The Essential Criticism

of John Steinbeck’s
Of Mice and Men
Edited by Michael J. Meyer

The Scarecrow Press, Inc.

Lanham, Maryland • Toronto • Plymouth, UK
2009
SCARECROW PRESS, INC.

Published in the United States of America

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Copyright © 2009 by Michael J. Meyer

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

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The essential criticism of John Steinbeck’s Of mice and men / edited by Michael J.
Meyer.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8108-6733-8 (alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8108-6734-5 (e-book)
1. Steinbeck, John, 1902–1968. Of mice and men. I. Meyer, Michael J., 1943–
PS3537.T3234O4 2009
813'.52—dc22 2008051372

⬁ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
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Manufactured in the United States of America.
For the eighth-grade classes at Grace Lutheran School, River Forest, Illi-
nois, who each year remind me that reading Of Mice and Men is important
because it touches the soul as well as the mind.
“We read to know we are not alone.”—Anthony Hopkins as C. S. Lewis
in Shadowlands, directed by Richard Attenborough (1993)
 CONTENTS

Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii
Editor’s Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv

PART ONE
THE 1930s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
CHAPTER ONE Book Reviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

PART TWO
THE 1940s AND 1950s. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
CHAPTER TWO The Wide World of John Steinbeck,
Chapter 8. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
Peter Lisca

PART THREE
THE 1960s AND 1970s. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
CHAPTER THREE John Steinbeck’s Parable of the
Curse of Cain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
William Goldhurst
CHAPTER FOUR Of George and Lennie and Curley’s Wife:
Sweet Violence in Steinbeck’s Eden . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
Mark Spilka

v
CONTENTS

CHAPTER FIVE The Novels of John Steinbeck,

Excerpt from Chapter 5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
Howard Levant

CHAPTER SIX Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (Novel) (1937) . . . . 86

John F. Slater

PART FOUR
THE 1980s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
CHAPTER SEVEN A Game of Cards in Steinbeck’s
Of Mice and Men . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
Michael W. Shurgot

CHAPTER EIGHT John Steinbeck’s Fiction: The Aesthetics of the

Road Taken: “Of Mice and Men” (Chapter 4) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
John Timmerman

PART FIVE
THE 1990s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
CHAPTER NINE A Historical Introduction to
Of Mice and Men . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
Anne Loftis
CHAPTER TEN Manhood Beset:
Misogyny in Of Mice and Men . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
Jean Emery

CHAPTER ELEVEN Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1937) . . . . . . 134

Charlotte Hadella

CHAPTER TWELVE Of Mice and Men:

Steinbeck’s Speculations in Manhood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150
Leland S. Person Jr.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN Queer Borders: Figures from the
1930s for U.S.-Canadian Relations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158
Caren Irr

vi
 CONTENTS

PART SIX
SINCE 2000 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
CHAPTER FOURTEEN Of Mice and Men:
A Story of Innocence Retained. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187
Marilyn Chandler McEntyre
CHAPTER FIFTEEN Of Mice and Men: Creating and
Re-Creating Curley’s Wife . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203
Mimi Reisel Gladstein
CHAPTER SIXTEEN Deadly Kids, Stinking Dogs, and Heroes:
The Best Laid Plans in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men . . . . . . . . . . . 220
Louis Owens
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Reading the Character of Crooks
in Of Mice and Men: A Black Writer’s Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . 236
Charles Johnson

PART SEVEN
NEW ESSAYS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Reduced to Nothing:
Race, Lynching, and Erasure in the Theater Revision of
Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253
Daniel Griesbach
CHAPTER NINETEEN Emotion Recollected in Tranquility:
A Context for Romanticism in Of Mice and Men. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 276
Barbara A. Heavilin
CHAPTER TWENTY One Is the Loneliest Number:
Steinbeck’s Paradoxical Attraction and Repulsion to
Isolation/Solitude . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 290
Michael J. Meyer
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Musical Intertextuality in Action:
A Directed Reading of Of Mice and Men . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307
Christian Goering, Katherine Collier, Scott Koenig, J. Olive O’Berski,
Stephanie Pierce, and Kelly Riley

vii
CONTENTS

Appendix: Online Sites for Teaching Of Mice and Men . . . . . . . . . . . . 331

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 333
About the Editor and Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 343

viii
 PREFACE

T
he idea for The Essential Criticism of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice
and Men began over fifteen years ago. Originally considered for
publication by Greenwood Press where a series of related vol-
umes was in process in the late 1990s, the volume was never completed
although many agreed that such a book was long overdue. The need
became even more evident recently as several critical assessments went
out of print, and the early reviews of the novel were largely unavailable
or the cost to access them was excessive. Thus researchers and under-
graduates who were seeking representative critical appraisals of a novel
that has sold more than seven million copies in its lifetime and is on
the reading lists of thousands of high school curriculums, often found
themselves frustrated and unable to find the essays they wanted to read
and cite. Noting the potential for a large reading public, Scarecrow Press
wisely issued a contract, choosing not only to republish some of the
early work but also to publish several studies that have not previously
appeared in print.
While the present volume is unable to reproduce all of the significant
criticism that has been published since Of Mice and Men appeared in 1937,
it does include representative studies that address the major themes of the
novel (the American Dream of land and property; loneliness/isolation;
camaraderie/friendship; class-, gender-, race-, and age-centered prejudice;
and a social critique that reflects the economic conflict between the haves
and have nots in America); it also shows the progression of scholarship

ix
PREFACE

and reflects the depth of meaning that Steinbeck incorporated into the
text.
Clearly, Steinbeck packed the pages of Of Mice and Men with signifi-
cance, creating passages that still have impact enough to have lasted over
seventy years and yet still retain the power to enthrall today’s readers and
to reflect twenty-first-century conditions that remain issues in the coun-
try that Steinbeck so valiantly tried to reform. The novel’s creative use
of language, including unique similes and metaphors; its employment of
animal imagery; and its discussion of the diverse thematic elements listed
above all seem fresh and new even on second and third readings. When
these elements are combined in a concise dramatic form that reflects the
author’s experimental technique, it is no wonder that one individual at
a 1989 conference held at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa ex-
claimed, “Why, them’s my people!”
My people, indeed! The story of George and Lennie resonates to
most readers for a variety of reasons. First of all, readers empathize with
the characters’ unlikely friendship and devotion to each other and identify
keenly with the frustration George and Lennie experience over unrealized
dreams and a denial of their hopes for independence and freedom. More-
over, such readers surely recognize present-day American problems in the
shattered prospects of the bindlestiffs, problems that not only reflect the
dilemma of racial and gender prejudice but also depict the divisiveness
that occurs when perceived deficiencies based on age, wavering emotional
stability, and lower mental ability are given prominence.
The critics represented here range from the earliest respondents to
Steinbeck’s novels (now considered classics) to the most recent analyses
(by individuals who have impeccable credentials but perhaps less recogni-
tion). These are followed by four original essays written especially for this
collection and offering unique assessments of the novel. I invite readers
of this collection to savor the critics whose work is reproduced here, to
consult the analysts whose essays are merely cited bibliographically due
to space constraints, and to sample the new critical approaches offered
within these pages. Once again you will discover the scope of Steinbeck’s
genius as a variety of critical opinions reopens a text that one early re-
viewer commended for “its compassion even more than [its] perfect sense
of form,” qualities that, for this writer at least, “mark off John Steinbeck,

x
 PREFACE

artist, so sharply from all the little verbal photographers who record tough
talk and snarl in books which have power without pity.”1

Note
1. Lewis Gannett, “Books and Things.” New York Herald Tribune, 25 February
1937: 17.

xi
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

W
ith grateful thanks to all who made this book a reality, includ-
ing Stephen Ryan and Jayme Bartles at Scarecrow Press and
the many students who typed or scanned manuscripts over the
years. I am especially indebted to Linda Gibson for typing and to Shawn
Koval for helping with the index. The illustrations were provided by a
former student, Brenda Latzke Heinz, who now teaches art at Roosevelt
Middle School in River Forest, Illinois.

xiii
 EDITOR’S NOTE

I
n order to facilitate easy location of the quotes from Of Mice and Men,
I have changed all references to the novel to a standard edition: Of
Mice and Men (New York: Penguin Classics, 1993). Please consult
this version for all quotes.

xv
 Part One
THE 1930s

T
wo years after the publication of Of Mice and Men, Harry Thorn-
ton Moore published The Novels of John Steinbeck: A First Critical
Study (Chicago: Normandy House, 1939). According to Moore,
Steinbeck’s characters are quite realistic but are trapped in a web of
circumstance that makes their fates inevitable. This initial reaction was
to become a typical response from a critical majority that considered
Steinbeck’s work as an integral part of the American Naturalist move-
ment, where human beings had little say so or ability to affect change in
their lives. Moore also lamented the fact that the book depicted violence
without tragedy, a trait that made its message melodramatic rather than
eliciting pathos.
The early reviews indicated a much divided stream of criticism about
Steinbeck’s short novel, ranging from extravagant praise to dismissive
critical assessment, indicating a dis-ease with the novel’s slang and “ques-
tionable” vocabulary as well as its sentimentalism and its “predictable”
if not obvious use of plot parallels. The positive reactions emphasize
Steinbeck’s compassion for the disenfranchised, his poetic and colorful
use of language, and the accuracy of his recording of the speech of the
common people.

Significant Study from the 1930s

Rascoe, Burton, “The Play Accentuates the Consummate Art of John Steinbeck.”
English Journal (March 1938): 205–16 [reprinted in E. W. Tedlock Jr. and

1
PART ONE

C. V. Wicker, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1957): 57–67

and also in Jill Karson, (San Diego: Greenhaven, 1996): 139–45].
This essay reviews the play version of the novel and comments on the com-
passion of Steinbeck for the misfits of life and for those who are handicapped
by the imponderables of heredity and environment. Steinbeck’s empathy for
individuals who are warped physically and emotionally is foregrounded and is
credited with evoking pity and wonder from his audience. Most importantly,
Rascoe suggests that Of Mice and Men’s tragedy is Sophoclean in stature and
that Steinbeck’s Manichean tendencies indicate the author’s concern with
the problem of good versus evil and his effort to show the non-morality of
Nature and the natural world.

2
 CHAPTER ONE
BOOK REVIEWS


Charles A. Wagner. “Books.” New York Mirror,
24 February 1937: 25.
Of the two selections for March made by the Book-of-the-Month Club,
and just published, we like best the young American Steinbeck’s novel,
though the veteran Mister Wells, who shares the selection, has returned
to the grand manner.
John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men . . . is just about the closest thing
to a little prose masterpiece in the social stir we’ve seen in years.
It is the story of two barley bucker pals who migrate from job to job
along the grain belt. One is a towering giant with the strength of ten men
but the mind of a child. The other hasn’t the heart to get rid of him, for
fear he will come to harm; to which, of course, he does.
But the cycle of friendship, even in tragedy remains unbroken. And,
in the course of his swift-moving tale, Mr. Steinbeck gives us a holiday
pageantry of portraits in toil, in men’s passions and repressions, in workers’
dreams and devilments, told with a poet’s eye to sounds and silences which
makes his book a memorable thing indeed, and something at last to cheer
about.

3
BOOK REVIEWS


Lewis Gannett. “Books and Things.”
New York Herald Tribune, 25 February 1937: 17.
“Guys like us, that work on ranches,” George told Lennie, “are the lone-
liest guys in the world. They got no family. They don’t belong no place.
They make a little stake and then they go into town and blow it in, and
the first thing you know they’re poundin’ their tail on some other ranch”
(OMM 13–14).
“But not us,” Lennie interrupted. (This is in John Steinbeck’s story Of
Mice and Men . . . which the Book-of-the-Month Club sends its members
this month.) “We got a future. Some day gonna have a little house and a
couple of acres an’ a cow an’ some pigs, an’ live off the fatta the lan’- an’
have rabbits! An’ I get to tend the rabbits” (OMM 14).1
It was a sort of incantation with which George, a small, quick, bony-
nosed man, soothed Lennie when that huge, shapeless halfwit grew rest-
less. They had a dream, and Lennie lived for it, and George, who loved
him, knew it could never come true.
“He’s a nice fella,” said Slim. “Guy don’t need no sense to be a nice
fella. Seems to me sometimes it jus’ works the other way around. Take a
real smart guy and he ain’t hardly ever a nice fella” (OMM 40).
Danny and Big Joe Portagee and Jesus Maria Corcoran, citizens of
Tortilla Flat, didn’t have much sense either; nor did the farmers of The
Pastures of Heaven. [Steinbeck’s characters] talk tough, and [sometimes
they have] no morals, but you ended [his] books loving them; and you
will close this strange, tragic little idyll with a vast sense of compassion for
big, dumb Lennie and for George, who knew Lennie would never get to
tend those rabbits, and that if he did stroke their fur with his too strong
hands he would kill them. And it is, perhaps, that compassion, even more
than the perfect sense of form, which marks off John Steinbeck, artist, so
sharply from all the little verbal photographers who record tough talk and
snarl in books which have power without pity. The most significant things
John Steinbeck has to say about his characters are never put into words;
they are the overtones of which the reader is never wholly conscious—and
that is art.

4
 BOOK REVIEWS


James Ross Oliver. “Book News and Views.”
Monterey [CA] Peninsula Herald, 25 February 1937: 5.
Book reviewing can be a joy at times, and it so happens that this is one
of them. The cause for the good feeling at the moment is that we have
just finished reading the one book we have encountered in some months
which has impressed us with the extreme artistry of its composition. It
happens less frequently than one might suppose.
As usual, this kind of a book can, and does, stir up all manner of ar-
gument, intellectual and violent. And John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men
. . . will be no exception. Of course, publishers and authors are quite will-
ing to let the storm rage. Sales never suffer from it.
Of Mice and Men is a small book of only 185 pages, but it is big in its
accomplishment. Again Steinbeck convinces us that his is the mission to
bring to the reader the lives and minds of the lower class. It is that pur-
pose that has brought upon him the condemnation of many; expressed
doubts in no uncertain terms concerning the immorality of his writing.
But considering the characters the author brings us, and considering again
his thoroughness in doing this, no condemnation is just. If one will only
glance through Steinbeck’s pages, one will see that these things which
they decry are not the author’s—rather those of whom he writes. Pressing
still further, and as a last plunge to get this thing off our chest, anyone
who knows these people will agree that he is right in his work.
But enough of that.
Of Mice and Men is what it is because of its inherent simplicity. The
plot is not great; nor are its characters great, but are both real and carried
through to completion. It is a plot upon which the characterizations and
story are laid as effectively as flesh upon bone.
Dramatically skillfully, Steinbeck takes us to as simple yet magnetic a
climax as one could wish for. And the accomplishment which impressed
us the most is that the author, in his faultless plot, has pegged or fore-
warned us of each development: some trifling event, some symbolic twist
of character, goes before like a perfect prologue. The artistry of it we do
not object to it in the least.

5
BOOK REVIEWS

Once more John Steinbeck has presented us with a simple, realistic

portrayal of simple, earthy men and women. They are the hardest char-
acters to delineate.


F[anny] B[utcher]. “Books.” Chicago Daily Tribune,
27 February 1937: 11.
The author of Tortilla Flat has written Of Mice and Men so simply, so
movingly, so factually that only when its last page is finished does the
reader realize what a remarkable literary feat John Steinbeck has per-
formed.
The book tells the story of Lennie, a huge moron who has a passion
to touch anything soft and goes into a panic if it is taken from him, and
of George, who watches over Lennie with touching care. George, a little
man with a quick mind, is the only person in the world (since Lennie’s
Aunt Clara’s death) who can do anything with the giant moron. He can
do everything with him, and does everything for him, including thinking.
When the book opens, Lennie and George are about to start on a new job,
after having had to flee for their lives from their last one. All they ask of life
is to lay aside a little money and buy a farm and “live on the fatta the lan”
where they can raise rabbits. They think they can. But the reader knows
they can’t—knows that fate is piling up something for them as one after
another sinister shadow is cast.
Brutality and tenderness mingle in these strangely moving pages.
Language that gentle ears would never hear seems as inevitable as Len-
nie’s clumsy devotion to the puppy which he kills with his petting. The
reader is fascinated by a certainty of approaching doom. It comes swiftly,
inevitably, and the final moments of George’s service to Lennie are high
tragedy. One false word, and Of Mice and Men would have been melo-
drama, and bad melodrama at that. But the author never, after the first
few pages, writes one false word.

6
 BOOK REVIEWS


Henry Seidel Canby. “Casuals of the Road.”
Saturday Review 15 (27 February 1937): 7.
Mr. Steinbeck . . . has written a long short story which should please
everybody. It should please everybody because it has every element of
good story-telling, and it must be remembered that most of our successful
novels of recent with any substance of art to them, succeeded by violating
most of the canons of the storyteller’s art in order to deemphasize ideol-
ogy, the stream of consciousness, or behaviorism.
Of Mice and Men is the story of a defective. His weakness is soft things,
strokable things. Upon them his fingers sooner or later close. He does “a
bad thing,” he kills them. But the principle in Lennie is nevertheless the
principle of good. And defective though may be, it is his longing for living
things that are lovable and to be taken care of—like rabbits—that makes
articulate the longing of all the rough hands the ranch for something of
their own, land, a house, animals, perhaps a wife, something different
from their wandering from lousy bunks to gilt saloons, getting nowhere,
owning nothing. Lennie’s friend, who has got him out danger before, and
Crooks, the nigger hostler, and Candy, the broken swamper, and even
Slim, who is the just and capable man in the story, all feel it. And slowly
the plan develops. “Everybody wants a little bit of land, not much. Jus’
som’thin’ that was his” (OMM 76).
This is the principle of good, even in the moron, Lennie. The prin-
ciple of evil is, obscurely, in the conditions of life that keep these men
bummers and vagabonds. But it focuses in the boss’s vicious son, Curley,
the ex-prizefighter, and on Curley’s wife, a poor little prostitute infected
by egoism because some one once told she could go into the pictures, and
held here among these men by Curley all she can do is to wander about
like some venereal germ looking salaciously for a victim. And she finds
Lennie, trying not to do a bad thing.
The story is as simple as that, but superb in its understatements, its
realisms which are used, not to illustrate behavior, but for character and
situation. Indeed, there has been nothing quite so good of the kind in
American writing since Anderson’s early stories. It is a limited kind, but

7
BOOK REVIEWS

close to the heart of the whole fiction business. If you can create charac-
ter—a fresh character, belonging to his soil and shaped by a fresh set of
experiences; and if (choosing sentiment rather than the other offgivings of
human nature—and sentiment is quite as real as its opposite), and if you
can make that make its own story, you are to closer to the job of fiction
than most writers come in our time.


“Steinbeck Touches the Sublime.”
San Francisco Call, 27 February 1937: 6.
Through California’s fertile valleys trudge loneliest guys in the world.
They are cattle-ranch hands, drifting job to job.
They got no fam’ly. They don’t belong no place. . . . They ain’t got
nothing to look ahead to.
But George and Lennie HAVE something to look ahead to. They
dream of saving a stake, of buying a few cheap acres in the hills, of having
their own rooftree, of raising their own fruit and chickens and pigs and
rabbits. Lennie is a simpleminded Hercules. George, wiser, watches over
him, snatches Lennie from the disasters into which he blunders, keeps his
dear dream alive.
The dream seems ready to come true when simple Lennie runs afoul
of shrewd, bullying Curley, the boss’s son, and Curley’s man-chasing,
painted, voluptuous, tantalizing wife. Then comes tragedy, stark, utter,
smashing.
It IS tragedy. Pure classic, profoundly concerned with human weak-
ness and suffering, hurtling from heights of pity to depths of agony. And
all simple, direct, mincing no word, wasting not a single magnificent
brush-stroke. Call it the finest published work of one of America’s most
gifted writers.


P. Ralph Thompson. “Of Mice and Men.”
New York Times, 27 February 1937: 15.
The boys have whooped it up for John Steinbeck’s new book, Of Mice and
Men . . . so enthusiastically that there isn’t much else left to say in the

8
 BOOK REVIEWS

way of praise. It is a grand little book, for all its ultimate melodrama; and
although this reader can’t begin to string along with Harry Hansen, who
calls it “the finest bit of prose fiction of this decade,” he must admit that it
is a long time since he laid eyes on anything as completely disarming.
Mr. Steinbeck’s story is of two wandering farmhands, George and
Lennie. George and Lennie are friends, sticking to each other in despera-
tion and dreaming of the day when they won’t have to bum around the
country looking for work—of the remote day when they will have enough
money to buy some sort of place of their own.
This probably sounds like sentimental truck, and in a way it is. But
under Mr. Steinbeck’s magic touch it is also strong, moving and very
funny. Lennie is a grown-up baby, physically powerful and mentally weak,
with a passion for soft, furry things. George is a tough and irritable cod-
ger, but he bears patiently with Lennie. . . .
. . . What happens when the two reach a ranch where they are to work
is the story. Read it and see how aptly John Steinbeck turns a tale.


