Of Mice and Men Summary: Steinbeck's Story of Two Men and One Small Dream
What Of Mice and Men is about
John Steinbeck published Of Mice and Men in 1937. It is a short novella about two displaced migrant ranch workers, George Milton and Lennie Small, moving from job to job in California during the Great Depression. The book opens with the pair walking from Soledad towards another ranch, and it closes within a few days of their arrival there.
George is intelligent but uneducated. Lennie is huge and immensely strong, and he has an intellectual disability that leaves him unable to function on his own. They travel together, which already sets them apart from the other men on the road. They also share a plan: one day they will buy a small piece of land of their own. Lennie's part of that plan is simple. He wants to tend the rabbits.
Trouble follows them. They left their last job in Weed after Lennie grabbed a young woman's skirt because he liked the look of it, and could not let go, because stress makes him grip harder. The accusation that followed was rape, and a mob formed to lynch him. That history sits under everything that happens next.
At the new ranch they are taken on and meet the other hands. The boss's son, Curley, is short, aggressive and quick to pick on bigger men. His wife is bored, flirtatious and watched by everyone. Candy, an elderly handyman with one hand, has an old dog he has kept for years. Slim, the jerkline skinner, is calm and perceptive and his dog has just had a litter. Crooks, the stable hand, lives apart from the others because he is black.
For a short stretch the dream stops being talk. Candy offers to put in $350 towards the land in exchange for a place to live, and suddenly the farm is affordable by the end of the month. Even Crooks, who openly scorns the idea, cannot help asking whether he could hoe a patch of garden there.
The main characters
George Milton. Sharp, tired, frequently exasperated, and bound to Lennie by a loyalty he never fully explains. He carries the plan and the story of the farm, repeating it aloud like a recitation.
Lennie Small. Gentle and enormously strong, drawn to soft things. He pets mice, puppies and fabric, and he kills small animals without meaning to because he does not know his own strength.
Candy. The old handyman whose dog is shot by the ranch hand Carlson. Watching that happen shapes how he thinks about his own future, and it drives him to buy into George and Lennie's plan.
Curley and Curley's wife. He is a bully with something to prove. She is never named. She is lonely, she had wanted to be a film star, and that ambition came to nothing.
Crooks and Slim. Crooks is educated and bitter, isolated by racism on the ranch. Slim is the figure the other men defer to, and the only one who really understands what happens at the end.
The themes
The title comes from Robert Burns's poem "To a Mouse": the best laid schemes of mice and men often go awry. That is the engine of the book. Everyone on the ranch carries a plan, and the plans are modest, and the world is arranged so that modest plans still fail.
Friendship is the other spine. George and Lennie have each other, and that single fact makes them objects of curiosity to men who travel alone. Steinbeck sets their companionship against the loneliness of Candy, Crooks and Curley's wife, three people cut off by age, race and gender in turn.
Class runs underneath. These are workers with no land, no security and no say. Steinbeck based the novella on his own time working alongside migrant farm labourers as a teenager in the 1910s, before the arrival of the Okies he would later write about in The Grapes of Wrath.
How it ends (spoilers)
Lennie accidentally kills his puppy. Curley's wife comes into the barn and talks to him about her own lost ambitions, then lets him stroke her hair. When she feels his strength she panics and screams, he grips harder in fright, and he breaks her neck. He runs to the meeting place George chose for emergencies. The ranch hands form a lynch mob. George gets there first, tells the story of the farm one last time, and shoots Lennie in the back of the head to spare him the mob. Slim leads him away. Curley and Carlson do not understand why either man is upset.
Why it still matters
It is short, it is plainly written, and it is taught in schools across the English-speaking world. It is also one of the most frequently challenged books in those schools, appearing on the American Library Association's list of the most challenged books of the 21st century, objected to for vulgarity and for language many readers find offensive and racist. Few novellas of this length have stayed so firmly in circulation, or provoked so much argument about what readers owe a difficult text.
