Journal of a Novel: The "East of Eden" Letters) as he began the final draft in 1951, "the story of my
country and the story of me. And I shall keep these two separate." Early critics dismissed as incoherent the twostranded story of the Hamiltons, his mother's family, and the Trasks, "symbol people" representing the story of Cain
and Abel; more recently critics have come to recognize that the epic novel is an early example of metafiction,
exploring the role of the artist as creator, a concern, in fact, in many of his books.
Like The Grapes of Wrath , East of Eden is a defining point in his career. During the 1950s and 1960s the
perpetually "restless" Steinbeck traveled extensively throughout the world with his third wife, Elaine. With her, he
became more social. Perhaps his writing suffered as a result; some claim that even East of Eden , his most
ambitious post- Grapes novel, cannot stand shoulder to shoulder with his searing social novels of the 1930s. In the
fiction of his last two decades, however, Steinbeck never ceased to take risks, to stretch his conception of the novel's
structure, to experiment with the sound and form of language. Sweet Thursday , sequel to Cannery Row , was
written as a musical comedy that would resolve Ed Ricketts's loneliness by sending him off into the sunset with a
true love, Suzy, a whore with a gilded heart.
The musical version by Rodgers and Hammerstein, Pipe Dream , was one of the team's few failures. In 1957 he
published the satiric The Short Reign of Pippin IV , a tale about the French Monarchy gaining ascendancy. And in
1961, he published his last work of fiction, the ambitious The Winter of Our Discontent, a novel about contemporary
America set in a fictionalized Sag Harbor (where he and Elaine had a summer home). Increasingly disillusioned with
American greed, waste, and spongy morality - his own sons seemed textbook cases - he wrote his jeremiad, a lament
for an ailing populace. The following year, 1962, Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature; the day after
the announcement the New York Times ran an editorial by the influential Arthur Mizener, "Does a Writer with a Moral
Vision of the 1930s Deserve the Nobel Prize?" Wounded by the blindside attack, unwell, frustrated and disillusioned,
John Steinbeck wrote no more fiction.
But the writer John Steinbeck was not silenced. As always, he wrote reams of letters to his many friends and
associates. In the 1950s and 1960s he published scores of journalistic pieces: "Making of a New Yorker," "I Go Back
to Ireland," columns about the 1956 national political conventions, and "Letters to Alicia," a controversial series about
a 1966 White House-approved trip to Vietnam where his sons were stationed. In the late 1950s - and intermittently for
the rest of his life - he worked diligently on a modern English translation of a book he had loved since childhood, Sir
Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur ; the unfinished project was published posthumously as The Acts of King Arthur and
His Noble Knights (1976). Immediately after completing Winter , the ailing novelist proposed "not a little trip of
reporting," he wrote to his agent Elizabeth Otis, "but a frantic last attempt to save my life and the integrity of my
creativity pulse." In 1960, he toured America in a camper truck designed to his specifications, and on his return
published the highly praised Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962), another book that both celebrates
American individuals and decries American hypocrisy; the climax of his journey is his visit to the New Orleans
"cheerleaders" who daily taunted black children newly registered in white schools. His disenchantment with American
waste, greed, immorality and racism ran deep. His last published book, America and Americans (1966), reconsiders
the American character, the land, the racial crisis, and the seemingly crumbling morality of the American people.
In these late years, in fact since his final move to New York in 1950, many accused John Steinbeck of increasing
conservatism. True enough that with greater wealth came the chance to spend money more freely. And with status
came political opportunities that seemed out of step for a "radical" of the 1930s: he initially defended Lyndon
Johnson's views on the war with Vietnam (dying before he could, as he wished, qualify his initial responses). And true
enough that the man who spent a lifetime "whipping" his sluggard will (read Working Days: The Journals of "The
Grapes of Wrath" [1989] for biting testimony of the struggle) felt intolerance for 1960s protesters whose zeal, in his
eyes, was unfocused and whose anger was explosive, not turned to creative solutions. But it is far more accurate to
say that the author who wrote The Grapes of Wrath never retreated into conservatism.
He lived in modest houses all his life, caring little for lavish displays of power or wealth. He always preferred talking to
ordinary citizens wherever he traveled, sympathizing always with the disenfranchised. He was a Stevenson Democrat
in the 1950s. Even in the 1930s, he was never a communist, and after three trips to Russia (1937, 1947, 1963) he
hated with increasing intensity Soviet repression of the individual.
In fact, neither during his life nor after has the paradoxical Steinbeck been an easy author to pigeonhole personally,
politically, or artistically. As a man, he was an introvert and at the same time had a romantic streak, was impulsive,
garrulous, a lover of jests and word play and practical jokes. As an artist, he was a ceaseless experimenter with
words and form, and often critics did not "see" quite what he was up to. He claimed his books had "layers," yet many
claimed his symbolic touch was cumbersome. He loved humor and warmth, but some said he slopped over into
sentimentalism. He was, and is now recognized as, an environmental writer. He was an intellectual, passionately
interested in his odd little inventions, in jazz, in politics, in philosophy, history, and myth - this range from an author
sometimes labeled simplistic by academe. All said, Steinbeck remains one of America's most significant twentiethcentury writers, whose popularity spans the world, whose range is impressive, whose output was prodigious: 16
novels, a collection of short stories, 4 screenplays ( The Forgotten Village , The Red Pony , Viva Zapata! , Lifeboat ),
a sheaf of journalistic essays - including four collections ( Bombs Away , Once There Was a War , America and
Americans , The Harvest Gypsies ) - three travel narratives ( Sea of Cortez , A Russian Journal , Travels with Charley
), a translation and two published journals (more remain unpublished). Three "play-novelettes" ran on Broadway: Of
Mice and Men , The Moon Is Down , and Burning Bright , as did the musical Pipe Dream . Whatever his "experiment"
in fiction or journalistic prose, he wrote with empathy, clarity, perspicuity: "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."