Joseph Henry Jackson. “Steinbeck’s Art Finds Powerful
Expression in Of Mice and Men.” San Francisco
Chronicle, 28 February 1937: Section D, 7.
Of Mice and Men, first of all, is not a “proletarian novel” in the sense in
which the arm-wavers currently use the term. It does concern working
men, yes, its setting is the road, the field and the bunkhouse. Its central
figures—there are two of them—are workers who take what jobs they can
get where they can get them, in the fruit, wrestling grain bags, running
cultivators, skinning mules. But the author’s first preoccupation is not with
these men as symbols or even as units in the mass of beaten-down labor.
As always, Steinbeck is interested in his characters as men as human be-
ings who think and do and desire the many and serious things that men
have always thought and done and longed for. Indeed it is the very com-
monplace desire of George and Lennie for their own little heaven-on-earth
that gives Steinbeck his story. These two, like other men, had plans. And
how their plans went astray (all right, “agley” if you insist. There will be a
fine, grand misquoting of Burns before all the reviewers are done with this
book.) How their plans, in fact, could never have come to fruition anyhow

9
BOOK REVIEWS

is Steinbeck’s theme. It is a simple story, one that combines a curious

dream-like quality with the swift streamlining of a good play. It is a story
that will sweep you irresistibly with it, too; even though you may shudder
more than once, you will not put it down.
You meet George and Lennie as they have made their way to a camp-
ing spot by a stream near the ranch where they have a job promised them
for the next day.
George, small and shrewd, is the brains of the pair in much more than
the usual sense. For Lennie, huge and strong and willing, hasn’t good
sense. He can’t remember things. He will do anything George tells him
but by himself he is lost. Sometimes George grows furious with Lennie
for his stupidity, long as he has known him. Lennie repeats things he
shouldn’t because though he remembers what he has heard now and then
he can never remember that he shouldn’t blurt them out. Sometimes, too,
Lennie gets into trouble. He never means to do anything bad, but he can’t
resist anything that feels soft to his enormous but sensitive fingers. When
he pets a mouse he pets it hard and kills it. Up in the north George and
Lennie had to clear out in a hurry because Lennie couldn’t help him-
self—he had to feel the soft silk of a little girl’s dress. Lennie had meant
no more but the girl screamed, and they had to hide in a ditch all night.
Sometimes George wished he could put Lennie in a cage with about a
million mice and leave him there. But he couldn’t. And he couldn’t stay
angry at Lennie. He had to take care of him anyway; somebody had to,
that was sure. And besides, he and Lennie shared a dream.
That dream was a little ranch somewhere. Lennie liked to hear George
tell about it, over and over again—“a big vegetable patch and chickens and
a rabbit hutch [rabbits were soft and smooth and Lennie loved them].
“And when it rains in the winter we’ll just say the hell with goin’ to work,
and we’ll build up a fire in the stove and set around it an’ listen to the rain
on the roof” (OMM 14–15). There was nothing strange about their dream
as you see. Men everywhere have had it. But so far George and Lennie
had never been able to fulfill it.
As the story opens, however, they are still dreaming it. And when
they come to the ranch and go to work there develops out of nowhere, by
sheer luck, a chance that their dream may be realized. Another man has
had that dream too. And he has the one thing George and Lennie have

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never been able to scrape together—a stake. A little more money, no more
than George and Lennie can earn and save in a month or two, and they
can buy the place they want. They even know the one, and how much it
will take.
How that dream, so near fulfillment, was snatched away is the story,
Of Mice and Men. You know what’s coming; you can’t help knowing.
Steinbeck has done such a masterly job of story-telling that you feel the
horror that is ahead even before it begins to grow. You see the fate that is
going to overtake these men and their dream. You realize what’s going to
happen, what can’t help happening. But—well, let me see you stop read-
ing, that’s all. And in spite of the grimness of the tale, let me hear you
deny after you have finished it, that Steinbeck has written it beautifully as
well as powerfully.
There is no question, of course, that there will be the usual chorus of
recriminations. Here (so it will go) Steinbeck had the materials for a fine
propaganda novel, a tale of the class struggle that might show how the
working man is exploited, etc., etc., etc., and he didn’t make use of his
chance to strike a blow for freedom. He didn’t unite with the Front. He
didn’t do this and he didn’t do that. He might have done such-and-such
and he should have done it thus-and-so. They’ve said it about Steinbeck
before and they’ll say it all again. And they’ll make it sound plausible,
too.
But I’m pretty sure that he won’t care. I hope he won’t. I hope he will
go right on, sharpening his talent as he is doing, changing his subjects, his
interests whenever he feels like it, writing about whatever is close to his
heart at the moment he writes, doing books that are sensitive, beautifully
written, imaginative works of art. That’s plenty to expect of any writing
man who cares as much for what he is doing as Steinbeck does. As for the
books written to prove this or to demonstrate that, to put forward a thesis
or to help the acceptance of an idea—let the ones who want to write them
do so. Sometimes such books will be literature. Sometimes, if the writers
of them happen to be artists, they will also be beautiful books. But more
often you will find beauty in books that were written because their authors
wanted to write them, just for their own sakes. So far, Steinbeck has stuck
to that plan. And Of Mice and Men is the best evidence that it is the right
way for him to write.

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BOOK REVIEWS


Fred T. Marsh. “John Steinbeck’s Tale of
Drifting Men.” New York Times Book Review 86
(28 February 1937): 7.
John Steinbeck is no mere virtuoso in the art of story-telling; but he is
one. Whether he writes about the amiable outcasts of Tortilla Flat or
about the grim strikers of In Dubious Battle, he tells a story. Of Mice and
Men is a thriller, a gripping tale running to novelette length that you will
not set down until it is finished. It is more than that; but it is that.
George and Lennie belong to the floating army of drifting ranch
hands. “Guys like us” George says, “are the loneliest guys in the world.
They got no family. They don’t belong no place. They come to a ranch
and work up a stake and then they go inta town and blow their stake, and
the first thing you know they’re poundin’ their tail on some other ranch.
They ain’t got nothing to look ahead to” (OMM 13–14).
The relationship between these two buddies of roads and ranches is a
strange one and causes comment at the new ranch. George is small, dark,
wiry, restless, keen-witted. Lennie is a huge, hulking man with an expres-
sionless face, pale blue eyes and wide, sloping shoulders, walking heavily
“dragging his feet a little, the way a bear drags his paws” (OMM 2). He is
stupid, but well-meaning.
George and Lennie came from the same Southern town, and George
has taken it on himself to take care of the big fellow. Sometimes he
wishes he were free of him. He’d get ahead much faster, Lennie is always
getting them into trouble—like the time he wanted to stroke the pretty
red skirt of the girl on the last ranch and in his dumb strength tore it off
her. They had to run away again to keep Lennie out of jail. The baby
boy in the big man’s body has baby urges—to stroke, pet and fondle
animals, all soft or pretty things, and he kills or destroys them unaware
of his strength. But when George is around he is all right, for he obeys
George implicitly.
George is a keen thinking man. There is nothing in this knocking
about. If only he and Lennie could get together $600 he knows of a little
place with a few acres they could buy and settle down to work for them-
selves. If only Lennie can be kept out of trouble. And so he keeps drum-

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ming it into Lennie’s head that he must be good and not do bad things.
Then they can get a stake together and live on the fat of the land in a place
of their own. They’ll grow their own stuff, keep a few pigs and chickens
and raise rabbits; Lennie can take charge of the rabbits and have all the
pets he wants. The big fellow never grows tired of hearing this story just
as a child likes to hear a tale told over and over again. And at the new
ranch, the way things are shaping up, the dream seems to be on the point
of coming true.
The tension increases and the apparently casual acts and conversation
nevertheless fit together to create suspense in an atmosphere of impending
doom. There are trouble makers in the bunkhouse. Curley, the boss’s son,
a little fellow handy with his fists, likes to take on big clumsy fellows, pick
fights with them. He wins no matter how the fight comes out, because if
he licks the big fellow every one says how game he is; and if he gets the
worst of it every one turns on the big fellow for not taking [on] some one
his own size. Then Curley’s wife, a lush beauty, is always coming around
where the men are, on the pretense of looking for Curley, giving all the
men the eye and, because, being a town girl, she is bored on the ranch,
bent on stirring up excitement. The other boys know how to keep out of
trouble. But Lennie only knows what George tells him when George is
right there on the spot. The girl spots Lennie as the only soft guy in the
bunch. The climax comes, not as a shock, but as a dreaded inevitability.
The theme is not, as the title would suggest, that the best laid plans Of
Mice and Men gang aft agley. They do in this story as in others. But it is
a play on the immemorial theme of what men live by besides bread alone.
In sure, raucous, vulgar Americanism, Steinbeck has touched the quick in
his little story.


Wilbur Needham. “John Steinbeck Does Dramatic
Novel.” Los Angeles Times, 28 February 1937: Part 3, 8.
Once more, John Steinbeck refuses to be neatly pigeonholed. He has
qualities lamentably rare in modern novelists: imagination and a restless,
inquiring mind. He will not sit down, like Thomas Wolfe, and contem-
plate his navel. He refuses to exploit one locality or any single idea or set

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BOOK REVIEWS

of characters. That is the way novelists achieve fame and shelves of books
all stamped with their trademarks; and Steinbeck cannot be accused of
courting fame, for he chooses queer balconies.
Beyond that, the man is something more than original in creation.
Those who seek originality are almost always experimenters; and the
results they offer are—experiments, usually unsuccessful. Steinbeck, obvi-
ously, does experiment; but he has a discernment in approach, an uncanny
touch in creation, that lift everything he writes out of ephemeral brackets
of experimental work. That is because he always has his feet on the ground
rooted in the earth and the things of earth—no matter what mountain
peaks his level eyes look on. No two of [the author’s] books had anything
in common except John Steinbeck, who was outwardly different in each,
inwardly no one but himself.
Now, Of Mice and Men. A little book, half the size of an ordinary
novel (the gods be praised for that!) but containing more. In everything
but its superficial form, the novel is a play. I was not surprised to learn
that a second script is being rehearsed at a San Francisco theater now. It
does not creak: and it will not, on the boards. There is fluid movement,
here, and inevitability; never spoiled by theatrical mechanics—and yet, it
is theater, as theater ought to be. With inner rhythms that move out into
a prose that is Steinbeck’s own.
George Milton and Lennie Small wander from one job to another on
California ranches. They don’t want to drift; but Lennie, a hulking fellow,
is not quite bright, and he gets them both in trouble. Lennie likes to pet
soft things, mice and rabbits and dresses and shining women’s hair. The
mice die, surprisingly, for Lennie is very gentle; or, he thinks he is. But his
great paws have an unconscious power; and the mice die and the women
scream. So they drift on to other parts, sometimes none too quickly.
Always before them is a dream of a little place of their own, where
they can live on the “fatta the lan,” and Lennie can “get to tend them
rabbits.” Always before them; and now, it seems about to turn real. Here
the drama, ever close beside Steinbeck’s strange inventiveness and native
humor, begins to outpace it and to draw away.
Of the book’s inner meaning, never obvious but never entirely ob-
scured by unexpected laughter and the movement of the story, I will not
speak. If you do not like inner meanings, you will certainly not find one
here, and, if you do, you’ll see more than one for yourself.

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Louis Paul. “Prose Made of Wind and Soil and
Weather.” New York Herald Tribune,
28 February 1937: Books section, 5.
The weeds and the willows and the tall waving grain of California’s sweet
valleys, rabbits and mice and a woman’s soft hair, the hot slanting sun
and the hungry desire of a pair of floaters to own a handful of dirt are the
materials out of which this lovely new novel by John Steinbeck is evoked.
Purling water is purling water here, without overtones; a gracious sky is
as beautiful as in any lyric poetry. The men are lads sent down to the
ranch from Murray and Ready’s in San Francisco: Lennie, like Nature
itself, whose powerful fingers killed little animals before he knew it, and
George, struggling to become human. Of Mice and Men is another of John
Steinbeck’s parables of earth, and no writer I know shapes the soil into
truer patterns for us to understand.
[Steinbeck’s earlier] works have been called dissimilar. Versatile, per-
haps; in a day when success has the tendency to standardize, versatility in a
novelist or any one else is thought of with some astonishment. The threads
that run continuously through these stories by John Steinbeck are, under
examination, more than perceptible. Not especially rare are those authors
who think in terms of panaceas, whose lack of courage and vitality draws
back from the monumental task of understanding; they are all for short cuts,
for adopting some ready-made philosophy and rushing on from there, and
what we get from these authors are drab second-hand discoveries, valueless
intrinsically dull. Here, however, is an intelligence as explicit as any research
scientists, an intelligence directed toward the understanding of the relation-
ship between men and earth. In each successive book, this desire to explore
the complex affinity is more apparent, until, with the publication of Of Mice
and Men, it achieves such cumulative impact as to be undeniable.
Of Mice and Men is made of a theme which some lesser novelist might
have called too insignificant to expound—two indigent members of the
strange tribe of casual workers destroyed by the simple mystery of loyalty.
But before they are destroyed there burns brilliantly between the covers of
this little book the image of the fire inside the flesh of two human beings,
whom fate has crushed before birth, human beings whose lives mean no
more to Nature than robins caught up by hawks.

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The story seems simple when accomplished by a superb craftsman:

the desire and struggle of those who till the soil for others to own a tiny
plot of the earth for themselves against this primitive hunger like the
rising tide of a destructive river, is played the forces which make a naive
aspiration impossible of attainment. “Sure, we’d have a little house an’ a
room to ourself. Little fat iron stove, an’ in the winter we’d keep a fire
goin’ in it. It ain’t enough land so we’d have to work too hard. Maybe six,
seven hours a day. We wouldn’t have to buck no barley eleven hours a day.
An’ when we put in a crop’ why we’d be there to take the crop up. We’d
know what come of our planting” (OMM 58). And while George dreams
in the crummy ranch bunk-house, he knows that his words are lies; and
the reader knows his words are the lies we use to escape our destinies.
And the author knows. They are not ugly lies, you understand; merely
the imagination evoking for the moment its little dream, an escape in to
a fairyland where there is no barley to buck.
In the cities men go to “movies.” There are little dumps on the Bowery
where for 10 cents the disinherited may observe life aboard a yacht or in a
penthouse, or cowboys riding the beautiful ranges of Arizona. In Arizona
the cowboys ride fence, one leg propped over against the saddle horn,
absorbed in a magazine of hair-raising adventure stories. Men in factories
tiredly dream of grubbing for gold “out West,” and office workers dance
themselves all night into insensibility. Men take whisky into them and, with
its drug, bump their heads against the stars in their rosy fancy. And serious
observers, infuriated by a world which impels us frantically toward escape,
babble in an impotent fashion of cures. Those who speak of books hunt
down such observations and interpret them in terms of social significance.
But the poet who immortalizes the fleeting tragedy of two such men
as George and Lennie is his own social force. That Lennie was an idiot,
no less, and victim of a pathological disease, is entirely beyond the point.
John Steinbeck does not know what makes men idiots and victims of
disease; such knowledge comes slowly and painfully as does the cure for
cancer. We sting the flesh of our economic body with patent medicines’
wondering, let us say, if Lennie’s tragedy might not be avoided if the
government in Washington gave every crop floater and bindlestiff and let-
tuce picker and wheat sacker a little farm in Salinas Valley. Such nonsense
invalidates the very spirit in which the author of such a work as Of Mice
and Men is creating.

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 BOOK REVIEWS

The verities we can live with are those thoughts born out of dreams
which, in the end, distinguish us from the robins and the waving grain.
Of such verities does John Steinbeck write, out of a warm and a rich
knowledge. With the genuine artist’s respect for his materials and love of
his craft, he puts away cheap prejudice, the distortion which comes from
anger; his thought is to tell the little truths he had discovered with his
eyes and callused hands and intelligence, and if these truths do not touch
your social conscience, nothing can. In Of Mice and Men, the truth is made
into a moving and profoundly beautiful book full of singing prose and en-
chantment. If, standing upon some pinnacle of dry logic, we suspect that
his creations of these ignorant American laborers are idealizations, that
without the magic of his poetry they must remain sweat-soaked beasts of
the fields, we but doubly assure ourselves of his essential humanity and
pay his artistry the highest compliment we know.


Maxine Garrard. “Of Mice and Men by Steinbeck
Powerful and Absorbing Novel.” Columbus [GA]
Enquirer, 1 March 1937: 2.
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck is a book so powerful it will make
the reader’s hair stand on end and curl a little in the bargain. Mr. Stein-
beck is a contributor to Esquire and has been startling its readers since
that magazine exploded upon the public a few years ago. His Tortilla
Flat caused comment and Of Mice and Men will bring on even more talk.
Weak-hearted readers and lovers of moonlight and romance should take
a word of warning—this is not of the pleasant school of thought wherein
things turn out fine in the end; they don’t.
Serving his strong meat fresh and still warm from life’s slaughter
house, John Steinbeck shades nothing in presenting his terrifying tale;
however, beneath the superficial horror of the story the reader senses a
dream of breathless beauty shimmering through the lives of the two main
characters. These vagabonds are men predestined to a stark, empty exis-
tence but between them flickers some unexplained devotion and future
vision of the time when they will “live on the fatta the lan’.” . . .
From the sordid lives of a cocky tramp and a balmy moron, John
Steinbeck has written a drama of indescribable magic and heart-breaking

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futility. Even if you think you are tough and can “take it,” this book will
cause an emotional upheaval. It is strong, it is powerful and it is wonder-
ful, but unless you can swallow raw stuff—lay off.


“Young Man’s Dream.” Time 28 (1 March 1937): 69.
George and Lennie were ranch hands. George was small, wiry tough,
shrewd; Lennie was enormous, floppy-looking but Herculean, and a
half-wit. George and Lennie were pals. Lennie was always getting them
into trouble, losing them jobs, getting them run out of town because
he liked to pet things—mice, little girls, rabbits. Not conscious of his
blundering strength, Lennie was apt to kill what he petted. George kept
him in line as well as he could by bawling him out, threatening to leave
him, telling him a beautiful fairy story about how they would save enough
money to buy a little farm, settle down in comfort, let Lennie take care
of rabbits.
They had just had to leave one job in a hurry because Lennie’s pas-
sion for petting things had been misunderstood by a frightened little girl.
On the new ranch everything went all right at first. Lennie was a terrific
worker, did beautifully as long as George was at hand to tell him what to
do. It looked for a while as if they could really make their stake, buy their
little farm, settle down to make their dream come true. But then things
began to go wrong. The boss’s son was an ugly customer, and he had just
married a floozy who kept him at a white heat of suspicion. When he
picked on Lennie, the big half-wit got so panicky that he seized his little
tormentor’s hand, crushed it nearly to bits. George managed to get them
out of that scrape, but when Lennie accidentally broke the floozy’s neck,
there was only one thing George could do to remedy that. Knowing where
Lennie was hiding, George got to him ahead of the posse, got trusting
Lennie to turn his head while he shot him behind the ear.
To Americans whose eyes are still smarting from the unhappy ending
of the Wall Street fairy tale of 1929, John Steinbeck’s little dream story
will not seem out of line with reality: they may even overlook the fact that
it too is a fairy tale. An oxymoronic combination of the tough and tender,
Of Mice and Men will appeal to sentimental cynics, cynical sentimentalists.
Critic Christopher Morley found himself “purified” by this “masterpiece

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. . . written in purest imagined compassion and truth.” Readers less easily

thrown off their trolley will prefer Hans Andersen.


P. Ralph Thomson. “Books of the Times.”
New York Times, 2 March 1937: 19.
John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men . . . is the most recently published of
books mentioned here, and in bulk one of the smallest, yet it should not
be overlooked by anyone interested in American fiction. In retrospect, the
lovable half-wit Lennie seems even a more improbable character than at
first reading it appeared to be. But improbable or not, he is memorable—a
blend if such a thing can be imagined, of Paul Bunyan, Tiny Tim and
Browning’s sprawling Caliban. . . .


Harry Thornton Moore. “Of Mice and Men.”
New Republic 90 (3 March 1937): 118–19.
George and Lennie are two drifting ranch hands who dream, as rootless
men do, of a piece of land of their own, where they will “belong.” They
have never been able to work up a stake because big, blundering, simple-
witted Lennie keeps getting them into trouble. He can never remember
things. He tenderly loves puppies and mice but always forgets about not
squeezing them too hard, and kills them. Fabulously strong but very
timid, he is quite docile in the hands of George, the pilot-fish of the pair.
George feels that Lennie has been given into his keeping. He controls
him by talking about the rabbit farm they will have one day, where Lennie
may look after the rabbits if he is good—for George too is webbed in the
dream. They come to work in the Salinas Valley, and it is there, among
the people they meet at the ranch, that their story is worked out.
This story has that common denominator of most good imaginative
writing, a shadow of the action that means something beyond the action.
But the underlying theme (of the danger of dreaming) never clogs the
primary story. The book is well contrived and effectively compressed,
driving ahead with straight and rapid movement, as magnificently writ-
ten as Steinbeck’s other four California novels. He again shows a deep

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understanding of both place and people, and his presentation of the

ranch and its daily life has the gleam of actuality. The people, human
beings reduced to bareness of thought and speech and action, are on the
side-tracks of the main line of western culture. They exist in a hard real-
ity, but most of them are susceptible to dreams. Some of them are lost
in compensatory dream-images of themselves, others are set afire by the
wish-dream of George and Lennie. But in one way or another all the
dreams and some of the people (both good and bad) are smashed: a spirit
of doom prevails as strong as in Steinbeck’s fellow Californian, Jeffers.
A writer deep in the ways of his own people feels (in many cases
unconsciously) a racial compulsive: the actual and mythical experience of
his people helps generate his material. But the final shaping of it depends
upon the artist’s own vision. In the present story, Lennie is cast up from
the midst of us and we all know him. Baffled, unknowingly powerful,
utterly will-less, he cannot move without a leader. And we also know
many Georges, good-heartedly trying to help the Lennies of life muddle
through; but all the while, despite their courage and good intentions, none
too certain of themselves. John Steinbeck sees them as unable to prevent
their charges (or often themselves) from steering into catastrophe. In book
after book his protagonists, tragic or comic, are shattered; and it goes
hardest with those who had the brightest dreams. It is disturbing to find
these men of good will so consistently going down in spiritual defeat or
meeting with a brutal death.


Heywood Broun. “It Seems to Me.”
St. Paul [MN] Daily News, 4 March 1937: 8.
I’d like to come along with the large group of critics who have already
recorded their enthusiasm for John Steinbeck’s new novel, Of Mice and
Men. This is a book written with compassion, celerity and an admirable
sense of structure. It is that rare and much to be desired thing—a short
novel. The telling takes no more than 31,000 words, and yet the narrative
is fully rounded out and complete. For instance, in my opinion, Of Mice
and Men is infinitely more important in the literary scheme of things than
Gone with the Wind.

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I am moved to great excitement about the emergence of Steinbeck

because he so neatly splits the bracket between the old romanticists and
the stern-faced boys and girls who have recently been treating the novel as
if it were nothing more than a candid camera. Steinbeck knows his farm
workers as well as anybody else. Lennie and George talk straight. No spu-
rious literary phrase creeps into the mouth of either. Nevertheless many
long stretches of their conversation are animated by true poetic content.
I think life is like that and that modern authors are beginning to find
it out. Transcripts of talk may be as faithful as you please and still take on
the cadence and color which make for beauty. Perhaps somewhat after the
manner of Moliere’s hero who discovered that he had been talking prose
all his life, the common run-of-the-mine American may wake up to the
fact that he uses a good deal of poetry in dealing with his daily concerns.
That may be a shock to some, since along certain levels poetry means Ed-
die Guest and a rhyme scheme fit to break the ear with its persistent beat,
like that of night club drums.
I do not know which native author should be selected as the spiritual
ancestor of Steinbeck. Every writer has to have an ancestor forced upon
him, whether or not he recognizes the old gentleman. Offhand it would
seem to me that Ring Lardner might have suggested in part the manner
and mode of John Steinbeck. To be sure, there is little similarity in subject
matter and none at all in point of view save the quality of compassion for
those who get pushed around.
I assume that at some period of his life Steinbeck read Upton Sinclair.
Mr. Sinclair is a good model for young authors, since he can serve both
as an inspiration and at the same time as a horrible example. I think that
writers will be lucky if they can catch from Upton something of his terrific
zeal about present problems in the workaday world, and yet if the younger
men are exposed to his influence too long they may become infected with
the flatness and bleakness of the Sinclair prose.
I’m aware that Upton Sinclair is a poet as well as a novelist. And his
is a style which doesn’t get in the way when he has a fast moving and
deeply biting story to tell. It is smoother, of course, than the English of
Dreiser, and yet never ornate. Fine writing and bad writing may be equally
destructive in the matter of getting into the reader’s eye when he is in close
pursuit of the theme itself. Of course, I’m using “fine writing” in the worst
sense of the phrase.

