Two migrant ranch hands share a dream of a few acres of their own — and one of them can't stop hurting the soft, small things he loves.
Steinbeck wrote "Of Mice and Men" in 1936, drawing directly on his own stint as a bindlestiff — an itinerant ranch hand carrying his bedroll ("bindle") from job to job — on the same kind of Salinas Valley barley ranches where the novel is set. He later said he based Lennie, loosely, on a real migrant worker he saw kill a ranch foreman with a pitchfork after the foreman fired a friend of his; the man was sent to a mental institution rather than prison, which stuck with Steinbeck as a story about culpability and the limits of the world's patience for people who are different. The title comes from Robert Burns's 1785 poem "To a Mouse," which contains the line "The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men / Gang aft agley" (often go wrong) — a poem about a farmer accidentally destroying a mouse's nest while plowing, and reflecting that even careful plans are at the mercy of forces beyond anyone's control.
The book is set during the Great Depression, when hundreds of thousands of displaced agricultural workers moved through California's Central Valley following seasonal harvest work, with no job security, no home, and often no family — a condition the novel dramatizes through George and Lennie's unusual attachment to each other, which every other character in the book finds strange precisely because loneliness and transience were the norm. Steinbeck's original manuscript was reportedly partly eaten by his dog, an Irish setter named Toby, forcing him to rewrite roughly half of it from memory — a detail he recounted with some amusement in letters, noting that the dog "may have been acting as a literary critic."
The novella was an immediate critical and commercial success, a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and Steinbeck's stage adaptation opened on Broadway in November 1937 to strong reviews, running for 207 performances and winning the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play. It has been a fixture of American high school curricula for decades, which has also made it one of the most frequently challenged and banned books in the United States, objected to over its language, its violence, and its bleak ending.