II.
The Migrant Experience:
Read the information in the following links:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/afctshtml/tsme.html
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/dustbowl/peopleevents/pandeAMEX08.html
http://www.csuchico.edu/lspr/migrant/ (Particularly look at all of the pictures on this site
for a better understanding of how these workers and their families lived)
Reflect in a paragraph or two on each of three of the following quotations from Of Mice
and Men to tie back in to anything you’ve read now and understand including how
migrant workers “shared conservative religious and political beliefs and were
ethnocentric in their attitude toward other ethnic/cultural groups, with whom they had
had little contact prior to their arrival in California. Such attitudes sometimes led to the
use of derogatory language and negative stereotyping of cultural outsiders. Voices from
the Dust Bowl illustrates certain universals of human experience: the trauma of
dislocation from one's roots and homeplace; the tenacity of a community's shared culture;
and the solidarity within and friction among folk groups.”
 George stared morosely at the water. The rims of his eyes were red with sun glare. He said
angrily, “We could just as well of rode clear to the ranch if that bastard bus driver knew what he
was talkin’ about. ‘Jes’ a little stretch down the highway,” he says. ‘Jes’ a little stretch.’ God
damn near four miles, that’s what it was! Didn’t wanta stop at the ranch gate, that’s what. Too






God damn lazy to pull up. Wonder he isn’t too damn good to stop in Soledad at all. Kicks us out
and says, ‘Jes’ a little stretch down the road.’ I bet it was more than four miles. Damn hot day.”
(4)
George’s voice became deeper. He repeated his words rhythmically as though he had said them
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. (14)
“Funny how you an’ him string along together…” What’s funny about it…Oh, I dunno. Hardly
none of the guys ever travel together. I hardly never seen two guys travel together. You know
how the hands are, they just come in and get their bunk and work a month, and then they quit and
go out alone. Never seem to give a damn about nobody.” (39)
“This is just a nigger talkin’, an’ a busted-back nigger. So it don’t mean nothing, see? You
couldn’t remember it anyways. I seen it over an’ over—a guy talkin’ to another guy and it don’t
make no difference if he don’t hear or understand. The thing is, they’re talkin’, or they’re settin’
still not talkin’. It don’t make no difference, no difference.” (71)
“I seen hundreds 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 qit 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 wanats 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 the head.” (74)
Crooks, on a black man's loneliness: "S'pose you didn't have nobody. S'pose you couldn't
go into the bunk house and play rummy 'cause you was black. How'd you like that? S'pose you
had to sit out here an' read books. Sure you could play horseshoes till it got dark, but then you got
to read books. Books ain't no good. A guy needs somebody-to be near him. A guy goes nuts if he
ain't got nobody. Don't make no difference who the guy is, long's he's with you. I tell ya, I tell
ya a guy gets too lonely an' he gets sick" (80).
I could’ve hoed in the garden and washed dishes for them guys.”…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 fat little
stove…an’ the rain comin’…an’ us jus’ settin’ there.” (96)
III. Mentally Challenged Individuals in the early 1900’s:
‘George looked over at Slim and saw the calm, God-like eyes fastened on him. “Funny,” said George. “I
used to have a hell of a lot of fun with ‘im. Used to play jokes on ‘im ‘cause he was too dumb to take care
of ‘imself. But he was too dumb even to know he had a joke played on him. I had fun. Made me seem God
damn smart alongside of him. Why he’d do any damn thing I tol’ him. If I tol’ him to walk over a cliff,
over he’d go. That wasn’t so damn much fun after a while. He never got mad about it , neither. I’ve beat
the hell outa him, and he coulda bust every bone in my body jus’ with his han’s, but he never lifted a finger
against me.” George’s voice was taking on the toned of confession. “Tell you what made me stop that.
One day a bunch of guys was standin’ around up on the Sacramento River. I was feelin’ pretty smart. I
turns to Lennie and says, ‘Jump in.’ An’ he jumps. Couldn’t swim a stroke. He damn near drowned before
we could get him. An’ he was so damn nice to me for pullin’ him out. Clean forgot I told him to jump in.
Well, I ain’t done nothing like that no more.” (40)
After reading the following article, write a persuasive argument (at least two
double-spaced pages) stating what you think should have been done with a
man such as Lennie in the time period of the book when there was no money
for social services, able-bodied people were starving, and the government had
no resources if such a man’s only relative (Aunt Clara) died and there was no
George to look after him.
One of the In 1940 it was proper to refer to the “mental deficient” as the idiot, the imbecile and the
moron. A textbook titled “Psychiatry for Nurses” by Karnosh and Gage (1940) carefully instructs
the student the correct classifications that have evolved into today’s insult. Below is a direct
quote from Psychiatry of Nurses (1940 - p. 237.)
“Types of Mental Deficiency
Idiot
The idiot is one whose mental capacity is below the third-year level; they are clumsy,
awkward, untidy and require constant supervision in the performance of the simplest
requirement of living. Most idiots learn a few simple words but rarely learn to talk
intelligently.
Imbecile
The imbecile may attain a mental level of six or seven years. Imbeciles can generally talk
with a very crude vocabulary, can be taught simple manual tasks.