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The proper time to admire the style of a man is when you have fin-
ished the last sentence on the last page of his story. So it was with Of Mice
and Men as far as I was concerned. I had put the book down all stirred by
the logical poignance of its conclusion. And it was only then that I sud-
denly realized that this man Steinbeck could write like a magician.
Until then I had been too much interested in what he had to say to pay
very much attention to the manner in which he said it. Like a conjurer, a
novelist should be able to take the rabbit out of the hat without letting his
audience in on the way in which he did it. John Steinbeck seems to me
right now to be the wonder man of current American letters.


Mark Van Doren. “Wrong Number.”
Nation 144 (6 March 1937): 275.
All but one of the persons in Mr. Steinbeck’s extremely brief novel are
subhuman if the range of the word human is understood to coincide
with the range thus far established by fiction. Two of them are evil, one
of them is dangerous without meaning to be, and all of them are igno-
rant—all of them, that is, except the one who shall be named hereafter.
Far from knowing the grammar of conduct, they do not even know its
orthography. No two of their thoughts are consecutive, nor for that matter
do they think; it is rather that each of them follows some instinct as a bull
follows the chain which runs through a hole in his nose, or as a crab moves
toward its prey. The scene is a ranch in California, and the bunkhouse
talk is terrific—God damn, Jesus Christ, what the hell, you crazy bastard,
I gotta gut ache, and things like that. The dialect never varies, just as the
story never runs uphill.
George and Lennie, the itinerant workers who come to the ranch one
day with a dream of the little farm they will own as soon as they get the
jack together, seem to think their new job will last at least that long; but
the reader knows from the beginning that it will not last, for Lennie is a
half-witted giant with a passion for petting mice—or rabbits, or pups, or
girls—and for killing them when they don’t like it. He is doomed in this
book to kill Curley’s wife; that is obvious; and then—. Lennie, you see,
cannot help shaking small helpless creatures until their necks are broken
just as George cannot relinquish his dream, and just as Curley cannot ever

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stop being a beast of jealousy. They are wound up to act that way, and the
best they can do is run down: which is what happens when Mr. Steinbeck
comes to his last mechanical page.
What, however, of the one exception. Ah, he is Slim the jerkline
skinner, the tall man with the “God-like eyes” that get fastened on you so
that you can’t think of anything else for a while. “There was a gravity in
his manner and a quiet so profound that all talk stopped when he spoke.
. . . His hatchet face was ageless. He might have been thirty-five or fifty.
His ear heard more than was said to him, and his slow speech had over-
tones not of thought, but of understanding beyond thought. His hands,
large and lean, were as delicate in their action as those of a temple dancer”
(OMM 33–34). He looks through people and beyond them—a feat never
accomplished save in mechanical novels. And he understands—why he
understands everything that Mr. Steinbeck understands. It is the merest
accident of education that he talks like the rest. “Jesus, he’s jes’ like kid,
ain’t he,” he says (OMM 43). If he had his creator’s refinement of tongue
he could write such sentences as this one which introduces Lennie: “His
arms did not swing at his sides, but hung loosely and only moved because
the heavy hands were pendula” (OMM 2). It wouldn’t have done to write
pendulums. That would have given the real sound and look of Lennie, and
besides it is a real word.
Mr. Steinbeck, I take it, has not been interested in reality of any kind.
His jerkline skinner (mule driver) is as hopelessly above the human range
as Lennie or Candy or Curley’s painted wife is below it. All is extreme
here; everybody is a doll; and, if there is a kick in the story, it is given us
from some source which we cannot see, as when a goose walks over our
grave, or as when in the middle of the night the telephone rings sharply,
and it is the wrong number. We shall remember it about that long.


S. W. “Current Literature.” Philadelphia Inquirer,
6 March 1937: 14.
Most stories of those President Roosevelt calls the “underprivileged”
sound a protestant note. It is as if the author had a graphophone record
of remarks by Norman Thomas or Mr. John L. Lewis at his elbow. So
fiction suffers; and argument is confused. Such things may not be said of

23
BOOK REVIEWS

the novels of John Steinbeck. On his record of six books he takes rank as
the best interpreter of the semi-submerged in this country. Whether good
or bad, unfortunate or self-stricken, he goes to the core of character with
the precision of a surgeon whose diagnosis is given in terms of art. Tricky
rhetoric he eschews. The manner of his expression is fine and true. In his
newly published short novel, Of Mice and Men, [what] might seem vulgar
is dignified, and at times transfigured, by a soul shining through. This is
the story of George and Lennie, strange partners in grain-bucking on a
California ranch. The story of George, small and active, and Lennie, the
hulking giant with a child’s mind and a passion for petting a mouse, a
rabbit, a piece of velvet, anything soft. With affectionate strategy George
stands between Lennie and disaster until Curley’s wife, the foolish jade,
invites him to stroke her hair. So there is one thing more for George to
do in the most affecting passage of recent American fiction.


Eleanor Roosevelt. “My Day.” New York World
Telegram, 16 March 1937: 31.
I have just finished a little book called Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck,
which fellow columnist, Mr. Heywood Broun, reviewed in his column not
long ago. My admiration for Mr. Broun leads me to want to look into any-
thing he praises, and so I sent for the book to bring it away with me. It is
beautifully written and a marvelous picture of the tragedy of loneliness.
I could see the two men, one comes across their likes in many places,
not only in the West described in the book but in every part of the coun-
try. When I closed Of Mice and Men, I could not help but think how for-
tunate we are when we have real friends, people we can count on and turn
to and who we know are always glad to see us when we are lonely.


Dorothea Brande Collins. “Reading at Random.”
American Review 9 (April 1937): 100–13.
As for Of Mice and Men—surely no more sentimental wallowing ever
passed for a novel, or had such a welcome, as this sad tale of a huge

24
 BOOK REVIEWS

half-wit and his cowboy protector! Mr. Steinbeck this time wrings the
Tears of Things from a ten-gallon hat, and reviewers who cannot bear
the mawkishness of a Milne, the crudity of a Coward, or the mysticism
of a Morgan were able to take the sorrowful symmetries of a Steinbeck to
their hearts and write their reviews with tears running down their cheeks.
Who does not know by this time of Lennie, who loved to stroke soft furry
things, but didn’t know his own strength? Of Slim, with the “God-like
eyes,” knight sans peur et sans reproche of the bunkhouse? Of George,
who loved Lennie well enough to shoot him? Of “Curley’s wife,” that
wax-dummy girl who might have come straight out of the window of a
chain dress-shop, so glossy, so hard, so brightly painted—and so far from
ever having drawn a breath?
Mr. Steinbeck is “economical.” He is, indeed. That is perhaps the
secret of his charm. I feel sure that all those reviewers who cheered so
hard for Of Mice and Men would, if they could have been caught while still
sobbing over George and Lennie, have admitted that even critics are only
boys at heart, for that is just the mood that Mr. Steinbeck’s work induces.
So perhaps again, they would admit that this secret of his success is that a
certain simple type of reader feels, when he discovers that he has foreseen
correctly any movement of a story, a kind of participation in the creative
act of the author. Almost any critic would admit this if the book under
consideration were one of the Tarzan books, or a book by Lloyd Douglas,
or any one of a dozen “popular novelists” of the sort they affect to despise,
but perhaps they have not noticed that the symmetry and expectedness (or
if you prefer, read “economy”) of Mr. Steinbeck’s work put the average
pulp writer to shame.
If Lennie kills a mouse by stroking it, you may be sure he will uninten-
tionally kill something larger in the same way; when you hear of Curley’s
wife’s soft hair, “like fur,” you can begin to cooperate with the author by ex-
pectation of her end. When George learns that a poor old worthless smelly
dog can be dispatched easily by a shot in the back of his head, you are
unwarrantably guileless if you do not suspect the manner in which Lennie
will meet his death. If an old man dreams of a home, peace, and security
you may be sure that a home, peace, and security are what he will most
agonizingly just miss. And so forth. You can call this sort of foreshadowing
“economy” if it pleases you; but if “economy” is the word you choose you
should abandon the word “obvious” hereafter and forever.

25
BOOK REVIEWS

It may be some time before the current vogue for Steinbeck passes.
Masculine sentimentality particularly when it masquerades as toughness,
is a little longer in being seen through than the feminine or the inclu-
sively human variety. Undoubtedly, there are plenty who would deny,
even today that The Sun Also Rises and What Price Glory? are too hard to
find the soft spots where the decay shows: the romantic overestimation of
the role of friendship, the wax-figure women, bright, hard, treacherous,
unreal—whether a Lady Brett, a French girl behind the lines or “Curley’s
wife,” these are all essentially hateful women, women from whom it is a
virtue to flee to masculine companionship. There was certainly a sort of
stag-party hysteria and uproar about the approval we have been hearing
for this padded short story about underdogs and animals, bunkhouses and
bathos, which has seldom risen so high since “Wait for baby!” soared over
the footlights. . . . Ah, I was forgetting Mr. Chips.


Edward Weeks. “The Bookshelf.” Atlantic 159
(April 1937): 14, 16 at back of issue.
Since the death of Ring Lardner, an element once characteristic of
American fiction has been conspicuous by its absence: laughter. The short
stories and the novels of our younger writers are so often pervaded by a
humorless intensity or by an irony and didacticism that leave the reader
cold. Now from California comes a novelist with a better balance, a
shrewder skill, a more native sense of reality. His name is John Steinbeck:
he has five novels to his credit. Farsighted reviewers began to spot him
three years ago; the reading public, slower with its recognition, will now
hurry to make amends.
John Steinbeck must have footed his way through that California
which is neither movies nor real estate. He knows the wanderers—the
fruit pickers, the ranch hands, the hoboes; he knows this migratory
race—its pride, its humor, its gullibility and futility. New Steinbeck
readers might follow this programme: first, Tortilla Flat, light-hearted,
wholly delightful; next, In Dubious Battle, which, partisan though it be,
is quite our most vital story of an American strike; and so coming down
to his Of Mice and Men . . . ?, a short tale of two harvest hands, the one a

26
 BOOK REVIEWS

slow-witted elephant, the other a ferret. You feel the affection that binds
Lennie and George together. You hear talk as natural as grass. You rec-
ognize in them a hunger which moves all men. There are moments when
the tension and brevity of the story make it read like a theatrical script. I
mean Slim’s authority and Candy’s dog mean more to me than the drama
in the barn or at the pool. But, whatever be your favorite passages, here is
indispensable proof of a vital and experienced story-teller.


“Dorothea Brande Doesn’t Enjoy Steinbeck.”
Charlotte [NC] News, 6 June 1937: 9A.
In the same measure that John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men gave
pleasure to many readers, so it outraged the critical sensibilities of two
reviewers—Mark van Doren and Dorothea Brande Collins. Professor
van Doren was dreadfully put out by its profanity, which suggests that
he is the Rip Van Winkle of our times. Mrs. Collins (the author of Be-
coming a Writer, which tells how to make your unconscious do the work)
decided that the story was so obvious that it bowled over only critics who
were boys at heart.
Commenting in the American Review, she says the secret of Stein-
beck’s success is “that a certain simple type of reader feels, when he has
foreseen correctly any movement of a story, a kind of participation in the
creative act of the author. . . . If Lennie kills a mouse by stroking it, you
may be sure he will unintentionally kill something larger in the same way;
when you hear of Curley’s wife’s soft hair ‘like fur,’ you can begin to co-
operate with the author by expectation of her end.”
Mrs. Collins evidently feels that in saying that the author meets the
expectations of the readers she has dealt his story a body blow. As a matter
of fact, she has merely expressed her dislike for a technique that is one of
many employed by writers; her interests are intellectual. And her concern
with the novel is chiefly as an exercise for the mind. This is a high form of
artistic appreciation and expression, but by no means the only one. What
counts in Of Mice and Men is that the author meets the expectations of his
readers (women as well as the stag line) a bit more successfully than many
other workers in his medium.

27
BOOK REVIEWS


Harold Brighouse. “New Novels: Archers of the Long
Bow.” Manchester Guardian, 14 September 1937: 5.
In [Wallace Stegner’s] Remembering Laughter the farm and the landscape
are realized without sentimentality. Mr. Steinbeck, in Of Mice and Men,
is both melodramatic and sentimental. Assume that there is love between
a performing bear and its keeper; the bear hugs a woman to death and the
keeper has to shoot it. For “bear” read Lennie, a giant of a man mentally
defective, and for “keeper” read George. They came, partners, through the
Californian woods to a farming ranch, and George’s dream was to save
wages till they could own land of their own. There is an incident, made
significant, of the shooting of a sheepdog, stinking in useless old age,
and insistence upon Lennie’s passion for stroking mice and rabbits till his
brutish affection killed them. So it was that he stroked the red hair, and
she not unwilling, of the raffish wife of the rancher’s son, and, stroking,
killed her. It is a pitiful tragedy amongst people the brightest of whom is
hardly more than half-witted, and the publisher is rhapsodical about it.
Personally I think Mr. Steinbeck has done better work than this.


V. S. Pritchett. “New Novels.” New Statesman and
Nation [England] 14 (25 September 1937): 48–49.
Of Mice and Men is decidedly surprising and queer. It is the story of two
casuals who run out of one job into the next. One is a huge half-wit with
a grip like a vice and a brain like a pea. He has a sinister mania for touch-
ing things mice, puppies, velvet, girls’ hair and sometimes he strokes too
hard; the other is a dogged little chap who “travels around” with him and
tries in vain to help the soft-headed, hard-handed fellow out of trouble.
The feeble talk of cowboys, their pathetic hopes and affections, their
childish preoccupations, are perfectly recorded. The American underdog
has provided Mr. Steinbeck with some macabre material. The reader
must not be put off the book by its awful jacket and its pointless illustra-
tions.

28
 BOOK REVIEWS


“Of Mice and Men.” London Mercury 36
(October 1937): 595.
Mr. Steinbeck’s tale of two drifting cattle-ranch hands, Lennie, the “natu-
ral” and George, his devoted protector, is an extremely skilful variant of
the tough tabloid. The companions have an escape-story of a place of their
own with cows and rabbits where they will live “off the fatta of the lan’,”
which George tells Lennie on their long tramps from job to job. Lennie’s
daftness takes the form of killing small, soft things, including women.
The final scene, in which George, preparing to shoot his friend to save
him from being lynched, tells the little story for the last time, is a triumph
of the sentimental macabre.


“Of Mice and Men.” Times Literary Supplement
[London], 2 October 1937: 714.
This is a moving story of two drifting cattle-ranch hands in California.
George and Lennie are friends, owning nothing but what they pack from
one job to the next. But they are optimists. The dream that buoys and
binds them is of the bit of land they are going to buy—some day. The
vision comes excitingly near, then vanishes.
The disaster is inherent in Lennie’s nature. A phenomenal worker
but a wantwit, he is pathetically incapable of looking after himself, or
even of controlling his huge body. George, small, active, querulous, is
incessantly watchful over his infantile friend and liability. They have been
chased from their last job because Lennie innocently touched a girl’s red
dress. Now a promising fresh start offers on another ranch. But when the
wanton wife of the owner’s unpleasant son makes up to Lennie, he shakes
her, not in anger but in fear of George’s wrath, and finds he has killed her.
He acts on George’s standing instruction that in event of trouble he is to
hide by the river. The lynchers go in pursuit. But George, with a stolen
pistol, reaches Lennie first and deals quick death, the best that could come
to his friend. It is a tremendous climax to a short tale of much power and

29
BOOK REVIEWS

beauty. Mr. Steinbeck has contributed a small masterpiece to the modern

tough-tender school of American fiction.


Additional Reviews
Joseph Henry Jackson. “A Bookman’s Notebook.” San Francisco Chronicle, 6
February 1937: 13.
“Friendship.” Newsweek 9 (27 February 1937): 38–39.
“A Tender, Touching Tale Admirably Told.” Chicago Tribune, 27 February 1937:
11.
Walter Sidney. “Treacle from a Talent.” Brooklyn Eagle, 28 February 1937: Sec-
tion C, 17.
Harry Hansen. “Critic Hails John Steinbeck Story as Finest Bit of Fiction in
Decade.” Pittsburgh Press, March 1937: Society section, 14.
Sterling North. “Blessed Are the Meek Portrayed by John Steinbeck.” Chicago
Daily News, 3 March 1937: 31.
Somerset Maugham. “H .G. Wells and John Steinbeck.” Philadelphia Inquirer, 6
March 1937: L4.
Russell Smith. “Steinbeck Humanizes Statistics.” Washington Post, 7 March
1937: 8.
Joseph Henry Jackson. “John Steinbeck: A Portrait.” Saturday Review 16 (25
September 1937): 11–12, 18.
James Newcomer. “Reappraisals IV: Steinbeck’s Mice and Men.” Dallas News, 14
August 1949: 32.

Note
1. This quote combines speeches by both Lennie and George. The critic mis-
takenly elides them.

30
 Part Two
THE 1940s AND 1950s

M
axwell Geismar in American Moderns, from Rebellion to Confor-
mity (New York: Hill and Wang, 1958) was similarly dismis-
sive of the novel, criticizing the lack of freewill demonstrated
by Steinbeck’s protagonists—Lennie Small and George Milton. His
reflections suggested that the pair are more animal-like than human and
that the author’s talent is questionable at best.
Albert Kazin’s On Native Grounds (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock,
1942) continued the tendency of finding Of Mice and Men to be somewhat
inferior because of its popular appeal and the broad reading public it at-
tracted. Kazin concluded that the book’s calculated sentimentality created
a far too general appeal for it to be considered a piece of “fine” literature.
Instead, it seemed designed for simplistic rather than mature readers.
E. W. Tedlock Jr. and C. V. Wicker’s Steinbeck and His Critics: A
Record of Twenty-five Years appeared in 1957 (Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico Press) and called into question the assumptions of Steinbeck’s
earlier critics, especially those who were critical of Steinbeck because they
felt his philosophy was not compatible with theirs; Tedlock and Wicker also
defended the author against charges of sentimentality and reprinted essays
that were to become classic commentaries on the Steinbeck canon.
The first full-fledged defense of Steinbeck’s work both stylistically
and thematically had to wait until 1958 and the publication of Peter
Lisca’s The Wide World of John Steinbeck (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press). Lisca’s assessment of Of Mice and Men in particular
set the stage for future emphases by calling attention to what he labels

31
PART TWO

the previous myopic observations about the text and by discussing the
author’s employment of symbolic settings, his use of animal imagery, and
his ability to design unique and creative figurative language to describe his
characters and to further his plotline.

Other Significant Studies from the 1940s–1950s

Beach, Joseph Warren. “John Steinbeck: Journeyman Artist.” In American Fic-
tion, 1920–1940, 309–47. New York: Macmillan, 1941 [reprinted in Ted-
lock and Wicker, Steinbeck and His Critics, 80–81 and in Jill Karson (San
Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1996), 90 ff].
This essay praises Steinbeck’s skill as a storyteller and his versatility, ob-
jectivity, and diversification. Specifically calling attention to his depiction of
human nature as fresh, direct and authentic (comparable to de Maupassant),
Beach then goes on to single out Of Mice and Men for the beauty depicted in
its tragic story line and the essential decency and pathos shown by George
and Lennie.
Gibbs, Lincoln. “John Steinbeck, Moralist.” Antioch Review 2 (June 1942): 172–
84 [reprinted in Tedlock and Wicker, Steinbeck and His Critics, 92–103].
Gibbs praises Steinbeck for advocating social reform and confronting
the vulgar and uncouth facts of life in concrete detail. Consequently, he
posits that Steinbeck’s readers will need tolerance (a good heart and strong
stomach) to confront the author’s realistic portraits. Labeling Steinbeck as
a noncritical humanist, Gibbs praises him for penetrating the hearts of his
most disrespectable characters like migrant laborers and underprivileged
social classes, thus enabling readers to understand that often misrepresented
“others” are not unlike themselves.
Burgum, Edwin Berry. “The Sensibility of John Steinbeck.” Science and Society 10
(Spring 1946): 132–47 [reprinted in Tedlock and Wicker, Steinbeck and His
Critics: 104–18].
In this article, Burgum explores John Steinbeck’s attitude toward the poor,
a class of people who had captured the attention of American novelists in
the 1930s. Burgum found that Steinbeck presents a wide range of attitudes
toward poor workers and vagabonds throughout his many novels. In the
novel Of Mice and Men, Steinbeck creates characters that evoke complex
sociological attitudes—some defined, some ambiguous—regarding the un-
derprivileged. Burgum suggests that Steinbeck leaves the reader pondering
at the end of the story, unclear about what attitude to take toward the moral
dilemma surrounding Lennie and George.

32
 THE 1940s AND 1950s

Kennedy, John. “Life Affirmed and Dissolved.” In Fifty Years of The American
Novel, ed. Harold Gardiner, 217–36. New York: Scribner’s, 1951 [reprinted
in Tedlock and Wicker, Steinbeck and His Critics, 119–34].
This essay suggests that Steinbeck does not fit into categories of negativ-
ism so prevalent among other modern writers. While the author depicts hu-
man existence as unremitting conflict and a savage battle, he also emphasizes
that life is worth living (baffling though it may be) by asserting the resiliency
and tough durability of his characters.
Lisca, Peter. “Motif and Pattern in Of Mice and Men.” Modern Fiction Studies 2
(Winter 1956): 228–34.

33
 CHAPTER TWO
THE WIDE WORLD OF JOHN STEINBECK,
CHAPTER 8
Peter Lisca

A
lthough Of Mice and Men appeared almost exactly one year after
In Dubious Battle, two years had elapsed since the strike novel had
been completed. The delay this time, however, was not in pub-
lication. Covici-Friede received the completed manuscript in September
of 1936, and Of Mice and Men was published in February of the following
year. Steinbeck had hardly finished the final draft of In Dubious Battle
when he wrote to his agents, “I’m doing a play now. I don’t know what
will come of it. If I can do it well enough, it will be a good play. I mean
the theme is swell” (JS-MO, ca. February, 1935).
While this reference to “a play” probably indicates that Of Mice and
Men was in progress two years before its publication, Steinbeck was do-
ing so many other things during this time that attention to the new work
must have been sporadic. . . . Despite these interruptions, however, Of
Mice and Men was pretty well along by April [of 1936], when Steinbeck
wrote he was working very hard on the new novel, and again that he had
“struck a snag” in the new work (JS-MO, 4/15/36; 4/20/36). In May,
. . . he underwent a baptism which many authors have undergone at some
time or other. “Minor tragedy stalked,” he wrote. “My setter pup, left
alone one night, made confetti of about half of my manuscript book. Two
months work to do over again. It sets me back. There was no other draft.
I was pretty mad, but the poor little fellow may have been acting critically.

