THE LIBRARY MOVES UPTOWN:
John Steinbeck
Of Mice and Men
(1937)
"They had walked in single file down the path, and even in the open one stayed behind the other. Both were dressed in denim trousers and in denim coats with brass buttons. Both wore black, shapeless hats and both carried tight blanket rolls slung over their shoulders. The first man was small and quick, dark of face, with restless eyes and sharp, strong features...Behind him walked his opposite, a huge man, shapeless of face, with large, pale eyes, with wide, sloping shoulders; and he walked heavily, dragging his feet a little, the way a bear drags his paws... "
The wild land around Salinas, California, thirty miles inland from the coast, was the setting for many of John Steinbeck's novels. As a young man, Steinbeck, born in Salinas in 1902, worked shoulder to shoulder with itinerant laborers or bindlestiffs who moved from ranch to ranch in the valley hunting for work. Here was raw material for a young and ambitious writer seeking to expose the fault lines of the Great Depression.
Steinbeck completed Of Mice and Men, a 30,000 word novella, in about two months. He took the title from Robert Burn's phrase: "The best laid schemes o'mice and men/Gang aft a'gley." George and Lennie were composites of people he had known, violence he had witnessed. They were broken men but they had their dreams, fated to end in tragedy. "Lennie was a real person...He killed a ranch foreman...stuck a pitchfork right through his stomach. I saw him do it." This Library's Marion King described Of Mice and Men as a "small, poignant, somewhat unpleasant story of a dangerously simple soul."
One afternoon Steinbeck discovered that his setter puppy had torn half the manuscript to pieces. "I was pretty mad," Steinbeck wrote to a friend, "but the poor little fellow may have been acting critically. [No need to ruin] a good dog for a mss I'm not sure is good at all." Of Mice and Men, first published by Covici-Friede and then by The Modern Library, made the best seller list within weeks of publication. But as Steinbeck's popularity rose so did his discomfiture with the outward trappings of success.
In 1937 Of Mice and Men was also performed on Broadway where it won the Drama Critics Award as the best American play of the year. In the 1939 screen version, Lon Chaney Jr. starred as the ill-fated Lennie, Burgess Meredith as George. "All I tried to write," Steinbeck later said, "was the story of two Salina Valley vagrants...I don't know what it means, if anything, and damned if I care. My business is only story-telling." Two years later Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath.
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