Moron
The moron ranges in mental accomplishment between the eighty-year level and the lower
adult normal which is ordinarily reached at about the fifteenth year. Constituting more
than 80 percent of all forms of mental defect, the morons are one of the serious problems
of modern times. Having no gross physical defects, they present themselves as a
shiftless, unstable group which gravitates to the lowest level of manual labor and social
activity. Out of this class are the recruited, the petty criminal, the prostitute, and the
ne’er-do-well.” http://www.toddlertime.com/stigma-dsm.htm
America's Deep, Dark Secret
May 2, 2004
(CBS) One of the deep, dark secrets of America's past has finally come to light. Starting in the early 1900s,
hundreds of thousands of American children were warehoused in institutions by state governments. And the
federal government did nothing to stop it.
The justification? The kids had been labeled feeble-minded, and were put away in conditions that can only
be described as unspeakable.
Now, a new book, “The State Boys Rebellion,” by Michael D'Antonio, reveals even more: A large proportion
of the kids who were locked up were not retarded at all. They were simply poor, uneducated kids with no
place to go, who ended up in institutions like the Fernald School in Waltham, Mass.
The Fernald School is the oldest institution of its kind in the country. At its peak, some 2,500 people were
confined here, most of them children. All of them were called feeble-minded, whether they were or not.
The people who ran Fernald back in the bad, old days are no longer alive, but many of the victims still are -victims like Fred Boyce, who was locked up there for 11 years. He came back to Fernald with
Correspondent Bob Simon.
”We thought for a long time that we belonged there, that we were not part of the species. We thought we
were some kind of, you know, people that wasn't supposed to be born,” says Boyce.
And that was precisely the idea.
The Fernald School, and others like it, was part of a popular American movement in the early 20th century
called the Eugenics movement. The idea was to separate people considered to be genetically inferior from
the rest of society, to prevent them from reproducing.
Eugenics is usually associated with Nazi Germany, but in fact, it started in America. Not only that, it
continued here long after Hitler's Germany was in ruins.
At the height of the movement - in the ‘20s and ‘30s - exhibits were set up at fairs to teach people about
eugenics. It was good for America, and good for the human race. That was the message.
But author Michael D'Antonio says it wasn't just a movement. It was government policy. “People were told,
we can be rid of all disease, we can lower the crime rate, we can increase the wealth of our nation, if we
only keep certain people from having babies,” says D’Antonio.
He says back then, schools tested children regularly, and those classified as feeble-minded got a one-way
ticket to Fernald -- or to one of the more than 100 institutions like it.
“Idiot, imbecile, and moron were all medical terms. They were used to define various levels of retardation or
disability. Moron was coined to describe children who were almost normal,” says D’Antonio. “I would
estimate that at least 50 percent would function in today’s world well.”
Fred Boyce was just 8 years old in 1949 when his foster mother died, and the State of Massachusetts
committed him to Fernald.
Boyce's records from Fernald show they labeled him as a "moron", even though tests showed his
intelligence was within the normal range, not bad for a boy with no education at all. He was kept there for 11
years.
Boyce says he thinks the state recommended that he come to Fernald because it was the easy way out:
“They didn’t have to look for homes for you, so they could just dump you off in these human warehouses
and just let you rot, you know. That's what they did. They let us rot.”
Most of the school is closed now, including Boyce's old dorms, which will be torn down soon. Approximately
36 children slept in each room, with the beds jammed together. And the children received little education
and less affection.
Regimentation? There was no shortage of that. And how long would they stay at Fernald? The kids were
told they could be here for life, that there was no exit.
“I kinda thought for a while, maybe there was something wrong with me, or why would I be here,” says Joe
Almeida, who was swept up into the system even though there was nothing wrong with him.
Almeida, an abused child, was only 8 when his father took him for a drive to the Fernald School, and told
him to wait in the hallway.
“I said, ‘Wait a minute, dad. Where are you going,’” recalls Almeida. “He goes, ‘Oh, you wait right there. I
gotta go get the car." And he went. And that was the last I seen of him.”
Almeida had no idea where he was, and no idea that he now wore an invisible label, which read "moron." He
ended up in the same dorm as Boyce, and they spent their mornings in the “schoolroom.” At least, that's
what the room was called.
“It was a school in name only. A child would experience the first year of school 5 or 6 times in a row,” says
D’Antonio. “He would read the same ‘Dick and Jane’ reader, and never make any progress because the
school wasn't equipped to actually educate children. It was there as a sort of holding pen.”
The children did most of the manual labor at the school.
“The kids at Fernald raised the vegetables that they ate. They sewed the soles on the shoes that they wore.
They manufactured the brooms that they used to sweep the floor,” says D’Antonio, who adds that the school
made sure that at least 30 percent of the kids admitted had normal or near normal intelligence.
The school needed those kids to work. “You had to have somebody with a certain level of intelligence in
order to run this place,” says Boyce. “And I can remember being out in the gardens from morning until night
in the sun.”
Almeida, however, had an unusual job, and the fruits of his labor are still there 50 years later. His job was to
cut up the brains of severely retarded people who had died at Fernald. He cut them into thin slices so
scientists could study them. Nothing ever came of the research, but the bits of brains are still there.
"They're still sitting here years later,” says Almeida. “I mean, what was it all for?"
Worse than the work, says Almeida, was the abuse he suffered from the attendants who staffed the place. It
was called “Red Cherry Day,” and the kids would sit in a circle and be called up alphabetically.
“And lucky me, my name is what? Almeida. You’d get up in front of all these kids, and you would pull down
your pants,” recalls Almeida. “You’d pull down your underpants and they’d make you turn around and they'd
whack your ass with this branch until it was red like a cherry.”
Almeida says few of the attendants showed any kindness, and some of them should have been
institutionalized themselves: “These people were sick that worked here.”
And of course, there was sexual abuse. The place was tailor made for it.
As the boys grew older, many rebelled, often by running away. They always got caught.
Boyce showed Simon what happened then. The kids were taken to the infamous Ward 22, the school's
detention center.