Excerpted from Lisca, Peter, The Wide World of John Steinbeck. Copyright © 1958 by
Rutgers, The State University. Reprinted by permission of Rutgers University Press.

35
PETER LISCA

I didn’t want to ruin a good dog for a manuscript I’m not sure is good at
all. He only got an ordinary spanking” (JS-MO, 5/27/36). It was not until
late in August Steinbeck finished the job of rewriting.1
Steinbeck’s growing reputation and the publishers’ promotion created
an eager market for Of Mice and Men even before the book appeared. . . .
On the eve of publication, he wrote: “I wish I could be personally elated
about all the fuss but I can’t. The book isn’t that good. It’s just one of
these crazy streams starting. . . . But as for the unpredictable literary en-
thusiasms of this country—I have little faith in them” (JS-MO, 2/12/37).
This opinion that “The book isn’t that good” is repeated in an article
which Steinbeck wrote for Stage just before Of Mice and Men’s Broadway
première, but after it had been performed directly from the book by the
San Francisco labor-theater group; “The book Of Mice and Men was an
experiment and, in what it set out to do, it was a failure.”2
Since, in this article and elsewhere, Steinbeck is explicit about what
the book “set out to do,” it may be well to examine these intentions before
undertaking a critical analysis of the work itself. Steinbeck’s remarks on
technique are particularly pertinent because Of Mice and Men was the first
of four attempts (to date) in the play-novelette form, the beginnings of
which can be seen in some chapters of In Dubious Battle.
As set forth in the Stage article, Steinbeck’s intention was to write a
play “in the physical technique of the novel.” This technique was to offer
certain advantages. First, “it would go a great way towards making the
play easy to read [avoiding awkward and interrupting stage directions]”.
Second, “the novel’s ability to describe scene and people in detail would
not only make for a better visual picture to the reader, but would be of
value to the director, stage designer, and actor . . .” Third, “it would be
possible for the playwright by this method to set his tone much more
powerfully. . . . And this tone is vastly important.” While these advantages
would accrue to the play, “the novel itself would be interfered with by such
a method in only one way, and that is that it would be short.” But several
advantages for the novel would result. For one thing, “the necessity of
sticking to the theme (in fact of knowing what the theme is), the brevity
and necessity of holding an audience could influence the novel only for the
better.” In a play, “wandering, discussion, and essay are impossible.” There
is another advantage for the novel which can be “played,” one related to
Steinbeck’s group-man theories: “For whatever reasons . . . the recent

36
 THE WIDE WORLD OF JOHN STEINBECK, CHAPTER 8

tendency of writers has been to deal in those themes and those scenes
which are best understood and appreciated by groups of people.” Some
things (such as war, prize fights on the radio) “cannot be understood in
solitude . . . the thing that is missing is the close, almost physical contact
with other people.”
So much for the technique. Concerning the book’s theme, Steinbeck
wrote his agents,

I’m sorry that you do not find this new book as large in subject as it
should be. I probably did not make my subjects and my symbols clear.
The microcosm is rather difficult to handle, and apparently I did not
represent insanity at all but the inarticulate and powerful yearning of all
men. Well, if it isn’t here it isn’t there. (JS-MO, 9/1/36)

To Ben Abramson, he wrote a similar comment on the book’s theme:

“. . . it’s a study of the dreams and pleasures of everyone in the world”
(JS-BA, ca. September, 1936).
Such words as “microcosm,” “of all men,” and “everyone in the world”
indicate that the problem he set himself in Of Mice and Men was similar
to that he had solved in his previous novel, In Dubious Battle. But whereas
in the earlier work the de-personalized protagonists were easily absorbed
into a greater pattern because that pattern was physically present in the
novel, in Of Mice and Men protagonists are projected against a very thin
background and must suggest or create this larger pattern through their
own particularity. To achieve this, Steinbeck makes use of language, ac-
tion, and symbol as recurring motifs. All three of these motifs are pre-
sented in the opening scene, are contrapuntally developed through the
story and come together again at the end.
The first symbol in the novel, and the primary one, is the little spot by
the river where the story begins and ends. The book opens with a descrip-
tion of this place by the river, and we first see George and Lennie as they
enter this place from the highway to an outside world. It is significant that
they prefer spending the night here rather than going on to the bunkhouse
at the ranch.
Steinbeck’s novels and stories often contain groves, willow thickets by
a river, and caves which figure prominently in the action. . . . For George
and Lennie, as for other Steinbeck heroes, coming to a cave or thicket

37
PETER LISCA

by the river symbolizes a retreat from the world to a primeval innocence.

Sometimes, as in The Grapes of Wrath, this retreat is explicit overtones of
a return to the womb and rebirth. In the opening scenes of Of Mice and
Men, Lennie twice mentions the possibility of hiding out in a cave, and
George impresses on him that he must return to this thicket by the river
when there is trouble.
While the cave or the river thicket is a “safe place,” it is physically im-
possible to remain there, and this symbol of primeval innocence becomes
translated into terms possible in the real world. For George and Lennie,
it becomes “a little house an’ a couple of acres” (OMM 14). Out of this
translation grows a second symbol, the rabbits, and this symbol serves sev-
eral purposes. Through synecdoche, it comes to stand for the “safe place”
itself, making a much more easily manipulated symbol than the “house an’
a couple of acres.” Also, through Lennie’s love for the rabbits, Steinbeck
is able not only to dramatize Lennie’s desire for the “safe place,” but to
define the basis of that desire on a very low level of consciousness—the at-
traction to soft, warm fur, which is for Lennie the most important aspect
of their plans.
The transference of symbolic value from the farm to the rabbits is
important also because it makes possible the motif of action. This is intro-
duced in the first scene by the dead mouse which Lennie is carrying in his
pocket. . . . As George talks about Lennie’s attraction to mice, it becomes
evident that the symbolic rabbits will come to the same end—crushed by
Lennie’s simple blundering strength. Thus Lennie’s killing of mice later
and his killing of the puppy set up a pattern which the reader expects to
be carried out again. George’s story about Lennie and the girl with the red
dress, which he tells twice, contributes to this expectancy of patterns, as do
the shooting of Candy’s dog, the crushing of Curley’s hand, the frequent
appearances of Curley’s wife. All these incidents are patterns of the action
motif and predict the fate of the rabbits and thus the fate of the dream of
a “safe place.”
The third motif, that of language, is also present in the opening
scene. Lennie asks George, “Tell me—like you done before” (OMM 13),
and George’s voice became deeper. He repeated his words rhythmically,
as though he had said them many times before.” The element of ritual is
stressed by the fact that even Lennie heard it often enough to remember
its precise language: “An’ live off the fatta the lan’. . . . An’ have rabbits. Go

38
 THE WIDE WORLD OF JOHN STEINBECK, CHAPTER 8

on George! Tell about what we’re gonna have in the garden and about the
rabbits in the cages and about” (OMM 14). This ritual is performed often
in the story, whenever Lennie feels insecure. And, of course, it is while
Lennie is caught up in this dream vision that George shoots him, so that
on one level the vision is accomplished—the dream never interrupted, the
rabbits never crushed.
The highly patterned effect achieved by these incremental motifs of
symbol, action, and language is the knife edge on which criticism of Of
Mice and Men divides. For although Steinbeck’s success in creating a pat-
tern has been acknowledged, criticism has been divided as to the effect of
this achievement. On one side, it is claimed that this strong patterning
creates a sense of contrivance and mechanical action,3 and, on the other,
that the patterning actually gives a meaningful design to the story, a tone
of classical fate.4 What is obviously needed here is some objective critical
tool for determining under what conditions a sense of inevitability (to use
a neutral word) should be experienced as catharsis effected by a sense of
fate. Such a tool cannot be forged within the limits of this study; but it is
possible to examine the particular circumstances of Of Mice and Men more
closely before passing judgment.
Although the three motifs of symbol, action, and language build up
a strong pattern of inevitability, the movement is not unbroken. About
midway in the novel (chapters 3 and 4), there is a countermovement
which seems to threaten the pattern. Up to this point, the dream of “a
house an’ a couple of acres” seemed impossible to realization. Now it
develops that George has an actual farm in mind (ten acres), knows the
owners and why they want to sell it: “The ol’ people that owns it is flat
bust an’ the ol’ lady needs an operation.” He even knows the price—“six
hundred dollars” (OMM 59). Also, the old workman, Candy, is willing
to buy a share in the dream with the three hundred dollars he has saved
up. It appears that at the end of the month George and Lennie will have
another hundred dollars and that quite possibly they “could swing her for
that.” In the following chapter this dream and its possibilities are further
explored through Lennie’s visit with Crooks, the power of the dream
manifesting itself in Crooks’s conversion from cynicism to optimism. But
at the very height of his conversion, the mice symbol reappears in the form
of Curley’s wife, who threatens the dream by bringing with her the harsh
realities of the outside world and by arousing Lennie’s interests.

39
PETER LISCA

The function of Candy’s and Crooks’s interest and the sudden

bringing of the dream within reasonable possibility is to interrupt, mo-
mentarily, the pattern of inevitability. But, and this is very important,
Steinbeck handles the interruption so that it does not actually reverse the
situation. Rather, it insinuates a possibility. Thus, though working against
the pattern, this countermovement makes the pattern more credible by
creating the necessary ingredient of free will. The story achieves power
through a delicate balance of the protagonists’ free will and the force of
circumstance.
In addition to imposing a sense of inevitability, this strong patterning
of events performs the important function of extending the story’s range
of meanings. This can best be understood by reference to Hemingway’s
“fourth dimension,” which has been defined by Joseph Warren Beach as
an “aesthetic factor” achieved by the protagonists’ repeated participation
in some traditional “ritual or strategy,”5 and by Malcolm Cowley as “the
almost continual per-formance of rites and ceremonies” suggesting recur-
rent patterns of human experience.6 The incremental motifs of symbol,
action, and language which inform Of Mice and Men have precisely these
effects. The simple story of two migrant workers’ dream of a safe retreat,
a “clean well-lighted place,” becomes itself a pattern or archetype which
exists on three levels.
There is the obvious story level on a realistic plane, with its shocking
climax. There is also the level of social protest, Steinbeck the reformer
crying out against the exploitation of migrant workers. The third level is
an allegorical one, its interpretation limited only by the ingenuity of the
audience. It could be, as Carlos Baker suggests, “an allegory of Mind and
Body.”7 Using the same kind of dichotomy, the story could also be about
the dumb, clumsy, but strong mass of humanity and its shrewd manipu-
lators. This would make the book a more abstract treatment of the two
forces of In Dubious Battle—the mob and its leaders. The dichotomy
could also be that of the unconscious and the conscious, the id and the
ego, or any other forces or qualities which have the same structural rela-
tionship to each other that do Lennie and George. It is interesting in this
connection that the name Leonard means “strong or brave as a lion,” and
that the name George means “husbandman.”
The title itself, however, relates the whole story to still another level
which is implicit in the context of Burns’s poem.

40
 THE WIDE WORLD OF JOHN STEINBECK, CHAPTER 8

But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane,

In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ mice and men
Gang aft a-gley
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain
For promis’d joy.

In the poem, Burns extends the mouse’s experience to include that of

mankind: in Of Mice and Men, Steinbeck extends the experience of
two migrant workers to the human condition. “This is the way things
are,” both writers are saying. On this level, perhaps the most important,
Steinbeck is dramatizing the non-teleological philosophy which had
such a great part in shaping In Dubious Battle and which would be fully
discussed in Sea of Cortez. This level of meaning is indicated by the title
originally intended for the book—“Something That Happened.”8 In
this light, the ending of the story is, like the ploughman’s disrupting of
the mouse’s nest, neither tragic nor brutal, but simply a part of the pat-
tern of events. . . . In addition to these meanings which grow out of the
book’s “pattern,” there is what might be termed a subplot which defines
George’s concern with Lennie. It is easily perceived that George, the
“husbandman,” is necessary to Lennie; but it has not been pointed out
that Lennie is just as necessary to George. Without an explanation of
this latter relationship, any allegory posited on the pattern created in Of
Mice and Men must remain incomplete. Repeatedly, George tells Len-
nie, “God, you’re a lot of trouble. I could get along so easy and so nice
if I didn’t have you on my tail” (OMM 7). But this getting along so easy
never means getting a farm of his own. With one important exception,
George never mentions the dream except for Lennie’s benefit. That his
own “dream” is quite different from Lennie’s is established early in the
novel and often repeated:

God a’mighty, if I was alone I could live so easy. I could go get a job an’
work, an’ no trouble. No mess at all, and when the end of the month
come I could take my fifty bucks and go into town and get whatever I
want. Why, I could stay in a cat house all night. I could eat any place I
want, hotel or anyplace, and order any damn thing I could think of. An’
I could do all that every damn month. Get a gallon whiskey, or set in a
pool room and play cards or shoot pool. (OMM 11)

41
PETER LISCA

Lennie has heard this from George so often that in the last scene, when
he realizes that he has “done another bad thing,” he asks, “Ain’t you gonna
give me hell? . . . Like, ‘If I didn’t have you I’d take my fifty bucks—’”
(OMM 103).
Almost every character in the story asks George why he goes around
with Lennie—the foreman, Curley, Slim, and Candy. Crooks, the
lonely Negro, doesn’t ask George, but he does speculate about it, and
shrewdly—“a guy talkin’ to another guy and it don’t make no difference
if he don’t hear or understand. The thing is, they’re talkin’. . .” (OMM
71). George’s explanations vary from outright lies to a simple statement
of “We travel together.” It is only to Slim, the superior workman with
“God-like eyes,” that he tells a great part of the truth. Among several
reasons, such as his feeling of responsibility for Lennie in return for the
latter’s unfailing loyalty, and their having grown up together, there is
revealed another:

He’s dumb as hell, but he ain’t crazy. An’ I ain’t so bright neither, or I
wouldn’t be buckin’ barley for my fifty and found. If I was even a little
bit smart, I’d have my own little place, an’ I’d be bringin’ in my own
crops, ‘stead of doin’ all the work and not getting what comes up outa
the ground. (OMM 39)

This statement, together with George’s repeatedly expressed desire to

take his fifty bucks to a cat house and his continual playing of solitaire,
reveals that to some extent George needs Lennie as a rationalization for
his failure. This is one of the reasons why, after the body of Curley’s wife
is discovered, George refuses Candy’s offer of a partnership which would
make the dream a reality and says to him, “I’ll work my month an’ I’ll take
my fifty bucks an’ I’ll stay all night in some lousy cat house. Or I’ll set in
some poolroom till ever’body goes home. An’ then I’ll come back an’ work
another month an’ I’ll have fifty bucks more” (OMM 95). The dream of
the farm originates with Lennie, and it is only through Lennie, who also
makes the dream impossible, that the dream has any meaning for George.
An understanding of this dual relationship will do much to mitigate the
frequent charge that Steinbeck’s depiction of George’s attachment is
concocted of pure sentimentality. At the end of the novel, George’s going
off with Slim to “do the town” is more than an escape from grief. It is an
ironic and symbolic twist to his dream.

42
 THE WIDE WORLD OF JOHN STEINBECK, CHAPTER 8

The “real” meaning of the book is neither in the realistic action nor in
the levels of allegory. Nor is it in some middle course. Rather, it is in the
pattern which informs the story both on the realistic and the allegorical
levels, a pattern which Steinbeck took pains to prevent from becoming
either trite or mechanical.
But whether because of its realism, its allegory, or its pattern, Of Mice
and Men was an immediate popular success. It appeared on the best-seller
lists, was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and was sold to Hollywood.
. . . Before leaving on a trip [to Europe], Steinbeck had been working on a
dramatization of Of Mice and Men, and on his return to New York early in
August (aboard another freighter) he stayed at George Kaufman’s farm in
Buck’s County, Pennsylvania, and with some advice from Kaufman, who
was to direct it, finished the final version of the play. Of Mice and Men
opened on November 23, 1937, on the stage of the Music Box Theatre in
New York and won great critical and popular acclaim. Upon completing
the stage version, and not even waiting for the play to be produced, he went
to Detroit, bought a car, and, after visiting Ben Abramson in Chicago,
drove to Oklahoma. There he joined a group of migrant workers heading
west, lived with them in their Hoovervilles, and worked with them when
they got to California. He was already writing The Grapes of Wrath.

Notes
1. Harry Thornton Moore, The Novels of John Steinbeck (Chicago: Normandy
House, 1939), 86. This source states that this incident did not occur “until after
type had been set and proofs corrected,” but this letter is explicit about there be-
ing “no other draft” and there being “two months work to do over again.” Moore’s
contention is disproved also by Steinbeck’s letter of February 12. Some twenty
years later, Steinbeck repeated the story about the pup and added, “I don’t know
how close the first and second versions would prove to be” (John Steinbeck, “My
Short Novels,” Wings [October 1953], 6).
2. John Steinbeck, Stage (January 1938): 50–51. “The novel might benefit by
the discipline, the terseness . . .” Although this article was published while Of
Mice and Men was on Broadway, the editors inform us that it had been submit-
ted earlier.
3. Mark Van Doren, “Wrong Number,” The Nation 144 (6 March 1937), 275;
also Joseph Wood Krutch, American Drama Since 1918 (New York: Random
House, 1939), 396.

43
PETER LISCA

4. Stark Young, “Drama Critics Circle Award,” The New Republic 94 (4 May
1938): 396; also Frank O’Hara. Today in American Drama (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1939), 181.
5. Joseph Warren Beach, “How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?” Sewanee
Review 59 (Spring 1951), 311–28.
6. Malcolm Cowley, “Introduction,” The Portable Hemingway (New York:
Viking, 1944).
7. Carlos Baker, “Steinbeck of California,” Delphian Quarterly 23 (April
1940): 42.
8. Toni Jackson Ricketts (Antonia Seixas), “John Steinbeck and the Non-
Teleological Bus,” What’s Doing on the Monterey Peninsula 1 (March 1947). Also
available in Steinbeck and His Critics. Ed. E. W. Tedlock and C. V. Wicker (Al-
buquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1957), 275–80.

44
 Part Three
THE 1960s AND 1970s

S
uggesting both the allegorical and realistic nature of the novel,
Lisca’s praise no doubt influenced the next major Steinbeck study,
Warren French’s John Steinbeck (New York: Twayne), a work that
appeared in 1961 as part of the Twayne United States Author Series.
French eventually issued a second edition of his critique in 1975, and then
updated his ideas in a 1994 Twayne title, John Steinbeck’s Fiction Revisited.
According to French, Of Mice and Men marks the end of the first period in
Steinbeck’s career as in its publication, the author not only achieved fame
but also discovered a solid method for creating objective structured story
telling and an ability to convey his message in a convincing contemporary
setting. In each of his books, French identifies the Arthurian elements in
the novel and their relation to the American Dream (Camelot/Avalon).
Indeed, the chapter entitled “End of a Dream” suggests the lack of suc-
cess in attaining the American Dream and elicits a compassionate reader
empathy with the failure of those individuals who continue to hope they
can attain the impossible. French calls Of Mice and Men an indication of
Steinbeck’s developing expertise and evidence of his mastery of the craft
of writing. Citing all the characters who lose their hopes for a better life
in the novel (including not only George and Lennie but also Crooks,
Candy, and Curley’s wife), he concentrates on the demise of the Ameircan
Dream. Oddly, French also categorizes the novel as a dark comedy in
which survival and acceptance of one’s lot in life are key themes.
F. W. Watt’s John Steinbeck (New York: Grove, 1962) offered a more
negative view of the novel, suggesting its main theme is slender and that

45
PART THREE

the character relationships are artificial and unlikely. In contrast, Joseph

Fontenrose’s John Steinbeck: An Introduction and Interpretation (New York:
Barnes & Noble, 1963), presented a brief six-page analysis and stressed
man’s longing for the land as well as asserting that the book offers a par-
able of the human condition—the inevitable futility of all human plans
(see the Robert Burns poem “To a Mouse” that Steinbeck alludes to in
the title). Fontenrose also noted the contrasting nature of the bindlestiff’s
dreams: lasting satisfaction (land ownership) with temporary pleasure
(the whorehouse, drinking, card playing) and independence/the simple
life with cooperation/group identity. Fontenrose praises Steinbeck’s use
of myth, science, and secular religion while rejecting prescriptive moral-
ism. He concludes that Steinbeck’s later works are much less deserving of
praise, an attitude that continued to serve as the norm for future critics
who found that Steinbeck’s novels were sadly inconsistent in quality, es-
pecially as he began more experimentation in his work.
In direct contrast to Watt’s 1962 dismissive analysis was William
Goldhurst’s groundbreaking study (“John Steinbeck’s Parable of the Curse
of Cain,” Western American Literature 6 [1971]: 123–35), which drew a
clear parallel between Steinbeck’s story line and the Biblical myth of Cain
and Abel and the question of whether we are indeed our brother’s keeper.
Goldhurst’s essay was followed in 1973 by Richard Astro’s discussion of
the novel in Steinbeck and Ricketts: The Shaping of a Novelist (Corvallis:
University of Oregon Press) which was broader based in its compliments,
stressing the author’s delicate handling of many fictional elements rather
than concentrating on one element of thematic excellence.
Thematic Design in the Novels of John Steinbeck by Lester Jay Marks
was the next full-length appraisal of the author’s work (The Hague: Mou-
ton, 1969) that identifies three thematic patterns that seem to reoccur
consistently in Steinbeck’s work. These include religiosity, group action,
and non-teleological thinking, and his study seemed to bring fresh air to
Steinbeck studies, invigorating and encouraging new approaches to the
author’s work.
In Steinbeck: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall, 1972), Robert Murray Davis seems to agree with earlier
critics that much of what Steinbeck wrote after 1947 is negligible and
indeed is stillborn, flawed in the strained quality of its prose; despite

46
 THE 1960s AND 1970s

including essays that defend Steinbeck, Davis suggests that the author’s
work after this date is marginal at best.
Shortly thereafter, Howard Levant’s book-length study, The Novels of
John Steinbeck, was published by Missouri University Press in 1974. More
a structural critique than a thematic analysis, Levant’s critical assessment
suggests that Of Mice and Men’s primary defect was that its simple plotline
leads to a melodramatic rather than tragic ending, an observation that
echoed Geismar’s early reaction in the 1930s. Moreover, Levant suggests
that Mice lacked a depth and breadth of insight. Calling Lennie a power-
ful semi-idiot, Levant sees his character as a reduction of humanity to its
lowest common denominator, a perception which gels with the naturalist
and fatalistic early readings of the novel. Levant also accuses Steinbeck of
not fleshing out characters’ traits and of relying on stereotypes; moreover,
he blames the author for overworking such techniques as foreshadowing
and for fostering a theme of unconventional morality that condones ac-
tions such as murder as “necessary evils.” Such errors then resulted in an
abrupt solution/ending to the plot. In conclusion, Levant finds the novel
manipulative, and he laments the fact that Steinbeck’s skill was directed
toward such meaningless victims.

