Editors Reads Verdict
Steinbeck's most perfectly crafted short novel compresses immense human sadness into 180 pages of prose that reads like a stage direction for tragedy. The dream of the small farm — the rabbits, the land, the independence — is one of literature's most affecting images of hope in a context designed to extinguish it.
What We Loved
- The compression and economy of the novella form is used with masterful precision
- The George-Lennie relationship is one of literature's most moving male friendships
- The ending is prepared from the opening scene — the inevitability is the tragedy
- The Depression-era setting is rendered with documentary accuracy and genuine compassion
Minor Drawbacks
- Curley's wife is sometimes felt to be a type rather than a fully realised character
- The symbolism can be somewhat heavy-handed — Candy's dog is Lennie is obvious
- Its brevity, while a strength, means some dimensions feel underdeveloped
Key Takeaways
- → The dream of independence and self-sufficiency is what makes poverty bearable — its destruction is the final violence
- → Lennie's strength and Lennie's innocence cannot coexist with a world designed for neither
- → George's act of mercy is the novel's most terrible and most loving act
- → The 'best-laid plans' of mice and men are subject to forces — economic, social, physical — that individuals cannot control
- → Loneliness is the Depression's defining social condition — George and Lennie's partnership is radical in its context
| Author | John Steinbeck |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Penguin Books |
| Pages | 187 |
| Published | January 1, 1937 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Fiction, Classic Literature, Tragedy |
| Difficulty | Beginner |
| Best For | Readers who want to understand the Great Depression's human cost through a perfectly crafted tragedy — and those who appreciate what a master craftsman can do in under 200 pages. |
The Perfect Tragedy
John Steinbeck wrote Of Mice and Men in the summers of 1936 and 1937, after years of writing about California’s agricultural workers — the dispossessed, the itinerant, the men who moved from ranch to ranch with nothing but their bindles and their willingness to work. He had intended to write a longer novel but the manuscript was eaten by his dog, and what he produced from the reconstruction was something more perfectly shaped: a novella so precisely crafted that nothing can be removed or added without damaging it.
The title comes from Robert Burns: “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft agley” — go often awry. It announces the novel’s tragic fatalism: the dream of George and Lennie is laid out clearly, it is good and reasonable, and it will not be achieved.
George and Lennie: The Impossible Partnership
George Milton is sharp, wiry, restless — the kind of man who might have made something of himself if he did not have Lennie Small to look after. Lennie is large, gentle, immensely strong, and intellectually limited — a man who loves to pet soft things and cannot control the strength of his own hands. Their partnership is simultaneously a burden (Lennie’s accidental violence has lost them jobs, driven them from towns) and a grace: in a world of solitary, itinerant men, they have each other.
Their dream — a small farm, a few acres, some chickens, some rabbits for Lennie to tend — is not grandiose but it is real. It is the dream of security and belonging in a world designed to provide neither. Every character who hears about it wants in. Old Candy, who fears being thrown off the ranch when his working days end, offers his life savings. Crooks, the Black stable hand who has been segregated from the other workers, briefly allows himself to believe in it before his isolation closes back around him.
The Inexorable Structure
From the novel’s first scene — George and Lennie stopping by a pool before their first day at the ranch — to its last, the structure is a closing trap. The mouse Lennie accidentally kills in the opening pages predicts the puppy, and the puppy predicts Curley’s wife. The story of what happened in Weed — where Lennie touched a woman’s dress and wouldn’t let go — predicts the ending with complete precision. Steinbeck wants us to see the catastrophe coming. The tragedy is not the surprise but the inevitability.
George’s act — shooting Lennie as the other men close in, in the same place by the pool, with Lennie hearing one more time about the rabbits and the farm — is the novel’s final terrible mercy: the dream maintained in the last seconds of the dreamer’s life.
Our rating: 4.5/5 — One of American literature’s most perfectly crafted tragedies, heartbreaking in its economy and its inevitability.
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