"Couldn't escape, you know, this was the prison," says Fred, who was locked up in solitary confinement
here. “And they had a little mattress on the floor there.”
As a further humiliation, kids were stripped naked. Back then, the windows had bars. “You’re just this child,
and you're in this cell because you ran away,” says Boyce. “And you ran away for reasons of abuse and
thinking that you don't belong here. You wanna have a life outside.”
Boyce finally got that life in 1960, when he was 19. Eugenics was no longer politically acceptable in
America, and Fernald started releasing people. The problem was, there weren't a lot of jobs around for
alumni of a school for the feeble-minded.
Boyce joined the carnival circuit, traveling around the country, mixing with people who didn't need to see
diplomas – surrounded by reminders of what his childhood could have been.
“I see these happy families, you know, and I see how much they love their kids. And I think, you know, 'I can
never have that,'” says Boyce.
What would their lives have been like, if they hadn’t been sent to Fernald?
“The one thing I can imagine is that their lives would have had a lot more love in them. I've had men tell me,
‘I never saw a man or woman who loved each other growing up. I never saw family life. And it's been
impossible for me to find it as an adult,’” says D’Antonio. “That's the part that gets me most upset, is they
were denied the human relations that sustain all of us.”
Almeida got out of Fernald the same year as Boyce, but when he hit his 40s, he found himself drawn back to
the place. It was the only home he'd ever really known.
But Fernald had changed, and only the seriously handicapped were living there now. So Almeida applied for
a job and worked there as a driver for 20 years. He retired last year.
“I always felt like they owed me. I always felt that they owed me, because they took the most important thing
of my life away,” says Almeida. “They took away my childhood and my education. The two things that you
need in life to make it, they took from me.”
And that's not all. More than 30 years after Boyce and Almeida were released, they found out that the school
had allowed them to be used as human guinea pigs.
In 1994 Senate hearings, it came out that scientists from MIT had been giving radioactive oatmeal to the
boys - men now - in a nutrition study for Quaker Oats. All they knew is that they'd been asked to join a
science club.
Among those who attended the hearing was Almeida, also a member of the club. He says the boys were
recruited with special treats: “We were getting special treatment, you know, extra dessert, we got to eat
away from the other boys. We were getting extra oatmeal. We're getting extra milk.”
“But they forgot to mention the milk was radioactive,” says David White-Lief, an attorney who worked on the
state task force investigating the science club.
He says he was outraged that the children were exploited without their knowledge. “It’s my contention, and it
was my contention on the task force, that these experiments, because of the lack of informed consent,
violated the Nuremburg Code established just 10 years earlier,” says White-Lief. “The lesson of Nazi
Germany was we don't do experiments on people without informed consent. They didn't use the word
"informed consent" - without knowing consent.”
Boyce, also in the science club, got a group of members together and they sued. Each received
approximately $60,000 in compensation from MIT, Quaker Oats and the government.
But Boyce and Almeida never got what they really wanted: an apology for sending them to Fernald and
calling them morons, a label that remains on their state records to this day.
Boyce, who is 63, says he has never received an apology from the State of Massachusetts or from any
agency at all. What stays with him the most, says Almeida, is being labeled a moron, and “never getting to
know what I could have been.”
Today, kids like Fred Boyce and Joe Almeida are placed in foster homes and attend public schools. The
dark era of institutionalization ended in the ‘70s at Fernald. Since then, it's become a home for mentally and
physically handicapped adults, and it’s about to be closed down forever.
The publisher of the book, "The State Boys Rebellion," is Simon and Schuster. Both Simon and Schuster
and CBSNEWS are units of Viacom.
© MMIV, CBS Worldwide Inc. All Rights Reserved.
IV. Respond to the original New York Times Book Review:
John Steinbeck’s Tale of Drifting Men
By Fred T. Marsh
NYT Feb 28, 1937
John Steinbeck is no mere virtuoso in the art of story telling; but he is one.
Whether he writes about the amiable outcasts of “Tortilla Flats” or about the grim strikers
of in “Dubious Battle,” he tells a story. “Of Mice and Men” is a thriller, a gripping tale
running to novelette length that you will not set down until it is finished. It is more than
that; but it is that.
George and Lennie belong to the floating army of drifting ranch hands. “Guys
like us, George says, “are the loneliest guys in the world. They got no family. They
don’t belong no place. They come to a ranch and 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. These two buddies appear as
strange newcomers and cause comment at the new ranch. George is small, dark, wiry,
restless and keen-witted. Lennie is a huge, hulking man with an expressionless face,
pale blue eyes, and wide, sloping shoulders, walking blearily, “dragging his feet a little,
the way a bear drags his paws.” He is stupid, but well-meaning. George and Lennie
come from the same southern town and George has taken it on himself to take care of the
big fellow. Sometimes he wishes he were free of him. He’s get ahead much faster.
Lennie is always getting them into trouble like the time he wanted to stroke the pretty red
skirt of the girl on the last ranch, and in his dumb strength, tore it off of her. They had to
run away again to keep Lennie out of jail. The baby boy in the big man’s body has baby
urges—to stroke, pet, and fondle animals—all soft and pretty things—and he kills or
destroys them, unaware of his strength. But when George is around, he is all right, for he
obeys George implicitly.
George is a keen thinking man. There is nothing in this knocking about. If only
he and Lennie could get together $600 he knows of a little place with a few acres they
could buy and settle down to work for themselves. If only Lennie could be kept out of
trouble. And so he keeps drumming it into Lennie’s head that he must be good and not
do bad things. Then they can get a take together and live on the fat of the land in a place
of their own. They’ll grow their own stuff, keep a few pigs and chickens and raise
rabbits; Lennie can take charge of the rabbits and have all of the pets he wants. The big
fellow never grows tired of hearing this story just like a child likes to hear a tale told over
and over again. And at the new ranch, the way things are shaping up, the dream seems to
be on the point of coming true.