Other Significant Studies in the 1960s and 1970s

French, Warren. “End of a Dream.” In John Steinbeck, chap. 7, 72–79. New York:
Twayne, 1961.
Ganapathy, R. “Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men: A Study of Lyricism through
Primitivism.” Literary Criterion 5 (Winter 1962): 101–4.
Ganapathy sees Of Mice and Men as reflecting influences by Wordsworth,
romanticism, and the lyrical ballads and of espousing the theme of the noble
savage and utilizing rhythmic colloquialisms as Wordsworth did.
Lisca, Peter. “Escape and Commitment: Two Poles of the Steinbeck Hero.”
In Steinbeck: The Man and His Work, ed. Richard Astro and Tetsumaro
Hayashi, 75–88. Corvallis: University of Oregon Press, 1970.
Gray, James. John Steinbeck. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971.
[University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers No. 94]
Gurko, Leo. “Of Mice and Men: Steinbeck as Manichean.” U Windsor Review
[Canada] 8 (Spring 1973): 11–23 [reprinted in Jill Karson, Readings on Of
Mice and Men (San Diego: Greenhaven, 1996): 59–69].

47
PART THREE

This essay portrays the novel as a dark parable equally matching goodness,
God, light, and soul with evil, Satan, darkness, and body. George is depicted
as mind and light while Lennie is body and darkness. Since they are oppos-
ing forces, their conflict is inevitable and will result in the death of one and
the victory of the other
Dacus, Lee. “Lennie as Christian in Of Mice and Men.” Southwestern American
Literature 4 (1974): 87–91 [reprinted in Karson, Readings on Of Mice and
Men, 80–85].
This article compares Lennie’s dream of rabbits to a Christian’s dream of
heaven and portrays George as a Christ figure or “good shepherd” and Curley
as satanic. Much of the analogies drawn are forced rather than probable].
Bellman, Samuel I. “Control and Freedom in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.” CEA
Critic 38 (November 1975): 25–27 [reprinted in Karson, Readings on Of Mice
and Men].
This is a psychoanalytic study that views Lennie as George’s id or subcon-
scious and sees his influence as needing to be repressed. At times, accord-
ing to this essay, Lennie is also a super-ego or conscience for George. Slim
replaces Lennie as George’s control mechanism.
Lisca, Peter. “Of Mice and Men.” In John Steinbeck: Nature and Myth, 76–86. New
York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1978.
Beatty, Sandra. “Steinbeck’s Play-Women: A Study of the Female Presence in
Of Mice and Men, Burning Bright, The Moon Is Down and Viva Zapata!” In
Steinbeck’s Women: Essays in Criticism, ed. Tetsumaro Hayashi, 7–16. Mun-
cie, IN: Ball State University, 1979.
Kiernan, Thomas. “Chapter Nineteen” in The Intricate Music, 211–22. Boston:
Little Brown, 1979.
Jain, Sunita. “Evil in Of Mice and Men.” In Steinbeck’s Concept of Man: A Critical
Study of His Novels. New Delhi, India: New Statesman Publishing, 1979
[reprinted in Harold Bloom, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (Broomall,
PA: Chelsea House, 1999), 47 ff].

48
 CHAPTER THREE
JOHN STEINBECK’S PARABLE OF
THE CURSE OF CAIN
William Goldhurst

C
ritical opinion on John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men is sur-
prisingly varied, miscellaneous, and contradictory. One critic
calls the novella a dark comedy and says that it descends from
myths of King Arthur. Other critics think of it as a tragedy, and at least
one advances the idea that it has no mythic background at all. A few
commentators feel very definitely that Of Mice and Men is political in
its drift, that it illustrates “tensions created by the capitalistic system”
or dramatizes “the role of the radical organizer attempting to lead the
masses towards a workmen’s utopia.” Others contend that it has little or
no political content but rather stresses sociological points such as our un-
enlightened treatment of old people and the mentally retarded. Several
other critics have observed that Steinbeck’s story emphasizes a simple
thesis, variously identified as (1) each man kills the thing he loves, (2)
our pleasures often oppose and thwart our schemes, and (3) the non-
morality of Nature. Basic differences of opinion may be illustrated by
the comments of two well-known literary historians who sum up their
reactions to the story in almost antithetical terms: Joseph Warren Beach
stressed “the tone of humanity and beauty with which Steinbeck invests
his tragic episode . . . without the use of sentimental phrase or direct
statement,” while Alfred Kazin spoke of “the calculated sentimentality

“Of Mice and Men: John Steinbeck’s Parable of the Curse of Cain” by William Gold-
hurst. Reprinted by permission of Western American Literature, English Department, Utah
State University, where the essay originally appeared in Volume 6 (1971), 123–135.

49
WILLIAM GOLDHURST

of Of Mice and Men” which makes Steinbeck’s fable “meretricious in its

pathos, a moment’s gulp.”1
Perhaps this diversity reflects the sort of critical individualism which
Steinbeck had in mind when he said that many critics fall under the head-
ing of “special pleaders [who] use my work as a distorted echo chamber
for their own ideas.”2 Two significant points do emerge, in any case, from
a consideration of this body of critical comment. First, it affirms and re-
affirms the inherent fertility of Steinbeck’s novella; already Of Mice and
Men has furnished two generations of readers with material for intellectual
sustenance. Second, and perhaps this is a bit unforeseen, no one of the
critics, as I see it, has penetrated to the essential meaning which luxuri-
ates under the surface of Steinbeck’s story. . . . I ought to say at the outset
that my emphasis is on the religious sources of Of Mice and Men and its
mythic-allegorical implications.
Of Mice and Men is a short novel in six scenes presented in description
dialogue-action form that approximates stage drama in its effect (about
this fact there is no critical disagreement). The time scheme runs from
Thursday evening through Sunday evening—exactly three days in se-
quence, a matter of some importance, as we shall see presently. The setting
is the Salinas Valley in California, and most of the characters are unskilled
migratory workers who drift about the villages and ranches of that area
picking up odd jobs or doing short-term fieldwork and then moving on to
the next place of employment. Steinbeck focuses on two such laborers who
dream of one day saving up enough money to buy a small farm of their
own. One of these is George Milton, small of stature, clever, sensitive, and
compassionate; the other is Lennie Small, who is oversized, mentally re-
tarded, enormously strong, and prone to getting into serious trouble. Early
in the story, the prospect of their ever realizing their dream seems remote,
but as the action develops (they meet a crippled bunkhouse worker who
wants to go in with them on the scheme, and who offers to chip in his
life savings), the probability of fulfillment increases. If the three homeless
migrants pool their salaries at the end of the current month, they can quit
and move on to their farm, which, as Steinbeck emphasizes repeatedly, is a
place of abundance and a refuge from the hardships of life.
Lennie manages to avoid disaster for exactly three days. He gets in-
volved, innocently at first, with the flirtatious wife of Curley, the boss’s
violent son; and through a series of unfortunate circumstances he becomes

50
 JOHN STEINBECK’S PARABLE OF THE CURSE OF CAIN

frightened and unintentionally kills the girl. Curley organizes a posse to

apprehend Lennie—with the idea either of locking him up in an asylum
or, more likely, of killing him on the spot. George gets to Lennie first and
out of sympathy for his companion shoots him in the head to spare him
the pain of Curley’s shotgun or the misery of incarceration.
The title of the story has a twofold application and significance. First,
it refers to naturalistic details within the texture of the novella: Lennie
likes to catch mice and stroke their fur with his fingers. This is a particu-
larly important point for two reasons: it establishes Lennie’s fatal weak-
ness for stroking soft things and, since he invariably kills the mice he is
petting, it foreshadows his deadly encounter with Curley’s wife. Second,
the title is, of course, a fragment from the poem by Robert Burns, which
gives emphasis to the idea of the futility of human endeavor or the van-
ity of human wishes. “The best laid schemes o’ mice and men / Gang aft
a-gley / An’ lea’ us nought but grief an’ pain / For promised joy.” This
notion is obviously of major importance in the novella, and it may be said
to be Steinbeck’s main theme on the surface level of action and develop-
ment of character.
Other noteworthy characters and incidents in Of Mice and Men in-
clude Crooks, the Negro stablehand who lives in the harness room. Here
on one occasion he briefly entertains Lennie and Candy, the bunkhouse
worker who wants to be a part of the dream farm. Crooks tells them they
will never attain it; he says he has known many workers who wanted land
of their own, but he has never heard of anyone who has actually realized
this ambition. Then there is Carlson, the blunt and unfeeling ranch hand
who insists on shooting Candy’s aged sheep dog, which, having outlived
its usefulness, has become an annoyance to the men who occupy the
bunkhouse. This is a significant episode which anticipates George’s mercy
killing of Lennie at the conclusion. (“I ought to of shot that dog myself,”
says Candy later. “I shouldn’t ought to of let no stranger shoot my dog”
[OMM 61]). Steinbeck is also at some pains to establish an important
aspect of the ranch workers’ existence: their off-hours recreation, which
consists of gambling, drinking, and visiting the local brothel. Upon such
indulgences, which they find impossible to resist, these men squander
their wages and thereby remain perpetually penniless, tied to a monoto-
nous pattern of work, transitory pleasure, homelessness, and dependence
upon job bosses for the basic needs of existence.

51
WILLIAM GOLDHURST

Of Mice and Men was published early in 1937 and was a Book-of-
the-Month Club selection and one of the year’s top best-sellers. . . . If
my own high school experience was at all typical, spontaneous parodies
of Lennie’s speech and behavior were a common feature of adolescent
get-togethers in the 1940s. But from that time to the present Of Mice and
Men has been a favorite topic for serious discussion in college literature
classes; and a sensitive television production in the late 1960s revealed
new subtleties and power in the little tale which, critical controversy or
no, has now assumed the status of an American classic.
Viewed in the light of its mythic and allegorical implications, Of Mice
and Men is a story about the nature of man’s fate in a fallen world, with
particular emphasis upon the question: Is man destined to live alone, a
solitary wanderer on the face of the earth, or is it the fate of man to care
for man, to go his way in companionship with another? This is the same
theme that occurs in the Old Testament, as early as chapter 4 of Genesis,
immediately following the Creation and Expulsion. In effect, the ques-
tion Steinbeck poses is the same question Cain poses to the Lord: “Am
I my brother’s keeper?” From its position in the scriptural version of hu-
man history, we may assume with the compilers of the early books of the
Bible that it is the primary question concerning man as he is, after he has
lost the innocence and non-being of Eden. It is the same question that
Steinbeck chose as the theme of his later book East of Eden (1952), in
which the Cain and Abel story is reenacted in a contemporary setting and
where, for emphasis, Steinbeck has his main characters read the biblical
story aloud and comment on it, climaxing the discussion with [Steinbeck’s
assertion that] “this is the best-known story in the world because it is
everybody’s story. I think it is the symbol story of the human soul.” As
an early Steinbeck variation on this symbolic story of the human soul, the
implications of the Cain and Abel drama are everywhere apparent in the
fable of George and Lennie and provide its mythic vehicle.
Contrary to the confident assertion in EOE, however, most people
know the Cain and Abel story only in general outline. The details of
the drama need to be filled in, particularly for the purpose of seeing how
they apply to Steinbeck’s novella. Cain was a farmer and Adam and Eve’s
firstborn son. His offerings of agricultural produce to the Lord failed to
find favor, whereas the livestock offered by Cain’s brother, Abel, was well
received. Angry, jealous, and rejected, Cain killed Abel when they were

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working in the field, and when the Lord inquired of Cain, Where is your
brother? Cain replied: “I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper?” For his
crime of homicide, the Lord banished Cain from his company and from
the company of his parents and set upon him a particular curse, the es-
sence of which was that Cain was to become homeless—a wanderer and
an agricultural worker who would never possess or enjoy the fruits of his
labor. Cain was afraid that other men would hear of his crime and try to
kill him, but the Lord marked him in a certain way so as to preserve him
from the wrath of others. Thus Cain left home and went to the land of
Nod, which, the story tells us, lies east of Eden.
The drama of Cain finds its most relevant application in Of Mice and
Men in the relationship between Lennie and George, and in the other char-
acters’ reactions to their association. In the first of his six scenes, Steinbeck
establishes the two ideas that will be developed throughout. The first of
these is the affectionate symbiosis of the two protagonists, their brotherly
mutual concern and faithful companionship. Steinbeck stresses the beauty,
joy, security, and comfort these two derive from the relationship:

“If them other guys gets in jail they can rot for all anybody gives a damn.
But not us.”
Lennie broke in, “But not us! An’ why? Because . . . because I got you
to look after me and you got me to look after you, and that’s why.” He
laughed delightedly. (OMM 14)

The second idea, which is given equal emphasis, is the fact that this
sort of camaraderie is rare, different, almost unique in the world George
and Lennie inhabit; other men, in contrast to these two, are solitary souls
without friends or companions. As George says in scene 1:

Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world.
They got no family. They don’t belong no place. They come to a ranch
an’ work up a stake and then they go into town and blow their stakes,
and the first thing you know they’re poundin’ their tail on some other
ranch. (OMM 13)

The alternative to the George-Lennie companionship is Aloneness, made

more dreadful by the addition of an economic futility that Steinbeck aug-
ments and reinforces in later sections. The migratory ranch worker, in other

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words, is the fulfillment of the Lord’s curse on Cain: “When thou tillest the
ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and
vagabond shalt thou be in the earth” [Genesis 4:12]. Steinbeck’s treatment
of the theme is entirely free from a sense of contrivance; all the details in
Of Mice and Men seem natural in the context and organically related to the
whole; but note that in addition to presenting Lennie and George as men
who till the ground and derive no benefits from their labor, he also manages
to have them “on the run” when they are introduced in the first scene—this
no doubt to have his main characters correspond as closely as possible to the
biblical passage: “a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be . . .”
To the calamity of homelessness and economic futility, Steinbeck later
adds the psychological soul corruption that is the consequence of solitary
existence. In scene 3, George tells Slim, the mule driver on the ranch:
“I seen the guys that go around on the ranches alone. That ain’t no good.
They don’t have no fun. After a long time they get mean.”
“Yeah, they get mean,” Slim agreed. “They get so they don’t want to
talk to nobody.” (OMM 41)

Again, in scene 4, the Negro stable buck Crooks tells Lennie: “A guy
needs somebody—to be near him. . . . A guy goes nuts if he ain’t got no-
body. Don’t make no difference who the guy is, long’s he’s with you. I tell
ya, I tell ya a guy gets too lonely and he gets sick.” (OMM 72)
This is Steinbeck’s portrait of Cain in the modern world, or Man
Alone, whose fate is so severe that he may feel compelled to echo the words
of Cain to the Lord: “My punishment is more than I can bear” [Genesis
4:13]. In Of Mice and Men Steinbeck gives us the case history of two simple
mortals who try to escape the homelessness, economic futility, and psycho-
logical soul corruption which Scripture embodies in the curse of Cain.
If, in scene 1, Lennie and George affirm their fraternity openly and
without embarrassment, in scene 2 George is more hesitant. “He’s my
. . . cousin,” he tells the ranch boss. “I told his old lady I’d take care of
him” (OMM 22). This is no betrayal on George’s part, but a cover-up
required by the circumstances. For the boss is highly suspicious of the
Lennie-George fellowship. “You takin’ his pay away from him?” he asks
George. “I never seen one guy take so much trouble for another guy”
(OMM 22). A short time later Curley also sounds the note of suspicion,
extending it by a particularly nasty innuendo: when George says, “We

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 JOHN STEINBECK’S PARABLE OF THE CURSE OF CAIN

travel together,” Curley replies, “Oh, so it’s that way” (OMM 25). Stein-
beck is implying here the general response of most men toward seeing
two individuals who buddy around together in a friendless world where
isolation is the order of the day: there must be exploitation involved, either
financial or sexual. At the same time Steinbeck is developing the allegori-
cal level of his story by suggesting that the attitude of Cain (“I know not:
Am I my brother’s keeper?”) has become universal.3 Even the sympathetic
and understanding Slim expresses some wonder at the Lennie-George
fraternity. “Ain’t many guys travel around together,” Slim says in scene 2.
“I don’t know why. Maybe ever’body in the whole damned world is scared
of each other” (OMM 35). This too, as Steinbeck interprets the biblical
story, is a part of Cain’s curse: distrust. Later on, in order to give the
theme of Aloneness another dimension, Steinbeck stresses the solitude of
Crooks and Curley’s wife, both of whom express a craving for company
and “someone to talk to.”
Notwithstanding the fact that they are obviously swimming against
the current, Lennie and George continue to reaffirm their solidarity all
along, right up to and including the last moments of Lennie’s life in scene
6. Here a big rabbit, which Lennie in his disturbed state of mind has hal-
lucinated, tells the half-wit fugitive that George is sick of him and is going
to go away and leave him. “He won’t!” Lennie cries. “He won’t do nothing
like that. I know George. Me an’ him travels together” (OMM 102).
Actually Steinbeck’s novella advances and develops, ebbs and flows,
around the basic image of the Lennie-George relationship. Almost all the
characters react to it in one way or another as the successive scenes unfold.
In scenes 1, 2, and 3, despite the discouraging opinions of outsiders, the
companionship remains intact and unthreatened. Midway into scene 3
the partnership undergoes augmentation when Candy is admitted into the
scheme to buy the little farm. Late in scene 4, Crooks offers himself as
another candidate for the fellowship of soul brothers and dreamers. This
is the high point of optimism as regards the main theme of the story; this
is the moment when a possible reversal of the curse of Cain seems most
likely, as Steinbeck suggests that the answer to the Lord’s question might
be, “Yes, I am my brother’s keeper.” If we arrive at this point with any
comprehension of the author’s purposes, we find ourselves brought up
short by the idea: What if this George-Lennie-Candy-Crooks fraternity
were to become universal?

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WILLIAM GOLDHURST

But later in the same scene, the entrance of Curley’s wife signals the
turning point as the prospects for the idea of brotherhood-as-a-reality
begin to fade and darken. As throughout the story she represents a force
that destroys men and at the same time invites men to destroy her, as
she will finally in scene 5 offer herself as a temptation which Lennie
cannot resist, so, in scene 4, Curley’s wife sows the seeds that eventually
disrupt the fellowship. Entering into the discussion in Crooks’s room in
the stable, she insults Crooks, Candy, and Lennie, laughs at their dream
farm, and threatens to invent the kind of accusation that will get Crooks
lynched.4 Crooks, reminded of his position of impotence in a white man’s
society, immediately withdraws his offer to participate in the George-
Lennie-Candy farming enterprise. But Crooks’s withdrawal, while ex-
tremely effective as social criticism, is much more. It represents an answer
to the question Steinbeck is considering all along: Is man meant to make
his way alone or accompanied? Obviously this is one occasion, among
many others in the story, when Steinbeck suggests the answer. Crooks’s
hope for fraternal living is short-lived. At the conclusion of the scene, he
sinks back into his Aloneness.
From this point on, even though the dream of fellowship on the farm
remains active, the real prospects for its fulfillment decline drastically. In
scene 5, after George and Candy discover the lifeless body of Curley’s
wife, they both face the realization that the little farm is now unattainable
and the partnership dissolved. Actually, the plan was doomed to failure
from the beginning; for fraternal living cannot long survive in a world
dominated by the Aloneness, homelessness, and economic futility which
Steinbeck presents as the modern counterpart of Cain’s curse. Immedi-
ately following his discovery of Curley’s wife’s body, George delivers a
speech that dwells on the worst possible aftermath of Lennie’s misdeed;
and this is not the wrath of Curley or the immolation of Lennie or the
loss of the farm, but the prospect of George’s becoming a Man Alone,
homeless, like all the others and a victim as well of economic futility: “I’ll
work my month an’ I’ll take my fifty bucks and I’ll stay all night in some
lousy cat house. Or I’ll set in some poolroom til ever’body goes home.
An’ then I’ll come back an’ work another month an’ I’ll have fifty bucks
more” (OMM 95). This speech represents the true climax of the novella,
for it answers the question that is Steinbeck’s main interest throughout.
Now we know the outcome of the Lennie-George experiment in fellow-

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ship, as we know the Aloneness of man’s essential nature. In subtle ways,

of course, Steinbeck has been hinting at this conclusion all along, as, for
example, in the seven references spaced throughout scenes 2 and 3 to
George’s playing solitaire in the bunkhouse. For that matter, the answer
is implied in the very first line of the story when the author establishes
his setting “a few miles south of Soledad . . .” (OMM 1), Soledad being at
one and the same time a town in central California and the Spanish word
for solitude, or aloneness.
But there are still other suggested meanings inherent in the dream
farm and the failure of the dream. The plan is doomed not only because
human fellowship cannot survive in the post-Cain world, but also because
the image of the farm, as conceived by George and Lennie and Candy, is
overly idealized, the probability being that life, even if they obtained the
farm, would not consist of the comfort, plenty, and inter-personal har-
mony they envision. The fruits and vegetables in abundance, the livestock
and domestic animals, and the community of people involved (“Ain’t
gonna be no more trouble. Nobody gonna hurt nobody nor steal from
’em”)—these are impractical expectations. George and Lennie, who were
to some extent inspired by questions growing out of the story of Cain in
chapter 4 of Genesis, want to retreat to chapter 2 and live in Eden! Of
all ambitions in a fallen world, this is possibly the most unattainable; for
paradise is lost, as the name of Steinbeck’s hero, George Milton, sug-
gests. And though there will always be men like Candy, who represents
sweet hope, the view of Crooks, who represents black despair, is probably
a more accurate appraisal of the human condition: “Nobody never gets to
heaven, and nobody gets no land. It’s just in their head. They’re all the
time talkin’ about it, but it’s jus’ in their head” (OMM 74). Obviously in
this context Crooks’s comment about nobody ever getting land refers not
to literal ownership but to the dream of contentment entertained by the
simple workmen who come and go on the ranch.
To pursue the Milton parallel a step further, we perceive immedi-
ately that Steinbeck has no intention of justifying the ways of God to
man. On the contrary, if anything, Of Mice and Men implies a critique
of Hebrew-Christian morality, particularly in the area of the concept of
punishment for sin. This opens up still another dimension of meaning
in our interpretation of Steinbeck’s novella. If George and Lennie fail
to attain their dream farm (for reasons already explored), and the dream

