Of Mice and Men

In one sentence: John Steinbeck's 1937 novella follows two ranch hands, George and Lennie, chasing a modest dream of owning their own patch of land, a dream that never had a shot in the world they were born into. The title comes from Robert Burns's line about the best-laid schemes of mice and men going awry.

Overview

George is wiry and sharp; Lennie is a big man, slow in the head and strong enough to hurt things without meaning to, forever drawn to petting soft animals and breaking them by accident. On the road to a new ranch job, George keeps returning to their dream: save enough, buy land, answer to nobody, let Lennie keep his own rabbits. An old-timer, Candy, offers his savings to join them, putting the dream a single month's wages away. Curley's wife, the boss's son's new bride, finds Lennie alone and lets him touch her hair; he can't control his grip and breaks her neck. Curley rounds up a posse, but George finds Lennie first, and while soothing him with the dream of the farm one last time, shoots him dead. This is a short novella, its plot compressed into two or three days and carried almost entirely by dialogue.

Why It's Recommended

What gives this book its weight isn't the phrase "the dream fails," it's how precisely it accounts for why. The American Dream promises a decent life to anyone willing to hustle, but in a world where the wealthy build their pile off the weak and the poor, that promise never gets to be more than a promise. The title itself points to Robert Burns's "To a Mouse" and its line about the best-laid schemes going awry, and Lennie's one defining habit, petting small soft things, lands on the same image as the title. The ending reads as allegory too: George shooting Lennie echoes Cain's question to God, "Am I my brother's keeper?" Cain's curse was that spilling his brother's blood meant he'd never taste the fruit of his labor again, and the land George and Lennie never reach plays like that same curse arriving early. George's surname, Milton, isn't an accident either; it's a direct nod to John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, paradise lost fixed onto the character by name.

Source

Wisecrack's Thug Notes covers Of Mice and Men in its 2013-08-27 episode, boiling the book's tragedy down to one line: "the American Dream promising a righteous life to everyone who got the juice to hustle, it ain't nothin but an illusion." The video also reads the ending as a modern retelling of Cain and Abel, closing on the moment George pulls the trigger.