The tension increases and the apparently casual acts and conversation
nevertheless fit together to create suspense in an atmosphere of impending doom. There
are troublemakers in the bunkhouse. Curley, the boss’s son, a little fellow handy with his
fists, likes to take on big clumsy fellows, pick fights with them. He wins no matter how
the fight comes out, because if he licks the big fellow everyone says how game he is, and
if he gets the worst of it, everyone turns on the big fellow for not taking someone his own
size. Then Curley’s wife, a lush beauty, is always coming around where the men are and
giving all the men the eye and, because, being a town girl, she is bored on the ranch, bent
on stirring up excitement. The other boys know how to keep out of trouble. But Lennie
only knows what George tells him when George is right there on the spot. The girl spots
Lennie as the only soft guy in the bunch. The climax comes, not as a shock, but as a
dreaded inevitability.
The theme is not, as the title would suggest, that the best laid plans of mice and
men gang aft agley (Scottish for “go oft awry”—Dr. S) They do in this story as in others.
But it is a play on the immemorial theme of what men live by besides bread alone.
In sure, raucous, vulgar Americanism, Steinbeck has touched the quick in his little
story.
Respond to the final line of this book review—how, in your understanding, does this
novella suggest that “men live by besides bread alone?” What is the “quick,” or the
essence, that Steinbeck has touched in this book?
V. Short Essay Questions:
Choose one of the following questions to develop into an informal essay: (See example
below for approximately length) or as an alternative, rent the 1992 movie “Of Mice and
Men” starring John Malkovich and Gary Sinise and either compare the book to the movie
or write a review of the movie rating it 1-10 in terms of how successful you feel that it is
as an adaptation of the novel.
QUESTION: When all the other ranch hands go to town, Lennie, Candy and
Crooks are left behind. Describe what each of these three does after the
others leave, and explain what they have in common that causes them to
be left out.
A plan of the proposed essay follows.
Essay Plan
Para. 1. Lennie - goes to pet his puppy in the barn, then enters Crooks' room
Para. 2. Candy - 'figuring' about, the dream farm, joins Lennie in Crooks' room
Para. 3. Crooks - rubbing liniment on his back, hostile to Lennie at first, joins in
'dream' of farm
Para. 4. All three are upset by Curley's wife
Para. 5. In Common - all are handicapped/crippled - not just physically
Possible Response:
When the other hands leave to go to town, Lennie goes to the barn to pet
the puppy which Slim has given him. The puppy is still only one or two days old,
and Lennie has been told not to pat it too much, but he can't resist going to see it
at this time. After seeing his puppy, Lennie notices the light on in Crooks' room,
and goes in. At first Crooks is hostile and tells him he has 'no business being
there', but is reassured that Lennie is harmless when he says he just wants to
'set'.
Meanwhile, Candy is still in the bunkhouse, thinking and 'figuring'. Shortly
before, George and Lennie have shared with him their dream of buying a little
farm. Candy has offered to add in his savings, which may make the purchase
possible. Excited by this prospect of a release from his boring existence, Candy
is busy poring over some of the details of the new scheme. After some time, he
comes into the barn looking for Lennie, and also ends up in Crooks' room, the
first time he has ever been there.
Until Lennie and Candy arrived, Crooks had been having a very quiet
time, rubbing liniment on his injured back. When Lennie arrives, Crooks
speculates on why he and George travel around together. Then he taunts Lennie
with the possibility that George may not return from town. At first Crooks makes
fun of Lennie's wild plans for buying a farm, but after Candy arrives and confirms
the details, he too becomes excited by the scheme and offers to join in.
Later, Curley's wife comes into the room on the excuse of looking for her
husband. The three men unite against her, but she insults them and threatens
Crooks with accusing him of molesting her before she leaves.
Each of the three men who are left behind is handicapped in some way.
Curley's wife comments that '... they left all the weak ones here.' Crooks, of
course, is a physical cripple, but he is also black. It would not have been possible
for him to mix with the other hands, even if he was physically fit.
Candy is also physically handicapped, having lost his hand in an accident
on the ranch. He is also an old man, and has already admitted to George and
Lennie that he: ain't got the poop no more.
Lennie is the only one of the three who is not physically handicapped
(unless you consider his giant size and strength a handicap), but he is mentally
backward. He has been left behind because he cannot be relied upon to behave
appropriately in town. So, each of the three has at least one disability that leaves
him lonely, vulnerable, and afraid.
1. George and Lennie are obviously committed to each other, yet they often criticize
each other or threaten to leave. Examine the negative aspects of this relationship, and
then consider why they stay together in spite of all of this. Contrast the language of
each, their threats and complaints, with what they really feel. What is it that so
strongly binds these two together?
2. Death is the culminating event in the novel, but the killing of Curley’s wife is
regarded with a lack of emotion by the characters, even less than the killing of the
puppy or the shooting of Candy’s dog earlier in the book. Why do you think this is
so? Why is the moral issue of her murder, the question of right and wrong, never
really an issue when Curley’s wife’s body is discovered by the men?
3. When George shoots Lennie, is this a sign of the strength of his love or the weakness
of his love for Lennie? Has he finally followed through on the threat to abandon
Lennie? Why does he shoot Lennie in the middle of their imagining the farm one last
time? Was this the right thing for George to do, his only real choice or not?
4. Trace the parallels that are developed between Candy and his dog and George and his
companion. Consider the amount of time they have spent together, the way they view
the limitations of their companions, the way they defend their companions, and any
other points of similarity you see. In what ways does the killing of Candy’s dog
foreshadow Lennie’s death?