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WILLIAM GOLDHURST

farm is a metaphor or image for heaven (as suggested by Crooks’s speech

in scene 4), then the failure to achieve the dream farm is most likely as-
sociated with the question of man’s failure to attain heaven. Steinbeck’s
consideration of this last-named theme is not hard to find.
Along this particular line of thought, Lennie represents one essential
aspect of man—the animal appetites, the craving to touch and feel, the
impulse toward immediate gratification of sensual desires.5 George is the
element of Reason which tries to control the appetites or, better still, to
elevate them to a higher and more sublime level. As Lennie’s hallucina-
tory rabbit advises him near the conclusion: “Christ knows George done
ever’thing he could to jack you outa the sewer, but it don’t do no good”
(OMM 102). Steinbeck suggests throughout that the appetites and Rea-
son coexist to compose the nature of man (“Me an’ him travels together”
[OMM 25]). He goes on to suggest that the effort to refine man into
something rare, saintly, and inhuman is another unattainable ambition.
Even when Reason (George) manages to communicate to the appetites
(Lennie) its urgent message (“You crazy son-of-a-bitch. You keep me in
hot water all the time . . . I never get no peace” [OMM 11]), the appetites
are incapable of satisfying Reason’s demands. This submerged thesis is
suggested when Aunt Clara—like the big rabbit a product of Lennie’s
disturbed imagination—scolds Lennie in scene 6:
“I tol’ you an’ tol’ you. I tol’ you. ‘Min’ George because he’s such a nice fella
an’ good to you.’ But you don’t never take no care. You do bad things.”
And Lennie answered her, “I tried, Aunt Clara, ma’am. I tried and
tried. I couldn’ help it.” (OMM 101)6

The animal appetites, even though well attended and well intentioned, can-
not be completely suppressed or controlled. Thus, the best man can hope for
is a kind of insecure balance of power between these two elements—which
is, in fact, what most of the ranch hands accomplish, indulging their craving
for sensual pleasure in a legal and commonplace manner each payday. Fail-
ing this, man must suppress absolutely the appetites that refuse to be con-
trolled, as George does in the symbolic killing of Lennie at the conclusion
of the novella. Possibly this is a veiled reference to the drastic mutilation of
man’s nature required by the Hebrew-Christian ethic. At the same time,
the theological implications of Of Mice and Men project the very highest
regard for the noble experiment in fraternal living practiced by George and

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 JOHN STEINBECK’S PARABLE OF THE CURSE OF CAIN

Lennie; and possibly the time scheme of their stay on the ranch—from
Friday to Sunday—is a veiled reference to the sacrifice of Christ. He too
tried to reverse the irreversible tide of Cain’s curse by serving as the ultimate
example of human brotherhood.
At this point, without, I hope, undue emphasis, we might attempt to
answer some specific objections which have been raised by critics of Of
Mice and Men. The faults most often cited are the pessimism of Stein-
beck’s conclusion, which seems to some readers excessive; and the author’s
attempt to impose a tragic tone upon a story which lacks characters of
tragic stature.7 Both of these censures might be accepted as valid, or at
least understood as reasonable, if we read the novella on the surface level of
action and character development. But a reading which takes into account
the mythical-allegorical significance of these actions and characters not
only nullifies the objections but opens up new areas of awareness. For ex-
ample, although Lennie and George are humble people without the status
of traditional tragic characters, their dream is very much like the dream
of Plato for an ideal Republic. And their experiment in fellowship is not
at all different from the experiment attempted by King Arthur. And at
the same time it is reminiscent of at least one aspect of Christ’s ministry.
These are remote parallels to Of Mice and Men, yet they are legitimate
and lend some measure of substance, nobility, and human significance to
Steinbeck’s novella. Its pessimism is not superimposed upon a slight story,
as charged, but has been there from the opening line, if we know how to
read it. Furthermore, the pessimism is not inspired by commercialism or
false theatrics but by the Hebrew Testament. (“And Cain said unto the
Lord, ‘My punishment is greater than I can bear.’”)
But let us tie up our loose ends, not with reference to critics but with
a brief summary of our discoveries during this investigation. Of Mice and
Men is a realistic story with lifelike characters and a regional setting, pre-
sented in a style highly reminiscent of stage drama. Steinbeck’s technique
also includes verbal ambiguity in place names and character names, double
entendre in certain key passages of dialogue, and a mythical-allegorical
drift that invites the reader into areas of philosophical and theological
inquiry. Sources for the novella are obviously Steinbeck’s own experience
as a laborer in California; but on the allegorical level, Of Mice and Men
reflects the early chapters of the Book of Genesis and the questions that
grow out of the incidents therein depicted. These consist primarily of

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WILLIAM GOLDHURST

the consideration of man as a creature alone or as a brother and compan-

ion to others. In addition, Steinbeck’s story suggests the futility of the
all-too-human attempt to recapture Eden, as well as a symbolic schema
that defines human psychology. Steinbeck also implies a critique of the
Hebrew-Christian ethic, to the effect that the absolute suppression of the
animal appetites misrepresents the reality of human experience.
Finally, we should say that Steinbeck’s emphasis, on both the allegori-
cal and realistic levels, is on the nobility of his characters’ attempt to live
fraternally. Even though the experiment is doomed to failure, Steinbeck’s
characters, like the best men of every age, dedicate themselves to pursuing
the elusive grail of fellowship.

Notes
1. Frederic I. Carpenter, along with several others, calls Of Mice and Men a
tragedy. See “John Steinbeck: American Dreamer,” in Steinbeck and His Crit-
ics, ed. E. W. Tedlock Jr. and C. V. Wicker (Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 1957), 76 (referred to hereinafter as Tedlock and Wicker). Warren
French calls Of Mice and Men a “dark comedy” in John Steinbeck (New Haven,
CT: College and University Press, 1961), 76. French also pushes the thesis of the
novella’s descent from Arthurian legend (73). Joseph Fontenrose says, “Of Mice
and Men has a recognizable mythical pattern,” in John Steinbeck: An Introduction
and Interpretation (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1963), 59. The political theo-
ries of Of Mice and Men are quoted from Edwin Berry Burgum and Stanley Edgar
Hymen, 109 and 159, respectively, in Tedlock and Wicker. Sociological points
are stressed by French in John Steinbeck, 77. Freeman Champney says Of Mice and
Men is “little other” than the theme of “every man [sic] kills the thing he loves” (in
Tedlock and Wicker, 140). The “pleasures often oppose and thwart our schemes”
thesis is in Fontenrose, An Introduction and Interpretation, 57. “The non-morality
of Nature” is the interpretation of Burton Rascoe, in Tedlock and Wicker, 65.
The quotations from Beach and Kazin, respectively, are in Tedlock and Wicker,
90, and On Native Grounds (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 109–19.
2. The quotation is in Tedlock and Wicker, 307.
3. One of Steinbeck’s critics unconsciously confirms this discouraging thesis
when he says, “Steinbeck represents George as being closely attached to Lennie.
But George’s feeling is not convincing because it is not that of most men in real
life” (Woodburn O. Ross in Tedlock and Wicker, 175). To Mr. Ross we might
reply, with John Steinbeck, tant pis! This is the same outlook that provides the
context for the tragedy of George and Lennie!

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 JOHN STEINBECK’S PARABLE OF THE CURSE OF CAIN

4. First appearance suggests that Steinbeck might be guilty of antifeminist

sentiment by his use of the Hemingwayesque “Men without Women” theme:
“Everything was fine with us boys until that trouble-making female came along,”
etc. Curley’s wife, however, is represented as the victim of the same impulses
as the men in the story; she too is impelled out of loneliness to seek company,
and she too is the victim of a dream: “Coulda been in the movies, and had nice
clothes,” etc. With this emphasis Steinbeck includes Curley’s wife in the prob-
lems and striving of all men who inherit the curse of Cain. In any case, though
she does in fact have trouble-making propensities, she is no worse in this respect
than her husband and overall is unquestionably a more sympathetic character
than Curley.
5. Obviously Steinbeck faced a problem in his portrait of Lennie as a sympa-
thetic though dangerous moron who has great difficulty in keeping his hands off
women. (Compare William Faulkner’s treatment of Benjy in The Sound and the
Fury.) The author’s entire emphasis would have been thrown off balance if Len-
nie had attacked Curley’s wife (or the girl in Weed) in some gross and lascivious
manner. Clearly, if he were prone to this sort of behavior, George would not be
traveling with him in the first place. Lennie must be as he is—powerful and po-
tentially dangerous, but essentially childlike and innocent—for other reasons as
well. His condition lends emphasis to the basic idea of general aloneness of men;
if Lennie were normally intelligent, he would most likely be busy pursuing his
own interests. Finally, the basic innocence of Lennie’s sensual impulses reinforces
Steinbeck’s critique of Hebrew-Christian-morality theme by making the point
that there is nothing evil, per se, in man’s natural sensuality.
6. All quotations from Of Mice and Men are taken from Of Mice and Men (New
York: Penguin Classics, 1993).
7. See Fontenrose, An Introduction and Interpretation, 60; and Edward Wagen-
knecht, Cavalcade of the American Novel (New York: Henry Holt, 1958), 496.

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 CHAPTER FOUR
OF GEORGE AND LENNIE AND
CURLEY’S WIFE: SWEET VIOLENCE
IN STEINBECK’S EDEN
Mark Spilka

Nearly everyone in the world has appetites and impulses, trigger emo-
tions, islands of selfishness, lusts just beneath the surface. And most
people either hold such things in check or indulge in them secretly.
Cathy knew not only these impulses in others but how to use them for
her own gain. It is quite possible that she did not believe in any other
tendencies in humans, for while she was preternaturally alert in some
directions she was completely blind in others. Cathy learned when she
was very young that sexuality with all its attendant yearnings and pains,
jealousies and taboos, is the most disturbing impulse humans have.

M
y epigraph is from Steinbeck’s postwar novel East of Eden,
published in 1952. It concerns a woman called Cathy Ames
who deserts her husband and newborn twins to become the
successful proprietor of a California whorehouse. In his diaries for the
composition of the novel, Steinbeck calls this woman a “monster” and says
he will prove to his readers that such monsters actually exist. His choice of
her as the archetypal mother of a California family, his peculiarly Miltonic
view of her as an exploiter of men’s lusts, and his awareness of the exploit-
ability of such feelings—this complex of psychological tendencies in the
later Steinbeck has much to do, I think, with the force behind his early

Mark Spilka, “Of George and Lennie and Curley’s Wife: Sweet Violence in Steinbeck’s
Eden.” Modern Fiction Studies 20:2 (1974), 169–179. © Purdue Research Foundation.
Reprinted with permission of the Johns Hopkins University Press.

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social fiction. I want to examine one of his early social tales, Of Mice and
Men, with that possibility in mind.
A minor classic of proletarian conflict, Of Mice and Men was written
in 1937, first as a novel, then as a play. Both versions proved enormously
popular and established Steinbeck as a leading writer of the decade. The
play won the Drama Critics’ Circle Award, and the film produced from it
in 1941 was widely applauded. A recent television version testifies to the
dramatic power of the basic story.
Certainly the novel’s dramatic force has much to do with its continu-
ing appeal. Steinbeck conceived it as a potential play, with each chapter
arranged as a scene and the action confined to a secluded grove, a bunk-
house, and a barn. In the play itself each chapter does in fact become a
scene; the dialogue is transferred almost verbatim, and the action—except
for a few strategic alterations—remains unchanged. Plainly Steinbeck was
able to convert the novel with comparative ease.
It may have helped that a paper-chewing dog destroyed his original
manuscript. Thanks to that fateful interference he rewrote the tale com-
pletely, proceeding now at a high pitch of masterful control. The opening
scene epitomizes the new compactness, the new surcharge of meaning,
which sets the book off from all his previous work, and which testifies—as
we shall see—not only to its dramatic but to its psychological power.
The sycamore grove by the Salinas River, so lovingly described in the
opening lines, is more than scene setting: it is an attempt to evoke the
sense of freedom in nature which, for a moment only, the protagonists
will enjoy. By a path worn hard by boys and hobos two migrant laborers
appear. The first man is mouselike: “small and quick, dark of face, with
restless eyes and sharp, strong features. Every part of him was defined:
small strong hands, slender arms, a thin and bony nose” (OMM 2). He is
the planner from the poem by Robert Burns: as with other mice and men,
his best arrangements will often go astray. A bus driver has just tricked
him and his friends into getting out four miles from the ranch where jobs
await them. Now he decides to stay in the small grove near the river be-
cause he “like[s] it here.” There will be work tomorrow, but tonight he can
“lay right here and look up” at the sky through the sycamore leaves; he can
dream and plan with his friend of the farm they will never own.
The nearest town is Soledad, which means “lovely place” in Spanish;
the town where they last worked, digging a cesspool, was Weed. Their

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friendship is thus quickly placed as a creative defense against rank loneli-

ness; it will be reinforced, thematically, by the hostility and guardedness
of bunkhouse life, and by the apparent advance of their dream toward re-
alization. But the secluded grove, the site of natural freedom, provides the
only substantiation their dream will ever receive; and when our mouselike
planner tells his friend to return there in case of trouble, we sense that the
dream will end where it essentially begins, in this substantiating site.
The second man to appear is “opposite” to the first: “a huge man,
shapeless of face, with large, pale eyes, with wide, sloping shoulders” and
loose-hanging arms; he walks heavily, “dragging his feet a little, the way a
bear drags his paws” (OMM 2). This bearlike man becomes equine when
they reach the grove: flinging himself down, he drinks from the pool
there, “snorting into the water like a horse” (OMM 3). Then again like a
bear, he dips his whole head under, “hat and all,” sits up so the hat drips
down his back, and “dabble[s] his big paw in the water” (OMM 3).
These animal actions and his childish speech place him for us quickly
as an idiot. What the first man plans for, the second already has. Like
other Steinbeck idiots—Tuleracito in The Pastures of Heaven (1932),
Johnny Bear in The Long Valley (1938)—he participates in natural life
freely, has access to its powers, and his attraction for Steinbeck is his free-
dom to use those powers without blame or censure. More nearly animal
than human, more nearly child than man, he eludes responsibility for his
actions. Again like the natural artist Tularecito and the uncanny mimic
Johnny Bear, he is extraordinarily gifted; he has superhuman strength
which inevitably threatens a society whose rules he cannot comprehend.
He is thus the perfect denizen of the secluded grove where, for a moment,
natural freedom reigns; the perfect victim, too, for an intruding social
world which will eventually deny that freedom.
In his pocket the idiot carries an actual mouse, dead from too much
handling. Later he kills a puppy with playful buffeting. A child fondling
“lesser” creatures, he is Steinbeck’s example of senseless killing in nature.
He is also part of an ascending hierarchy of power. His name is Lennie
Small, by which Steinbeck means subhuman, animal, childlike, without
power to judge or master social fate. His friend’s name, George Milton,
puts him by literary allusion near the godhead, above subhuman creatures,
able to judge whether they should live or die. The title and epilogue of In
Dubious Battle (1936) were also drawn from Milton, whose grand judg-

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mental abstractions take humble proletarian forms in Steinbeck’s world.

Thus, in a later set-up scene (which may have been inspired also by Stein-
beck’s paper-chewing dog), old Candy, the lowly bunkhouse sweeper,
says that he should have shot his own decrepit dog—should not have let a
stranger do it for him. George too will decide that he must shoot Lennie,
like a mad rather than decrepit dog, for the unplanned murder of another
man’s wife; that he cannot allow strangers to destroy him.
Both shootings have been sanctioned by the jerkline skinner, Slim,
“prince of the ranch,” who moves “with a majesty achieved only by royalty”
and looks with “calm, God-like eyes” upon his bunkhouse world. Since
his word is “law” for the migrant farmhands, and since Milton, a rational
farmhand, can recognize and accept such godlike laws, he must choose
to shoot his friend. By East of Eden Steinbeck would conclude that it is
choice which separates men from animals, a belief which supports one
critic’s view of George’s decision as “mature.” But it is not his “ordinari-
ness” which George will accept in destroying Lennie and the comforting
dream they share, as this critic holds: it is his humanness, his responsibil-
ity for actions which the animal Lennie, for all his vital strength, cannot
comprehend.
And yet George will be diminished—made “ordinary”—by his choice.
As many critics insist, he uses Lennie selfishly, draws from him a sense of
power, of superiority, which he sorely needs. If he is sensitive to Lennie’s
feelings—cares for and about him in demonstrable ways—he also “lords”
it over him almost vengefully. The opening scene indicates nicely how
much petty satisfaction he takes in giving Lennie orders and complaining
about the burden of thinking for him. But more than this: the scene cre-
ates a causal expectation—that one way or another Lennie will always feed
this satisfaction, will always do, in effect, what George desires—which
means that George himself invites the troubles ahead, makes things go
astray, uses Lennie to provoke and settle his own quarrel with a hostile
world.
This is evident enough when he tells Lennie not to talk, to leave job
negotiations to him so as not to expose his idiocy before his strength
has been displayed. Inevitably bosses are annoyed when Lennie fails to
speak for himself; suspicions are aroused, and future troubles more or less
ensured. This is exactly what George desires, first with the boss of the
Soledad ranch, then with two extensions of the boss’s power—his son

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Curley and Curley’s straying wife. George resents these people so much,
and pins such frightening taboos on them, that Lennie is bound to panic
when he meets them, to clutch with his tremendous strength—like a child
caught with some forbidden object—and so punish people George openly
dislikes. In a very real sense, then, George lordfully creates the troubles
for which Lennie will himself be blamed and punished—though he only
obeys his master’s vengeful voice.
This is to move from social into psychological conflict: but Stein-
beck, in taking a boss’s son and his wife as sources of privileged pres-
sure on migrant farmhands, has moved there before us. He has chosen
aggressive sexuality as the force, in migrant life, which undermines the
friendship dream. This variation on the Garden of Eden theme is, to say
the least, peculiar. There is something painfully adolescent about the no-
tion of a cooperative farm run by bachelor George and idiot Lennie, with
the probable help of a maimed old man and a defiant black cripple. The
grouping is not unlike the Arthurian circle around Danny in Tortilla Flat
(1935): four good-hearted lads sticking together against the world, who
can drop work and go into town whenever they want to see “a carnival
or a circus . . . or a ball game.” Their self-employment seems more like
freedom from adult supervision than from harsh conditions; and their
friendship seems more like an escape from the coarseness of adult sexual-
ity than from bunkhouse loneliness. Even their knightly pledge to help
each other seems oddly youthful. That Steinbeck read the Arthurian leg-
ends at an early age, and that he also worked on ranches during boyhood
summers, may be relevant here: for the world of friendship he imagines
is a boy’s world, a retreat from the masculine grossness and insecurity
of the bunkhouse, from whorehouse visits and combative marriages like
Curley’s, which in his youth he must have found disturbing. George Mil-
ton shows enough insecurity and disgust about sex, and enough hostility
toward women, to make these speculations about Steinbeck’s choices
worth pursuing. . . .
In Of Mice and Men, Lennie first pets Curley’s wife, then breaks
her neck, without any awareness that she provokes both reactions. His
conscious desires are simple: to stroke something furry, and to stop the
furry thing from yelling so George won’t be mad at him. But George has
predicted this episode, has called Curley’s wife a rattrap, a bitch, a piece
of jailbait; and he has roundly expressed disgust at Curley’s glove full of

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Vaseline, which softens the hand that strokes his wife’s genitals. Len-
nie has obligingly crushed that hand for George, and now he obligingly
breaks the rattrap for him, that snare for mice and men which catches
both in its furry toils.
In the play Steinbeck goes out of his way to make it clear that
George’s hostility to Curley’s wife prefigures Lennie’s. In a scene not in
the novel, he arranges an exchange in the Negro Crooks’s room in which
George’s arm is raised in anger against this woman: he is about to strike
her for threatening the friendship dream, for trying to “mess up what
we’re gonna do.” Then Curley’s father arrives, the girl retreats from the
room, and George lowers his hand as the scene closes.
As such manipulations imply, Steinbeck projects his own hostilities
through George and Lennie. He has himself given this woman no other
name but “Curley’s wife,” as if she had no personal identity for him. He
has presented her, in the novel, as vain, provocative, vicious (she threatens
Crooks with lynching, for instance, when he tries to defy her), and only
incidentally lonely. Now in the play—perhaps in response to the criti-
cisms of friends—he reverses her portrait. She is no longer vicious (her
lynching threat has been written out of the script), and she is not even
provocative: she is just a lonely woman whose attempts at friendliness are
misunderstood. Thus she makes her first entrance with a line transferred
from a later scene in the novel: “I’m just lookin’ for somebody to talk to,”
she says, in case we might think otherwise. In her final scene, moreover,
in a sympathy speech written expressly for the play, she joins Lennie in
the lost world of childhood:

Curley’s Wife: My ol’ man was a sign-painter when he worked. He used

o get drunk an’ paint crazy pitchers an’ waste paint. One night when I
was a little kid, him an’ my ol’ lady had an awful fight. They was always
fightin’. In the middle of the night he come into my room, and he says,
“I can’t stand this no more. Let’s you an’ me go away.” I guess he was
drunk. (Her voice takes on a curious wondering tenderness.) I remember in
the night—walkin’ down the road, and the trees was black. I was pretty
sleepy. He picked me up, an’ he carried me on his back. He says, “We
gonna live together. We gonna live together because you’re my own
little girl, an’ not no stranger. No arguin’ and fightin’,” he says, “because
you’re my little daughter.” (Her voice becomes soft.) He says, “Why you’ll
bake little cakes for me, and I’ll paint pretty pitchers all over the wall.”

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MARK SPILKA

(Sadly) In the morning they caught us . . . an’ they put him away. (Pause)
I wish we’d a’ went (OMM, play version).

