Of Mice and Men

A story built to be staged

Steinbeck called Of Mice and Men a play-novelette, and it was the first of three he wrote. In the foreword to a later one, Burning Bright, he described the form as a play that is easy to read, or a short novel that can be staged simply by lifting out the dialogue. The Center for Steinbeck Studies chronology lists the book as a play-novelette too.

You can see the stage in how the book is built. The whole story happens in four places: the riverbank, the bunkhouse where the ranch hands sleep, the small room in the barn where Crooks lives, and the barn itself. A Penguin teacher's guide lays the six chapters out the way a play is laid out: an opening, rising trouble, a crisis and a resolution.

The plan worked quickly. The stage version opened in New York on 23 November 1937 and ran for 207 performances. In May 1938 it won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award. A Hollywood film followed in December 1939. Lewis Milestone directed it, with Burgess Meredith as George and Lon Chaney Jr. as Lennie.

Where the title comes from

Steinbeck's working title was Something That Happened. The title he used comes from Robert Burns's 1785 poem "To a Mouse," in which a farmer ploughing a field wrecks a mouse's nest. The poem's best-known lines are "The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, / Gang aft agley," Scots for "often go wrong."

The scholar Michael Meyer says Steinbeck liked the parallel between the mouse and people. A small creature builds a home, and a blade much stronger than it destroys the home by chance. George and Lennie's plan for a farm is that kind of scheme.

Who picked the title is less settled. The Steinbeck scholars Susan Shillinglaw and Barbara Heavilin both credit his first wife, Carol Henning Steinbeck, who typed and edited his work in the 1930s. A 2021 University of Glasgow doctoral thesis by John MacKenzie weighs the evidence. No document proves it, but the thesis concludes that the evidence points to Carol. In a September 1938 letter about his next novel's title, Steinbeck wrote: "Carol's again."

The people on the ranch

The ranch is full of people living alone. Candy is an old ranch hand who lost a hand in an accident and is afraid of being thrown off the ranch once he can no longer work. His only companion is an old sheepdog with no teeth. Crooks, the only Black man on the ranch, has a crooked back and is made to sleep in the barn, away from the other men.

Curley's wife is the only woman who appears in the story, and Steinbeck never gives her a name. The men treat her with barely hidden disgust. She tells Lennie that she could have been in the movies if she had not married Curley. A Penguin teacher's guide asks students why she is never named.

When Candy hears about the farm, he offers his savings of $350 to join the plan. For one evening in the barn, Crooks lets himself imagine living there too. Then Curley's wife threatens him, and he gives the idea up. One way to read the book is that the farm matters most to the people with nowhere else to go.

Candy's dog also points ahead. Carlson, another ranch hand, says the old dog should be put out of its misery. Slim agrees, Candy gives in, and Carlson shoots the dog in the back of the head. Candy says afterwards that he should not have let a stranger shoot his dog.

A banned book that schools keep teaching

Of Mice and Men is one of the most taught books in American high schools. A Penguin teacher's guide puts that down to its short length, its plain prose and its themes of friendship and hard choices.

The book is also on the American Library Association's list of the most challenged books of the twenty-first century. The complaints are about its rough language, the racist and sexist words the ranch hands use, the way it describes Lennie's disability, and its dark ending. The Center for Steinbeck Studies at San José State University notes that the challenges have not made the book any less popular.

The Penguin guide points out that Steinbeck wrote Lennie in 1937. The clinical definition of autism was developed ten years later, in 1947, so calling Lennie autistic puts a later label on him.

Of Mice and Men in Paris

French readers had the book within two years. Gallimard published Des souris et des hommes in Paris in 1939, translated by Maurice-Edgar Coindreau, who also wrote an introduction. The novelist Joseph Kessel wrote the preface.

After the war the stage version reached Paris. The play opened at the Théâtre Hébertot in April 1946 in a translation by Marcel Duhamel, directed by Paul Oettly. Robert Hébert played Lennie and Claudine Dupuis played Curley's wife. Robert Laffont printed Marcel Duhamel's text the same year.

The play came back to Paris in December 1975, at the Théâtre de Paris. Robert Hossein and Pierre Mondy directed it for the Théâtre populaire de Reims, still using Marcel Duhamel's adaptation. Steinbeck himself lived in Paris for a season in 1954, long after the book was written.