5. Several characters have suggested a need to have a companion or just a person who
will listen. What evidence is given that this is a strong desire of many of the
characters? Consider, too, the effect that having a companion gives to Candy and
Crooks as they confront Curley’s wife.
6. Which character do you feel most sorry for in this story? Explain your choice by
referring closely to the events of the novel. Would this character find you empathetic
in your feelings, or patronizing? In other words, would this character want your pity?
7. Slim is the only character in the novel who is not handicapped in some way. Do you
agree?
VI. Respond to Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech:
John Steinbeck
Nobel Prize Speech - 1962
I thank the Swedish Academy for finding my work worthy of this highest honor. In my heart there may be
doubt that I deserve the Nobel Award over other men of letters whom I hold in respect or reverence - but
there is no question of my pleasure and pride in having it for myself.
It is customary for the recipient of this award to offer scholarly or personal comment on the nature and
direction of literature. However, I think it would be well at this particular time to consider the high duties and
responsibilities of the makers of literature.
Such is the prestige of the Nobel Award and of this place where I stand that I am impelled, not to speak like
a grateful and apologetic mouse, but to roar like a lion out of pride in my profession and in the great and
good men who have practiced it through the ages.
Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty
churches - nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tin-horn mendicants of low-calorie despair. Literature
is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it and it has not changed except to become more
needed. The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their
functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species.
Humanity has been passing through a gray and desolate time of confusion. My great predecessor, William
Faulkner, speaking here, referred to it as a tragedy of universal physical fear, so long sustained that there
were no longer problems of the spirit, so that only the human heart in conflict with itself seemed worth
writing about. Faulkner, more than most men, was aware of human strength as well as of human weakness.
He knew that the understanding and the resolution of fear are a large part of the writer's reason for being.
This is not new. The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our
many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the
purpose of improvement.
Furthermore, the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart
and spirit - for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness
and despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and of emulation. I hold that a writer who does not
passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.
The present universal fear has been the result of a forward surge in our knowledge and manipulation of
certain dangerous factors in the physical world. It is true that other phases of understanding have not yet
caught up with this great step, but there is no reason to presume that they cannot or will not draw abreast.
Indeed, it is part of the writer's responsibility to make sure that they do.
With humanity's long, proud history of standing firm against all of its natural enemies, sometimes in the face
of almost certain defeat and extinction, we would be cowardly and stupid to leave the field on the eve of our
greatest potential victory.
Understandably, I have been reading the life of Alfred Nobel; a solitary man, the books say, a thoughtful
man. He perfected the release of explosive forces capable of creative good or of destructive evil, but lacking
choice, ungoverned by conscience or judgment.
Nobel saw some of the cruel and bloody misuses of his inventions. He may have even foreseen the end
result of all his probing--access to ultimate violence, to final destruction. Some say that he became cynical,
but I do not believe this. I think he strove to invent a control--a safety valve. I think he found it finally only in
the human mind and the human spirit.
To me, his thinking is clearly indicated in the categories of these awards. They are offered for increased and
continuing knowledge of man and of his world - for understanding and communication, which are the
functions of literature. And they are offered for demonstrations of the capacity for peace - the culmination of
all the others.
Less than fifty years after his death, the door of nature was unlocked and we were offered the dreadful
burden of choice. We have usurped many of the powers we once ascribed to God. Fearful and unprepared,
we have assumed lordship over the life and death of the whole world of all living things. The danger and the
glory and the choice rest finally in man. The test of his perfectibility is at hand.
Having taken God-like power, we must seek in ourselves for the responsibility and the wisdom we once
prayed some deity might have. Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only hope. So that
today, saint John the Apostle may well be paraphrased: In the end is the word, and the word is man, and the
word is with man.

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Why do we need a book such as “Of Mice and Men?”
Which “human heart” in this novel is most “in conflict with itself?”
What dreams in this book are “dark and dangerous?”
Having carefully read “Of Mice and Men,” what do you understand that you
didn’t before, what has Steinbeck communicated to you that you can articulate,
that has, in some fashion, affected you, changed you?
VII. Criticism
After you read this overview of the critical reaction to “Of Mice and Men,” and after you
read the essay by R. Moore, please respond to the five questions at the end of this section
as your final assignment for this literature ladder.
Of Mice and Men | Critical Overview
The critical reception of Of Mice and Men was the most positive that had greeted any of
Steinbeck's works up to that time. The novel was chosen as a Book of the Month Club
selection before it was published, and 117,000 copies were sold in advance of the official
publication date of February 25,1937. In early April, the book appeared on best-seller
lists across the country and continued to be among the top ten best-sellers throughout the
year. Praise for the novel came from many notable critics, including Christopher Morley,
Carl Van Vechten, Lewis Gannett, Harry Hansen, Heywood Broun, and even from First
Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Henry Seidel wrote in the Saturday Review of Literature that
"there has been nothing quite so good of the kind in American writing since Sherwood
Anderson's early stories." New York Times critic Ralph Thompson described the novel as
a "grand little book, for all its ultimate melodrama."
At the time of the book's publication, critical reaction was mostly positive, although at
the end of the 1930s, after Steinbeck had written The Grapes of Wrath, there was some
reevaluation of Steinbeck's earlier work. Some critics complained that Of Mice and Men
was marred by sentimentality. Other critics faulted Steinbeck for his portrayal of poor,
earthy characters. When Steinbeck won the Pulitzer Prize for The Grapes of Wrath, one
of his strongest critics, Arthur Mizener, condemned Steinbeck's receipt of the award,
faulted the author for his love of primitive characters, and criticized his sentimentality. In
1947, an article by Donald Weeks criticized Steinbeck both for sentimentality and for the
crude lives of his characters. Obviously, Steinbeck caused problems for many reviewers
and critics, who wrote contradictory attacks on the novelist, alternately blasting him as
too sentimental and too earthy and realistic for their tastes.