Here Steinbeck overcompensates, creates a new imbalance to correct

an old one. His sentimentality is the obverse side of his hostility. We see
this in the novel when it breaks through in another form, as a mystic mo-
ment of redemption for Curley’s wife. Thus, as she lies dead in the barn,
“the meanness and the plannings and the discontent and the ache for at-
tention” disappear from her face; she becomes sweet and young, and her
rouged cheeks and reddened lips make her seem alive and sleeping lightly
“under a half-covering of hay.” At which point sound and movement stop,
and, “as sometimes happens,” a moment settles and hovers and remains
“for much, much more than a moment.” Then time wakens and moves
sluggishly on. Horses stamp in the barn, their halter chains clink, and
outside, men’s voices become “louder and clearer.”
Restored to natural innocence through death, Curley’s wife is con-
nected—for a timeless moment—with the farm dream. Then men’s voices
and stamping horses indicate the sexual restlessness she provokes in adult
life. Only when sexually quiescent—as in death or childhood—can she
win this author’s heart. . . .
Herein lies his strength and weakness in Of Mice and Men: for the
passage from stroking rabbits to stroking genitals is both profoundly and
ridiculously conceived. As literary zanies like Max Schulman and Steve
Allen have been quick to see, Lennie’s oft-repeated line, “Tell about
the rabbits, George,” comes perilously close to self-parody. Lifted only
slightly out of context, it reduces the friendship farm to a bad sexual joke.
As a sentimental alternative to the emptiness, divisiveness, and gross
sexuality of bunkhouse life, it seems fair game for satire. But Steinbeck
is never that simple. He is fascinated not by Lennie’s innocent pleasures
but by the low threshold which his innocent rages cross whenever he is
thwarted. Consider Lennie’s reaction when George imagines that striped
cats may threaten his beloved rabbits: “You jus’ let ’em try to get the rab-
bits,” he says, breathing hard. “I’ll break their God damn necks. I’ll . . . I’ll
smash ’em with a stick.”
This frightening capacity for violence is what Lennie brings into the
unsuspecting bunkhouse world: he carries within him, intact from child-
hood, that low threshold between rage and pleasure which we all carry

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within us into adulthood. But by adulthood we have all learned to take

precautions which an idiot never learns to take. The force and readiness
of our feelings continue: but through diversions and disguises, through
civilized controls, we raise the threshold of reactions. This is the only real
difference, emotionally, between Lennie and ourselves.
A great deal of Steinbeck’s power as a writer comes, then, from his
ability to bring into ordinary scenes of social conflict the psychological
forcefulness of infantile reactions: his creation of Lennie in Of Mice and
Men is a brilliant instance of that ability—so brilliant, in fact, that the
social conflict in this compact tale tends to dissolve into the dramatic ur-
gencies of Lennie’s “fate.” In his next novel, The Grapes of Wrath (1939),
Steinbeck would find a situation commensurate with his own low thresh-
old for idiot rage. The epic scope of the Okies’ tribulations, of their forced
migration from their farms and later exploitation in California, contains
and absorbs his immense capacity for anger. It is no accident that this novel
begins with the return of a blameless murderer, Tom Joad, imprisoned for
an almost pointless crime involving sexual rivalry (when a jealous friend
knifes him at a dance, Tom smashes him with a nearby shovel); nor that
the problem for Tom, for the rest of the novel, is how to control his easy
rages (once he leaves the state he violates parole; any brush with police will
return him to prison); nor that the novel ends with his commission of an-
other blameless but now socially significant murder (when a strikebreaker
kills ex-preacher Casy, now a Christ-like labor leader, Tom smashes him
with his own club). Nor is it an accident that the erotic potential of sen-
sual innocence is diffused, in the novel’s closing scene, by an act of social
compassion. With Lennie’s pathetic fate in mind, the meaning of Rose of
Sharon’s mysterious smile as she breastfeeds a starving middle-aged man
is not hard to fathom: she has found in the adult world what Lennie has
never been able to find—an adequate way to satisfy inchoate longings, a
way to nurture helpless creatures, perform useful tasks, indulge innocent
pleasures, without arousing self-destructive anger. Steinbeck has called
Of Mice and Men “a study of the dreams and pleasures of everyone in the
world” and has said that Lennie especially represents “the inarticulate and
powerful yearning of all men,” their “earth longings” for land of their own,
for innocent-pleasure farms. In a profoundly psychological way he was
right about the pleasures, though strangely neglectful of the rages which,
in his world at least, accompany them. Tom Joad’s confident smile, his

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flaunting of homicide to a truck driver as The Grapes of Wrath begins, and

Rose of Sharon’s mysterious satisfaction as it closes, suggest that fuller
accommodation of universal urges which gives his greatest novel much of
its extraordinary power.
Of Mice and Men helped him to release that power by making murder
seem as natural and innocent as love. He had been trying his hand at
blameless murders in stories like “Flight,” where a young Indian reaches
manhood through a killing, then flees to his own death in the wilderness;
or like “The Murder,” where a husband kills his foreign wife’s lover and
then beats her into admiring submission. There are natural killings too in
The Red Pony, where the little boy, Jody, cuts up the bird he has stoned
and hides the pieces out of deference to adults: “He didn’t care about
the bird, or its life, but he knew what older people would say if they had
seen him kill it; he was ashamed because of their potential opinion.” Jody
is too small to push these primitive sentiments very far; but Lennie, a
more sizable child, is better able to amplify their meaning. After killing
Curley’s wife, he flees to the grove near the Salinas River, as George has
told him to. Back in his own element, he moves “as silently as a creeping
bear,” drinks like a wary animal, and thinks of living in caves if George
doesn’t want him any more. Then out of his head come two figures: his
aunt Clara and (seven years before Mary Chase’s Harvey) a giant rabbit.
These figments of adult opinion bring all of George’s petty righteousness
to bear against him, shame him unmercifully, and threaten him with the
only thing that matters: the loss of his beloved bunnies. Then out of the
brush, like a third figment of Miltonic pettiness, comes George himself,
as if to punish him once more for “being bad.” But for Lennie as for
Jody, badness is a matter of opinions and taboos, not of consequences
and responsibilities. He doesn’t care about Curley’s wife, who exists for
him now only as another lifeless animal. Nor does Steinbeck care about
her except as she arrives at natural innocence; but he does care about that,
and through Lennie, who possesses it in abundance, he is able to affirm
his belief in the causeless, blameless animality of murder. Of course, he
also believes in the responsibility of those who grasp the consequences of
animal passion, and it is one of several paradoxes on which this novel ends
that George comes humbly now to accept responsibility for such passions,
comes not to punish Lennie, then, but to put him mercifully away, to let
him die in full enjoyment of their common dream. So he asks him to face

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the Gabilan Mountains, which in East of Eden are said to resemble the
inviting lap of a beloved mother; and, like a bedtime story or a prayer be-
fore execution—or better still, like both—together they recite the familiar
tale of the friendship farm.
What makes this ending scary and painful and perplexing is the
weight given to all that Lennie represents: if contradictory values are
affirmed—blameless animality, responsible humanity, innocent longing,
grim awareness—it is Lennie’s peculiar mixture of human dreams and
animal passions which matters most. George’s newfound maturity is para-
doxically a triumph: without Lennie he seems more like a horseless rider
than a responsible adult. “The two together were one glorious individual,”
says Steinbeck of the boy Jody and his imagined pony, Black Demon, the
best roping team at the rodeo. Without such demonic vitality, by which
any kind of meaningful life proceeds, George is indeed friendless and
alone. With it, needless to say, he is prone to destructive rages. On the
horns of that adolescent dilemma—that inability to take us beyond the
perplexities of sexual rage—Steinbeck hangs his readers. Impales them,
rather, since the rich tensions of this poignant perplex, however unre-
solved, are honestly and powerfully presented. . . .
Steinbeck himself liked simple stories well enough to write straight
allegories like The Pearl (1947). But chiefly he liked the puzzling kind. In
Tortilla Flat, an otherwise comic novel, he shows, for instance, how Danny
tires of the chivalric life and reverts to the “sweet violence” of outlawry.
“Sweet violence” means something more here than the joys of boyish rebel-
lion: it means delight in pulling the house down on one’s own and other
people’s heads, which is what Danny does when the friendship dream
proves insubstantial, and he pays with his life—and later, with his friends’
help, with his house—for the pleasure of destroying it. Lennie too pays with
his life for the pleasure of destructive rages; but he serves in this respect as
an extension of his friend’s desires: he is George Milton’s idiot Samson,
his blind avenger for the distastefulness of aggressive sexuality. Which may
be why their friendship seems impossible from the first, why the pathos
of their dream, and of its inevitable defeat, seems less important than the
turbulence it rouses. Once more, “sweet violence” is the force which moves
these characters, and which moves us to contemplate their puzzling fate.
By East of Eden Steinbeck would learn that rages generally follow
from rejected love, that parental coldness or aloofness breeds violence in

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youthful hearts; and he would come also to accept sexuality as a vulnerable

condition, a blind helplessness by which men and women may be “tricked
and trapped and enslaved and tortured,” but without which they would
not be human. Oddly, he would create in Cathy Ames a monstrous pro-
jection of his old hostility toward women as exploiters of the sex impulse;
and he would impose on her his own preternatural alertness to its selfish
uses and his own fear of being absorbed and blinded by it in his youth.
But by accepting sex now as a human need, he would redeem his Lennies
and Dannys from outlawry and animality, and he would finally repair the
ravages of sweet violence. Of Mice and Men remains his most compelling
tribute to the force behind those ravages, “the most disturbing impulse
humans have,” as it moves a selfish master and his dancing bear to idiot
rages. And once more it must be said to move us, too. For however con-
tradictory it seems, our sympathy for these characters, indeed their love
for each other, is founded more deeply in the humanness of that impulse
that in its humanitarian disguises.

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 CHAPTER FIVE
THE NOVELS OF JOHN STEINBECK,
EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER 5
Howard Levant

J ohn Steinbeck’s only published excursion into literary theory is an

effort to justify the form of the play-novelette–a term he invented.
Also, in the span of thirteen of the middle years of his career, Stein-
beck published three play-novelettes. These facts suggest that for Stein-
beck the play-novelette is an important novelistic form. It is therefore
appropriate to consider the theory and the practice of the form as well as
its implications in the larger frame of Steinbeck’s development of a simpli-
fied novelistic structure in longer fiction after about 1940.
Steinbeck presented the theory in an oddly titled article, “. . . the novel
might benefit by the discipline, the terseness . . . ,” in the January 1938
issue of Stage.1 Steinbeck’s view is that a play-novelette is a pure dramatic
structure—in the theatrical, not in the Jamesian, sense. He argues that if a
novelist can simplify narrative and characterization by ordering a novel as
if it were a play, the result must be an immediately powerful communica-
tion of theme and an enormous intensification of all the other novelistic
values. He adds that Of Mice and Men, one of his efforts in the genre, is a
failure as a play-novelette.
One can praise Steinbeck’s intention to vitalize the novel through a
new form, but without doubt his theory is absurd.2 (It should be added
that Steinbeck’s practice does little to redeem the theory.) Foremost, a

Reprinted from The Novels of John Steinbeck by Howard Levant, by permission of the
University of Missouri Press. Copyright © 1974 by the Curators of the University of
Missouri.

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HOWARD LEVANT

novel is not a play, and terms do not make it so. Consider a key passage
in Steinbeck’s argument:

For some years the novel has increasingly taken on the attributes of the
drama. . . . To read an objective novel is to see a little play in your mind.
All right, why not make it so you can see it on a stage? This experiment,
then, is really only a conclusion towards which the novel has been un-
consciously heading for some time.3

The argument is serious, as the tone suggests. But the logic is un-
convincing because the analogy is false. To know that Henry James and
his literary heirs succeeded in making the novel a direct rendering of ex-
perience does not mean that a novelist can remove every vestige of form
and, in that sense, “make it so you can see it on a stage.” Steinbeck takes
the issue beyond the limits of analogy in an effort to sharpen a point; he
confuses what a novel and a play are and can do; in short, he loads the
argument in his favor.
The logical trick is not worth consideration, as Steinbeck seems to know,
since he uses a second argument that is based on a quite different theory:
The best way to reach an audience is by a direct effect. He asserts that the
trouble with the novel as a form is that it is made for the individual “alone
under a reading lamp,” whereas a play depends on a group response:

Now if it is true, and I believe it is, that the preoccupation of the modern
novelist lies in these themes which are most poignantly understood by a
group, that novelist limits the possibility of being understood by making
it impossible for groups to be exposed to this work.4

Again the logic is unconvincing because the analogy is false. The argu-
ment rests only on Steinbeck’s feeling that the group responds to a liter-
ary effect with more emotional validity than any individual can generate.
Even if a measure of emotion could be devised, and if the private reading
of drama were outlawed, the fact remains that a play is not a novel. Fi-
nally, the analogy is qualified by the direction of much modern writing,
including the novel, into private or subjective content and form.
The Stage article is an aberration of logic and of literary history, but
it is more illuminating to consider how deeply the aberration is rooted in
Steinbeck’s practice.5

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Much of the longer fiction is organized around some abstraction, a

technical device or an intellectual point of view that operates as a “univer-
sal,” giving a spurious dramatic structure to panoramic materials. Stein-
beck can overcome this tendency by accident (as in Tortilla Flat) or by
exorcising a part of his skill that is dangerous to cultivate (as in The Grapes
of Wrath—but only in part). The excellent work and the aberrant work are
both characteristic. Dates of publication alone prevent critical simplicity:
Of Mice and Men and the Stage article were published between In Dubious
Battle and The Grapes of Wrath. It is quite probable, as Moore and Lisca
suggest, that the beginning of the play-novelette form can be seen in the
more objectively rendered chapters of In Dubious Battle.6 The factual and
probable evidence indicates that the play-novelette form, aberration as it
may be, nevertheless is rooted deeply in some of the best of Steinbeck’s
previous work. Further, the evidence suggests why Steinbeck engages in
so patently absurd a confusion of form over a period of thirteen years.
He tries to achieve a harmony between structure and materials in every
novel, but the effort is a constant struggle, open in part to accident. Now,
the play-novelette form is eminently a way to formulate a harmony—to
remove accident and struggle by a formula. To a novelist like Steinbeck,
afflicted with artistic ambition but limited in structural insight, the at-
traction of the play-novelette form is obvious. Its theory may rest on false
analogy, may be only a gimmick, or may indicate Steinbeck’s lack of judg-
ment with a terrifying clarity. But we must keep in mind that the theory
and the practice of the play-novelette, in Steinbeck’s hands, is a continu-
ation of his constant effort to achieve a harmony between structure and
materials. To do less is to limit criticism to a club.
These various matters can be understood more deeply and perhaps
more clearly through analysis of Of Mice and Men. Despite Steinbeck’s
disclaimer in Stage, Of Mice and Men is certainly a play-novelette ac-
cording to Steinbeck’s own theory. Biographical information supports
this view. Steinbeck reported to his agents, at the beginning of his work
in February 1935, “I’m doing a play now,” and Harry Thornton Moore
records several illuminating contemporary facts:

After Of Mice and Men was published and the suggestion was made that
it be prepared for the stage, Steinbeck said it could be produced directly
from the book, as the earliest moving pictures had been produced. It was

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HOWARD LEVANT

staged in almost exactly this way in the spring of 1937 by a labor-theater

group in San Francisco, and, although the venture was not a failure, it
plainly demonstrated to Steinbeck that the story needed to be adapted to
dramatic form. . . . But, when Steinbeck transferred the story into final
dramatic form for the New York stage, he took 85% of his lines bodily
form the novel. A few incidents needed juggling, one or two minor new
ones were introduced, and some (such as Lennie’s imaginary speech with
his Aunt Clara at the end of the novel) were omitted.7

It would seem that the novel was intended to function as a play, and
Steinbeck did not alter the novel in any essential way during the tinkering
in preparation for the New York stage production. Aesthetic consider-
ations support the biographical information, as in Moore’s observation:
“Structurally, the novel was from the first a play: it is divided into six parts,
each part a scene—the reader may observe that the action never moves
away from a central point in each of these units.”8 And clearly the novel
does “play”: Characters make entrances and exits; plainly indicated paral-
lels and oppositions that are characteristic of the drama exist in quantity
and function as they should; suspense is maintained; characters are kept
uncomplicated and “active” in the manner of stage characterization; since
there is little internal or implicit development, events depend on what is
said or done in full view; the locale is restricted mainly to one place; the
span of time is brief; the central theme is stated and restated—the good
life is impossible because humanity is flawed—and in itself is deeply poi-
gnant, as Steinbeck had defined a play-novelette theme. In short, I do not
see how Of Mice and Men could meet more completely the specifications
of a play-novelette as Steinbeck listed them. If critics have been displeased
with Of Mice and Men, as Steinbeck was, the trouble cannot lie in the ap-
plication of the theory but in the assumption that inspired the theory. I
shall explore this point in detail.
As a dramatic structure, Of Mice and Men is focused on Lennie and
occurs within the context of the bunkhouse and the ranch. Within these
confines, Steinbeck develops theme and countertheme by exploring the
chances for the good life against the flawed human material that Lennie
symbolizes most completely and the code of rough justice that most people
accept. Even this initial, limited statement points to the central difficulty
in the novel. The “well-made” dramatic form that Steinbeck defined in
Stage and did construct in Of Mice and Men is conducive to abstraction

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 THE NOVELS OF JOHN STEINBECK, EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER 5

because it is limited to visible action. Lennie is limited in much the same

way. As a huge, powerful, semi-idiot who kills when he is frightened or
simply when he is thoughtless, Lennie is a reduction of humanity to the
lowest common denominator. It may be possible to construct a parable
out of so limited a structure and materials, but it is impossible to handle
complex human motives and relationships within those limits. Of Mice
and Men is successful to the extent that it remains a parable, but the en-
veloping action is more complex than the parable form can encompass.
Lennie is the most fully realized character, yet he is presented nec-
essarily as a personification, an exaggerated, allegorized instance of the
division between mind and body; the sketch that is Lennie is incapable of
conveying personality. The other characters are personified types rather
than realized persons. Though less pathetic than Lennie, they do not have
his moral impact. In short, every structural devise except personification is
sacrificed to highlight Lennie’s moral helplessness. The sacrifice is much
too great. It thins out the parable. The stripped language furthers this
effect of extreme thinness. For example, Lennie’s one friend, George, is
not a realized man but a quality that complements Lennie’s childlike in-
nocence. George fills out Lennie’s pattern to complete a whole man. He is
a good man, motivated to protect Lennie because he realizes that Lennie
is the reverse image of his own human nature. George is a representation
of humanity that (unlike Lennie) is aware of evil. An extended abstract
passage (pages 38-43) makes this clear.`
Everything in the development of the novel is designed to contribute
to a simplification of character and event.
The opening scene of the green pool in the Salinas River promises
serenity, but later the pool is the background for Lennie’s violent death.
George’s initial hope that Lennie can hide his flawed humanity by seem-
ing to be conventional is shattered in the end. Lennie’s flaw grows into
a potential for evil, and every evil is ascribed to him after his unwitting
murder of Curley’s wife. The objective image of the good life in the fu-
ture, “a little house and a couple of acres an’ a cow and some pigs,” is op-
posed sharply to the present sordid reality of the bunkhouse and the ranch
(OMM 14). Minor characters remain little more than opposed types,
identifiable by allegorical tags. Curley is the unsure husband, opposed to
and fearful of his sluttish, unnamed wife. Slim is a minor god in his per-
fect mastery of his work. His serenity is contrasted sharply with Curley’s

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hysterical inability to please or to control his wife, and it contrasts as easily

with the wife’s constant, obvious discontent. Candy and Crooks are simi-
lar types, men without love. Both are abused by Curley, his wife, and the
working crew. (Lennie might fall into this category of defenselessness if
he were aware enough to realize the situation; but he is not.) These sharp
oppositions and typed personae restrict the development of the novel. The
merely subordinate characters, such as Carlson and Whit, who only begin
or fill out a few scenes, are strictly nonhuman, since they remain abstract
instruments within a design.
The climax of that design is simplified in its turn, since it serves only
to manipulate Lennie into a moral situation beyond his understanding.
The climax is doubled, a pairing of opposites. In its first half, when Cur-
ley’s wife attempts to seduce Lennie as a way to demonstrate her hatred
of Curley, Lennie is content (in his nice innocence) to stroke her soft hair;
but he is too violent, and he snaps her neck in a panic miscalculation as he
tries to force her to be quiet. In the second half, George shoots Lennie to
prevent a worse death at the hands of others. The melodramatic quality
of these events will be considered at a later point. Here, it is more impor-
tant to observe, in the design, that the climax pairs an exploration of the
ambiguity of love in the rigid contrast between the different motives that
activate Curley’s wife and George. Curley’s wife wants to use Lennie to
show her hatred for Curley. George shoots Lennie out of a real affection
for him. The attempted seduction balances the knowing murder; both
are disastrous expressions of love. Lennie is the unknowing center of the
design in both halves of this climax. Steinbeck’s control is all too evident.
There is not much sense of dramatic illumination because the quality of
the paired climax is that of a mechanical problem of joining two parallels.
Lennie’s necessary passivity enforces the quality of a mechanical design.
He is only the man to who things happen. Being so limited, he is inca-
pable of providing that sudden widening insight which alone justifies an
artist’s extreme dependence on a rigid design. Therefore, in general, Of
Mice and Men remains a simple anecdote.
It would be a mistake to conclude that the limited scope of the ma-
terials is the only or the effective cause of the simplification. Writers fre-
quently begin their work with anecdotal materials. Most often, however,
they expand the reference of such materials through a knowing exercise
of their medium.9 It is Steinbeck’s inability to exercise his medium or,

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 THE NOVELS OF JOHN STEINBECK, EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER 5

perhaps more fundamentally, to select a proper medium, which ensures

the limited reference, the lack of a widening insight.
In his discussion of the play-novelette form in Stage, Steinbeck dis-
misses the objection that allegory is an overly limited form,10 but the ob-
jection is serious. Of Mice and Men is not merely a brief novel. It is limited
in what its structure can make of its materials. Moreover, Steinbeck hoped
to achieve precisely that limitation—the Stage essay leaves no doubt of
this—although, it is true, he felt that form would ensure a concentration,
a focus, of the materials. Instead, there is a deliberate thinning of materials
that are thin (or theatrical) to begin with.
In fact, Steinbeck uses every possible device to thin out the effect of
the materials. Foreshadowing is overworked. Lennie’s murder of Curley’s
wife is the catastrophe that George has been dreading from the start. It is
precisely the fate that a fluffy animal like Curley’s wife should meet at the
hands of Lennie, who has already killed mice and a puppy with his over-
powering tenderness (OMM 8, 84–85). When Curley’s wife makes clear
her intention to seduce the first available man and the course of events
abandons Lennie to her, the result is inevitable. But that inevitability does
not have tragic qualities. The result is merely arranged, the characters
merely inarticulate, and the action develops without illumination. Lennie
can hardly distinguish between a dead pup and the dead woman: “Lennie
went back and looked at the dead girl. The puppy lay close to her. Len-
nie picked it up. ‘I’ll throw him away,’ he said. ‘It’s bad enough like it is’”
(OMM 92).
The relative meaninglessness of his victims substitutes pathos for
tragedy. Curley’s rather shadowy wife underlines the substitution: She is
characterless, nameless, and constantly discontent, so her death inspires
none of the sympathy one might feel for a kind or a serene woman. Oth-
ers respond to her death wholly in light of Lennie’s predicament—from
George’s loving concern to Curley’s blistering need for revenge—not
his character. Everything that is excellent in the novel tends to relate,
intensely if narrowly, to that emphasis. Within these limits, much that
Steinbeck does is done excellently. The essential question is whether the
treatment of the materials is intense enough to justify their evident ma-
nipulation, their narrowed pathos.
The novel communicates most intensely a theme of unconventional
morality. Lennie does commit murder, but he remains guiltless because he

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is not responsible for what he does.11 Yet the morality is only a statement of
the pathos of Lennie’s situation, not an exploration of guilt and innocence.
A development through parallels and juxtapositions does little to expand
the stated theme. Carlson parallels Lennie’s violence on a conventional
level when he insists on killing Candy’s ancient, smelly dog. Carlson’s
reasoning is that the group has a right to wrong the individual. Lennie is
incapable of any logic, even of this twisted sort, and he is never cruel by
choice; that potential moral complexity is neglected in the design to permit
the brutal simplicity of the group’s response to Carlson’s argument and to
Lennie’s crime. Carlson’s crime is approved by the group: He abuses power
to invade another man’s desire for affection, reduced to a worthless dog.
Lennie’s crime is an accident in an attempt to express affection; murder is
too serious for the group to ignore, so Lennie is hunted down. We are in-
tended to notice the irony that Carlson’s crime inverts Lennie’s. That sim-
ple, paralleled irony substitutes for a possible, intense, necessarily complex,
and ambiguous development of the materials. The rendered development,
not the materials themselves, produces this simply mechanical irony.
Certainly the theme of unconventional morality offers tragic possi-
bilities in a dimension beyond the anecdotal or the sketch of a character or
event. From that viewpoint, the oppositions can expand into tragic aware-
ness, at least potentially. They can even be listed as follows. Lennie is good
in his intentions, but evil in fact. The group is good in wanting to punish
a murderer, but evil in misunderstanding that Lennie is guiltless. Counter-
wise, George, Candy, and Slim are endowed with understanding by their
roles as the friend, the man without hope, and the god, but they are power-
less against the group. Curley’s wife is knowingly evil in exploiting Lennie’s
powerful body and weak mind. Curley is evil in exploiting all opportunities
to prove his manhood. These two are pathetic in their human limitations,
not tragic. George enacts an unconventional morality less by accident than
any of the others. He feels strongly that, in being compelled to look after
Lennie, he has given up the good times he might have had, but he knows
the sacrifice is better, that he and Lennie represent an idealized variety of
group-man. Slim’s early, sympathetic insight makes this explicit:

“You guys travel around together?” [Slim’s] tone was friendly. It invited
confidence without demanding it. “Sure,” said George. “We kinda look
after each other.” He indicated Lennie with his thumb. “He ain’t bright.