In addition, Steinbeck had written three novels about migrant labor in California by the
end of the 1930s. Many critics at the time dismissed these novels as communist or leftist
propaganda. In fact, Steinbeck's work has often been discussed in sociological, rather
than literary, terms. This is unfortunate because it misses the author's intentions:
whatever politics or sociology are contained in Steinbeck's works are minor elements in
novels of great literary merit. After the 1930s, there were several decades of what can
only be described as a critical trashing of Steinbeck's work. When the author was
awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, very few critics praised the choice. Many
publications neglected to even cover the event. Writing in the New York Times, Arthur
Mizener attacked Steinbeck in an article entitled, "Does a Moral Vision of the Thirties
Deserve a Nobel Prize?" The article was published just before the Nobel Prize was
presented to Steinbeck in Sweden. The article stated: "After The Grapes of Wrath at the
end of the thirties, most serious readers seem to have ceased to read him " He went on to
state that the Nobel Committee had made a mistake by bestowing the award on a writer
whose "limited talent is, in his best books, watered down by tenth-rate philosophizing."
Most of the critical opinion at the time was that Steinbeck's career had seriously declined
since 1939. Time and Newsweek did not write favorably of the Nobel Prize to Steinbeck.
An editorial in the New York Times went so far as to question the process of selection for
the award: "The award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to John Steinbeck will focus
attention once again on a writer who, though still in full career, produced his major work
more than two decades ago. The award will bring back the vivid memory of the earlier
books: the . . . anger and compassion of The Grapes of Wrath, a book that occupies a
secure place as a document of protest. Yet the international character of the award and the
weight attached to it raise questions about the mechanics of selection and how close the
Nobel committee is to the main currents of American writing. Without detracting in the
least, from Mr. Steinbeck's accomplishments, we think it interesting that the laurel was
not awarded to a writer—perhaps a poet or critic or historian—whose significance,
influence and sheer body of work had already made a more profound impression on the
literature of our age."
The irony was that Steinbeck's books were still widely read at that time, long after many
of Steinbeck's contemporaries from the 1930s had been forgotten. Some critics have
written that Of Mice and Men is one of Steinbeck's most pessimistic works. In spite of
this, Steinbeck scholar Louis Owens wrote that "it is nonetheless possible to read Of Mice
and Men in a more optimistic light than has been customary. In previous works, we have
seen a pattern established in which the Steinbeck hero achieves greatness." Recent
criticism, beginning in the 1980s, has acknowledged that Steinbeck's best work is
timeless at its deepest level. There are questions about existence and not merely the
Depression era's political agenda. Was Steinbeck a sentimentalist, or a political
ideologue, or an earthy primitive? Steinbeck himself understood that the wide range of
criticism of his works reflected the mindset of the individual critics. He said that many
critics were "special pleaders who use my work as a distorted echo chamber for their own
ideas." Jackson Benson, a Steinbeck scholar and author of The True Adventures of John
Steinbeck, Writer, wrote that "what saved Steinbeck from constant excess was a
compassion that was, in much of his writing, balanced and disciplined by a very objective
view of the world and of man." Sixty years after its publication, Of Mice and Men is a
classic of American literature read by high school and college students across the United
States. It has been translated into a dozen foreign languages. Although the critics may
argue for another sixty years about its merits, this "little book," as Steinbeck called it, will
continue to expand people's understanding of what the writer called "the tragic miracle of
consciousness."
“Of Mice and Men Critical Overview” Novels for Students. Ed. Marie Rose Napierkowski, Vol. 1. Detroit,
Gale, 1998. e.notes.com
Dreams and Reality in Of Mice and Men
R. Moore
John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men is a powerful and vivid depiction of life in rural
America. It recounts the tragic story of George Milton and Lennie Small, two lonely
itinerant farm workers who belonged nowhere and to no one but themselves. George has
accepted the burden of protecting the mentally incompetent but uncommonly strong
Lennie from the thefts and tricks of both ranch bosses and other hands, but, in so doing,
George has considerably reduced the possibilities of his own successful attainment of
independence and peace. In order to placate his childishly effusive companion, George
has invented a fantasy in which both of them operate their own farm and Lennie, in
particular, is in charge of the rabbits. It is a vision which immediately quiets any of the
good-natured giant’s anxieties, as well as bringing a comforting repose to the otherwise
realistic and rather cynical George.
When the two friends arrive at the latest farmhouse, Lennie promises faithfully to obey
his companion and be good. A somewhat skeptical George arranges jobs for both of
them, and the fate of these two friends of the road is sealed. Curley, a sadistic paranoid,
takes an immediate dislike to Lennie simple because of his strength. After a series of
provocations, Lennie is driven to put Curley in his place. Unable to control his massive
strength, the brutish innocent breaks the bones of Curley’s hand before his co-workers
can pull him away from the unwitting victim. From this moment on, Curley plans full
revenge.
The opportunity tragically presents itself in the guise of Curley’s own wife, a rather
coarse but pathetically lonely creature who frequently attempts to attract advances from
hired hands to relieve the tedium of her life on the ranch. Driven away from the
bunkhouse in which the men have their quarters by her jealous husband, the young
woman waits until all but Lennie have left the ranch, and then proceeds to engage him in
conversation. So preoccupied with her own misery is the girl that she does not realize her
companion’s potential danger. Enthusiastically recalling an opportunity she once had to
appear in Hollywood films, she invites Lennie to feel the soft texture of her hair. At first
reticent, the fellow is soon persuaded by the friendly insistence of the girl. Suddenly she
is locked in his uncomprehending grasp; moments later, her dead body slumps to the
floor of the bunkhouse.
When George and Candy, a down-on-his-luck worker who had expressed great interest in
joining the friends in their dream farm, realize what has happened, Lennie is told to take
refuge in a secret place George had once designated for some emergency. Taking
Curley’s gun, George waits for the others to form a search party. Raging with jealous
anger and despair, Curley makes it clear that, when found, Lennie will not be brought
back alive. During the course of the chase, George manages to separate from the others.
Finding his friend at the appointed meeting place, he suggests that Lennie watch out
across the river and try to picture that farm they will one day share. As his burly friend
complies, George raises the gun and fires into the back of Lennie’s head. When the others
catch up to him, George explains that he had happened to stumble upon Lennie who was
killed in a struggle for the gun which he tried to use against George.
There are a great many indigenously American elements in the plot and characterization
that Steinbeck provides in Of Mice and Men. In the first place, the novel was written in
1937, a time during which the plight of the nation’s migrant workers was beginning to be
a subject of concern among thinking Americans. It remained, of course, for Steinbeck’s
The Grapes of Wrath, presented in 1939, to furnish a definitive portrait of this tragedy,
but the saga of George and Lonnie takes as its basic material the frustrations and touching
hopelessness that characterize the lives of all such unfortunate men and women.
It would seem, having established the background of the narrative, that the distinctive
American flavor of the characters is worth commenting upon. Perhaps Steinbeck might
be accused of an uncompromisingly cynical attitude, but, nevertheless, the novel
underscores with poignant irony the characteristic belief in tomorrow that is, at one and
the same time, the saving grace and the inherent weakness of American life or, more
accurately, American life at that particular point in history.
The major figures in Steinbeck’s story are all driven by a compelling faith in the
possibility of dreams coming true. George and Lennie are the protagonists and, in a
certain sense, the author has them epitomize all the dreams of the others. George is the
prototype of one who is torn by the need for a kind of solution to the painful enigma of
life and by a realization, at the same time, that there is none that might ever be considered
satisfactory. George is perfectly aware of the impossibility and total impracticality of the
dream he has projected for Lennie; however, he is also keenly conscious of the fact that
the fantasy keeps Lennie in a certain dubious contact with reality and, therefore, in a
position where he is determined to prove his ability to work productively and keep out of
trouble. Using the fantasy to this advantage, George is able to protect the hapless
imbecile and see to it that he remains properly clothed and fed. There is, however,
another consciousness of the part of Lennie’s loyal companion that should be noted, even
emphasized. Although George clearly realizes how he uses the fantasy to keep Lennie in
check, he is also rather painfully conscious of the fact that he cannot himself keep the
fantasy in check. He, too, is moved by it to hope that someday soon his friend and he
might find that safe harbor from the world that would exploit innocence and helplessness.
When the equally cynical Candy hears of their dream, and cannot help but express his
interest and desire to join them in the achieving of it by adding his own financial support,
George finds it difficult to maintain a real hold on reality. His nature and his experience
have taught him that life offers little; one wonders with him whether or not he dare hope
nature and experience have deluded him; the novel’s conclusion indicates they, of course,
have not.
George and Candy are similar victims of the twists which fortune manufactures for
humankind; they suspect anything that looks good. Lennie and Curley’s wife represent a
different view of reality. Both dream their impossible dreams and are unable to relate
them to the realistic situation in which they are enveloped. Lennie does not know his own
strength nor how to control it; Curley’s wife can only conceive of life as movie glamour
and happy-ever-aftering; she’s too caught up in fantasy even to realize the threat Lennie
poses to her unhappy life.
Steinbeck’s documentation of frustrated dreams, though utilizing a regional locale, offers
a basic universality in the manner in which the reader is able to sympathize with the
desires of those characters trapped within the confining strictures of the debasing lives
they lead. George is a more approachable figure than the unforunate Lennie, but even the
latter is appealing in his well-meaning innocence.
Of course, one might suppose that, despite Lennie’s death, George could very well decide
to persevere in his dream, and take Candy on as his new partner. The relationship
between George and Lennie, however, suggests this is not a probably event. The former
is frequently out of patience with his relentlessly confused companion; he frequently
complains that there is no reason to put up with such stupidity as Lennie’s. However, he
does, for they are tied to each other for the whole of their journey on the road of life; they
are tied to each other as body is tied to soul. When the body finally dies, a victim of the
cruelties of daily and inexplicable reality, the soul is left to wander by itself. It is the
feeling of this reader that it is for such a reason that George will remain alone.
R. Moore. "Of Mice and Men: Dreams and Reality in Of Mice and Men." eNotes: Of Mice and Men. Ed.
Penny Satoris. Seattle: , October 2002. 29 December 2005. <http://www/ofmice/3419>.
Do you agree and see George as “rather cynical,” or, do you feel that underneath
his gruff exterior, he really does keep a small spark of “the dream” really
burning?
How can hopelessness be “touching?” Aren’t poverty, loneliness, and despair
simply painful, even brutal. Doesn’t the word “touching” trivialize the
hopelessness of workers such as George and Lennie?
Is the “belief” in tomorrow” just as alive for extremely poor people today (think
of the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans for example) or, as the author
implies, is this belief more true “at that particular point in history?
Do you think that George ever truly believes in “the dream,” especially after
Candy offers his stake in it, or does he simply keep repeating the story to humor
Lennie?
Do you agree with the conclusion, that George remains alone and will lose all
desire to pursue “the dream”?
The End!