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 THE NOVELS OF JOHN STEINBECK, EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER 5

Hell of a good worker, though. Hell of a nice fella, but he ain’t bright.
I’ve knew him for a long time.” Slim looked through George and be-
yond him. “Ain’t many guys travel around together,” he mused. “I don’t
know why. Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each
other.” “It’s a lot nicer to go around with a guy you know,” said George.
(OMM 34–35)

This important passage centers the theme of unconventional morality. It

celebrates a relationship “the whole damn world” is incapable of imagin-
ing, given the ugly context of ranch life and sordid good times, and it
locates the good life in friendship, not in the material image of the little
farm. This passage is the heart of the novel.
But a novel cannot be structured solely on the basis of a theme, even
a fundamental theme. Too much else must be simplified. Worse, the
unconventional morality located in friendship produces Lennie’s death,
not only because Steinbeck can see no other way to conclude. Lennie dies
necessarily because friendship can go no further than it does go, and noth-
ing can be made of the dreamlike ideal of little farm. The extreme sim-
plification is that Steinbeck can do nothing with Lennie after he has been
exhibited. These limitations derive from the simplification required by the
play-novelette form. Steinbeck appears to be aware that formal limitations
need some widening, since he imbeds Lennie’s happiest and most intense
consciousness of the good life of friends in an ironic context:

George said, “Guys like us got no fambly. They make a little stake an’
then they blow it in. They ain’t got nobody in the worl’ that gives a hoot
in hell about ’em—”
“But not us,” Lennie cried happily. “Tell about us now.”
George was quiet for a moment. “But not us,” he said.
“Because—”
“Because I got you an’—”
“An’ I got you. We got each other, that’s what, that gives a hoot in
hell about us,” Lennie cried in triumph. (OMM 104)12

The passage extends friendship beyond its boundary; it celebrates a spe-

cies of marriage, minus the sexual element, between Lennie and George.
But the content of the passage is qualified heavily by its position; George
shoots Lennie after retelling the story about the little farm that always

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HOWARD LEVANT

quiets Lennie. As further irony, precisely the responsibilities of a perfect

friendship require George to shoot Lennie. The mob that would hang
Lennie for murder is in the background throughout the scene. The situ-
ation is moving, but the effect is local. The ironies relate only to Lennie’s
pathetic situation; they do not aid an understanding of Lennie or account
(beyond plot) for his death. Too, the scene is melodramatic; it puts aside
the large problems of justifying the event in order to jerk our tears over
the event itself.
To say that Steinbeck avoids the problems of structure by milking
individual scenes is not to say that Of Mice and Men is a total failure. As
mature work, it is not a depot for the basic flaws in Steinbeck’s earliest
work. Many of the scenes are excellently constructed and convincing in
themselves. Considerable attention is given to establishing minor details.
For example, George shoots Lennie with the Luger that Carlson used to
kill Candy’s old dog. The defenseless man is linked by the weapon with the
defenseless dog in the group’s web of created power. George does his kill-
ing as a kind of ritual. If the police or the mob had taken Lennie, the death
would have been a meaningless expression of group force, the exaction of
an eye for an eye rather than an expression of love. The background of
language is the workingman dialect that Steinbeck perfected in In Dubious
Battle, realized here to express a brutally realistic world that negates ideal-
ism and exaggerates the sadistic and the ugly. Its perfection is enhanced
by a factual context—the dependence of the men on their shifting jobs,
the explicit misery of their homelessness, and the exposure of their social
and economic weaknesses. The more sensitive men dream of escape into
some kind of gentleness. The thread of possible realization of that dream
tends to hold the novel in a focus. The opposite pole of man’s imperfect
moral nature motivates Curley’s wife and Carlson. Steinbeck’s fine web of
circumstance reaches from the ideal possibility to the brutal fact.
Of Mice and Men is strongest in precisely this plot sense, in a sequence
and linkage of events controlled by ironic contrast and juxtaposition. The
result is limited to the rendering of a surface, yet the necessarily external
devices of plot are used with artistic care and skillful tact.
Just after George, Lennie, and Candy agree to realize the dream of
the little farm by pooling their savings and earnings, Curley appears,
searching for his wife. Frustrated, Curley punches Lennie without mercy
until (on George’s order) Lennie grabs and crushes Curley’s hand. This

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 THE NOVELS OF JOHN STEINBECK, EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER 5

violent event suggests that Curley’s sadistic vision of the world will not be
shut out by the idealized vision of cooperative friends. More closely, the
ugly inversion of “the good, clean fight” serves to contrast Lennie’s in-
nocence with his surprise and helplessness before evil. The other men in
the bunkhouse are unconcerned; violence is an ordinary element in their
lives. The incident enacts and announces the implicitly universal moral
imperfection of humanity—an insight that broadens and becomes more
overt in the following scenes. When Curley has to go to town to have a
doctor care for his crushed hand, the men take the chance to go into town
for a spree. Crooks, Candy, and Lennie—the Negro, the old man, and
the idiot—are left on the ranch with Curley’s wife. The circumstances
provide her with an opportunity to seduce Lennie; she hates Curley, and
the Hollywood ideal of the seductive movie queen is her only standard of
love. Crooks cannot protect Lennie because his black skin leaves him open
to sexual blackmail; Candy’s feeble efforts are useless; and Lennie does not
understand what is happening. The ultimate irony in this tangle of vio-
lence is that none of the characters is evil or intends to do evil. . . . In her
need as in her amoral unawareness of good and evil, Curley’s wife is not
unlike Lennie, just as the various moral defects of other people conspire
by chance to leave Lennie alone and defenseless with Curley’s wife. Yet
“love” has different meanings for Lennie and for Curley’s wife; the clash
of meanings ensures their deaths.
The death of Curley’s wife switches the narrative focus to George and
to the device of the split hero. Steinbeck is fond of this device of a divided
(not duplicated) hero, usually two men of opposite nature, one distinctly
secondary to the other but both sharing the center of the novel. For a
few suggestive, not inclusive, examples: Henry Morgan, Jim Nolan, and
Aaron Trask are coldly thoughtful, knowing men, either selfish or ideal-
istic in what they do; Coeur de Gris, Mac, and Caleb Trask are relatively
warmer men, possibly as knowing as their opposites, but usually more
subject to their emotions. Jim Casy and Tom Joad extend and complicate
the pattern as they become suggestive types of Christ and Saint Paul,
the human god and the coldly realistic organizer, but they do not break
the pattern. There are obvious narrative virtues of clarity in a device that
is recognizable as well as flexible. The secondary hero is subordinate in
Steinbeck’s fiction—except in Of Mice and Men. There, Lennie’s murder
propels George into a sudden prominence that has not structural basis.

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HOWARD LEVANT

Is the novel concerned with Lennie’s innocence or George’s guilt? The

formal requirements of a play-novelette mandate a structural refocus.
Steinbeck needs a high point to bring down the curtain. With Lennie
dead, Steinbeck must use and emphasize George’s guilt. The close is
formulated—the results of a hasty switch—not structured from preceding
events, so it produces an inconclusive ending in view of what has hap-
pened previously. And the ideal of the farm vanishes with Lennie’s death,
when George tells Candy the plan is off.
Here the difficulty is with a structure that requires a climax which
cannot be achieved once Lennie, the center of the novel, is removed; but
Lennie must be killed off when his existence raises problems of character-
ization more complex than the play-novelette form can express. Materials
and structure pull against each other and finally collapse into an oversim-
plified conclusion that removes rather than faces the central theme.
The abrupt “solution” rests on melodrama, on sudden, purely plot
devices of focus and refocus. Such overt manipulation indicates that in
its practice the play-novelette is not a new form. Steinbeck’s experience,
his mature technical skill do not finally disguise his wish to return to his
earliest fictional efforts to realize complex human behavior by way of an
extreme simplification of structure and materials. His deliberate avoidance
of an organic structure and his consequent dependence on a formula, on
the exercise of technique within an artistic vacuum, exhausts the signifi-
cance of the play-novelette theory. His practice, as in Of Mice and Men,
does not lead to serious efforts and to a real achievement in the art of the
novel. Rather, it leads to manipulations designed to effect a simplifica-
tion of structure and materials. So much skill, directed toward so little, is
disturbing. But the skill is absolutely there.

Notes
1. John Steinbeck, “. . . the novel might benefit by the discipline, the terseness
. . . ,” Stage 15 (January 1938): 50–51. Excerpts from this work are quoted by
permission of McIntosh and Otis, Inc.
2. Antonia Seixas was Steinbeck’s secretary for a time, and the wife of Stein-
beck’s close friend, Edward Ricketts; she speaks with authority from within the
circle. Consequently, her opinion—published in March 1947—that Of Mice and
Men is a great novel primarily on philosophic grounds is a fascinating echo of

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 THE NOVELS OF JOHN STEINBECK, EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER 5

Steinbeck’s low view of the actual novel and his high view of the abstract theory
of the form presented in the Stage article.
3. Steinbeck, Stage, 51.
4. E. W. Tedlock Jr., and C. V. Wicker, eds., Steinbeck and His Critics: A Re-
cord of Twenty-Five Years (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1957).
The abbreviation is embarrassing. Tedlock and Wicker omit the Stage article
from an otherwise important collection of Steinbeck’s observation on his craft.
5. Harry Thornton Moore, The Novels of John Steinbeck (Chicago: Nor-
mandie House, 1939), 48–49; Peter Lisca, The Wide World of John Steinbeck (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1958), 132–33.
6. John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men (New York: Penguin, 1993). Hereafter
cited as OMM.
7. Moore, Novels, 49; Lisca, Wide World, 130.
8. Moore, Novels, 48.
9. Mark Schorer, “Technique as Discovery,” Hudson Review 1 (Spring 1948),
67–87. I am much indebted to Schorer’s argument.
10. Steinbeck, Stage, 51.
11. This paradox is the “moral” of the poem by Robert Burns which sup-
plies the title of the novel; the title indicates Steinbeck’s own concentration on
a thematic development, not on characters or events as important in themselves.
Further: A “moral” does tend to be simple.
12. This is a repetition of an earlier passage in a less sinister context (13–14).
Compare the close of In Dubious Battle.

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 CHAPTER SIX
STEINBECK’S OF MICE AND MEN
(NOVEL) (1937)
John F. Slater

[Editor’s note: Portions of this article have been omitted as the content does not
directly apply to Of Mice and Men.]

I. Background

T
he publication of Of Mice and Men in January of 1937 opened an
impressive new horizon in the course of Steinbeck’s literary de-
velopment and brought about significant alterations, not entirely
welcome, in his personal situation. Especially during his early years as a
writer, Steinbeck had shown restless attraction to imagery that focused on
the activity of learning. When he wrote, in Tortilla Flat, “the waves gently
practiced at striking and hissed a little,” he seemed to amplify his private
concern with the laborious reiterations needed to establish the wave-
length of a distinctive voice. In Of Mice and Men, Steinbeck continued to
learn through practice. True to the scientific attitude he adopted toward
the procedures of his craft, he viewed the novel as a kind of laboratory,
a theater of operations where he could master innovative dramatic skills.
. . . The “experiment,” he said, was an attempt to make “a play that can
be read or a novel that can be played.”1 What he achieved was a union of
competing genres that reflects simultaneously his respect for formal order

Previously published in A Study Guide to Steinbeck, ed. Tetsumaro Hayashi, 129–48.

Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1974. Reprinted with permission.

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 STEINBECK’S OF MICE AND MEN (NOVEL) (1937)

and his suspicion of it, his need for design without the expense of yield-
ing to any one orthodoxy. The surfacing at this time of Steinbeck’s overt
interest in dramatic modes indicates another, related conflict as well. His
emergence as a public figure was threatening to impinge on his role as
artist. Of Mice and Men was an immediate popular and critical success.
The novel, with the play and movie adaptation that followed, brought
financial security and engendered lasting respect among critics who have
treated few other of Steinbeck’s works as kindly with the passage of time.
But even during the two-year period when he was working on Of Mice
and Men, Steinbeck was already troubled by the prospect of wide recogni-
tion and acceptance: “I am scared of popularity. It has ruined everyone I
know.”2 Steinbeck welcomed a moderately sized audience and subscribed
to “the recent tendency of writers . . . to deal in those themes and those
scenes which are best understood and appreciated by groups of people.”3
An unbridled reception, however, could be as harmful as a formless novel,
and consequently Steinbeck declared his intention of “holding an audi-
ence,” necessarily imagined as a finite one if the book were to become a
play, and of creating intimate, “almost physical contact”4 with his readers.
For Steinbeck, the readership equivalent to a packed house was a few tens
of thousands, and he addressed himself to them, not to the millions who
eventually materialized in the wake of The Grapes of Wrath.
Prefatory comments that link Of Mice and Men to the decade that
produced it must issue a precautionary note. To the extent that the book
is a documentary account as well as an artistic tour de force, it touches
on Steinbeck’s private history more than the contemporary public his-
tory of his country. Despite the continuation of the era’s great event, the
Depression, Steinbeck was relatively unencumbered, at least by 1936, in
the management of his family affairs. On the other hand, he had become
reflective and inward-looking about the direction his career increasingly
promised to take. Correspondingly, Of Mice and Men, unlike the two
novels that embraced it, is not about the alignment of massive economic
forces. Certainly the story is interested in how modular groups of people,
even two men together, formulate effective myths of social cohesion; but
the emphasis is on individual performance or its failure, not monolithic
external factors. In Of Mice and Men, Steinbeck is steadfastly sympathetic
toward men less fortunate than himself. On this occasion, however, the
overwhelming power that leads to the prosperity of those who harness

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JOHN F. SLATER

it while maiming countless unenfranchised victims is represented, not

by titanic accumulations of economic might but by the supremacy of
Steinbeck’s own verbal and imaginative faculties. The twentieth-century
subculture in which Lennie and George find themselves is no doubt a
diminished source of romantic fantasy or its fulfillment, but Steinbeck
goes out of his way to indicate that the realization of what dreams they
can salvage is economically well within their grasp. Lennie, by virtue
of his psycho-physical abnormality, and George, by virtue of his fatally
dependent, self-defeating temperament, represent regrettable limitations
of personal talent more than the defects of a nation divided into warring
factions. Their world is a hard one, inhospitable to pastoral visions drawn
from the American past, but it does not deny a place to people like Slim,
ordained by special accomplishments, any more than the demanding
world of American literature withheld acclamation from the novel Of Mice
and Men and its author.

II. Synopsis
[Editor’s note: This section of text merely repeats the plot line of Of Mice and
Men.]

III. Critical Explication

[See editor’s note.]
In terms of literary criticism, Leslie Fiedler’s controversial book Love
and Death in the American Novel ushered in the revolution of the 1960s.
The controversy centered on Fiedler’s thesis that the American novel is
distinguished by an archetypal sequence of close relationships between
“male pairs,” such as Huck Finn and Jim, that border on what Fiedler now
calls, with some reservations, the “homoerotic.” Fiedler’s contention helps
place Of Mice and Men in an important historical tradition, although no
one would quarrel with Burton Rascoe’s early assessment that “the rela-
tionship between George and Lennie is a paradigm of all the nonphysical,
nonsexual (let us use the so tritely inadequate and now almost meaning-
less word ‘spiritual’ to help out in indicating the meaning) emotions,
concerns, and aspirations in the world.”9 But Fiedler provided another
kind of access, as well, to the reader who sought to base his admiration

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 STEINBECK’S OF MICE AND MEN (NOVEL) (1937)

of Steinbeck on the solidest possible ground. Fiedler impatiently rejected

the strictures of New Criticism and reasserted the right, even of academic
critics, to share the motivations of general readers who view factors other
than artistic performance—factors such as the light a given novel might
shed on cultural continuities—as valid if not indeed essential dimension
of reading activity.
. . . Of Mice and Men is relevant to current concerns, including the
concern of students to be subjective, even sentimental, free from fear of
recrimination while reserving the right to be tough-minded about im-
mutable realities when occasion requires. A generation of students that
introduced the word “scenario” to the lexicon of political activism can
appreciate Steinbeck’s abiding interest in the wellsprings of social drama.
Furthermore, powerful sympathy has revived for the downtrodden pro-
tagonists Steinbeck chronicled. Like George and Lennie, many young
people profess to “give a damn,” and their experience often vindicates
the use of the slogan. Thoreau’s vision of a life uncluttered by academic
sophistication has won new adherents—and has its counterpart in Lennie
and George’s dream of a farm of their own. Salinas remains the scene of
economic and social friction, and even Soledad has lent its name to the
headlines. Of Mice and Men proves no exception to the renewed timeliness
of Steinbeck’s work. . . .
Throughout Steinbeck, rhetorical arrangements, however liberated
compared with ordinary ones, complement the victimization of characters
by uncontrollable, even unrecognizable imperatives latent in nature and in
manmade systems like the rudimentary verbal ones the characters them-
selves put together. Thus when the reader of Of Mice and Men submits
to the exciting flow of unfolding events, he also perceives himself in the
presence of an architectural scheme analogous to the rise-and-fall trajec-
tory of classical drama. This recognition of the novel’s structural integrity
reveals that, even as they manipulate one another, Steinbeck’s characters
are as subservient to the dictates of his master plan as to the urgencies of
natural impulse.
To implement the economy of an “experiment” in dramatic form,
Steinbeck communicated the parallels he sensed between natural and rhe-
torical forces by focusing on a specific image in Of Mice and Men, the image
of a “trap.” Most obviously, he used the slang word for “mouth,” “trap,” to
suggest that even apparently casual utterances can hem men in. . . .

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JOHN F. SLATER

An explicit “trap” reference occurs in Of Mice and Men when Curley’s

wife says to Crooks, “Listen, Nigger. . . . You know what I can do to you
if you open your trap?” (OMM 80). The reference seems insignificant in
isolation, but in the context of George’s warning Lennie that Curley’s wife
is “a rat-trap if I ever seen one” (OMM 32), it elevates sensitivity to the trap
of racial discrimination that imprisons Crooks. Given the title of the novel,
George’s comment about a “rat-trap” also brings to mind Burns’ couplet,
“The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley,” and its implica-
tion that destiny, chance, is a trap set for men, mice, and perhaps rats too.
Of Mice and Men is as much concerned with references to “chance,” often
in connection with games, as it is with traps. George’s “rat-trap” comment
also shows how rhetorical and natural threats coincide in Of Mice and
Men. Women, and by extension human sexuality, are a biological trap for
Steinbeck’s characters. The Salinas bordellos trap men’s money and sap
their will power. Steinbeck perhaps intended an oblique disparagement of
Lennie’s Aunt Clara when he bestowed the name Clara on the more ex-
pensive of the town’s two madams. References to Curley’s “glove fulla vase-
line” (OMM 27) disagreeably symbolize the entrapment of husband and
wife in mutual sexual exploitation. These references supplement Candy’s
loss of his hand, prepare the ground for the crushing of Curley’s hand and,
again by extension, show the meaning of Crooks’s crippled spine. Crooks’s
infirmity is emblematic of his handicapped racial status, a brand of impo-
tence cruelly thrust home by what Curley’s wife says to him.
Thus far, we have noticed historical factors that have influenced the
reception of Of Mice and Men, . . . [but] the history of critical reactions
to the book also deserves attention. The conclusions that critics have
drawn about Of Mice and Men can best be summarized by quoting one of
Steinbeck’s astutest readers, Peter Lisca, who accepts the lead of Antonia
Seixas in his finding that “the simple story of two migrant workers’ dream
of a safe retreat, a ‘clean well-lighted place,’ becomes itself a pattern or
archetype which exists on three levels.”
“There is the obvious story level on a realistic plane, with its shocking
climax. There is also the level of social protest, Steinbeck the reformer
crying out against the exploitation of migrant workers. The third level is
an allegorical one, its interpretation limited only by the ingenuity of the
audience.”22 Referring to Burns’ poem, Lisca goes on to identify a final,
fourth level:

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In the poem, Burns extends the mouse’s experience to include that of

mankind; in Of Mice and Men, Steinbeck extends the experience of two
migrant workers to the human condition. “This is the way things are,”
both writers are saying. On this level, perhaps the most important,
Steinbeck is dramatizing the non-teleological philosophy which had
such a great part in shaping In Dubious Battle and which would be fully
discussed in Sea of Cortez.23

Lisca’s comments are definitive, and his chapter on Of Mice and Men
in The Wide World of John Steinbeck is the indispensable point of departure
for any survey of the novel’s critics.
The current explication has sought to show that the “inevitableness”
Lisca notices in Of Mice and Men is the effect of the novel’s rhetorical com-
ponents, not just of the superficial course of events. Lennie’s actions repeat
themselves with a regularity that soon becomes predictable, and Steinbeck
similarly marshals his artistic resources to produce a cyclical, rather than lin-
ear dramatic action. In addition to the recurrent elements already discussed
at some length, the reader will probably have recognized several others in
the novel itself. Apparently minor details often serve to buttress the novel’s
taut, interlocking arrangement. When George tells Lennie, “You ain’t
gonna put nothing over on me” (OMM 8), his language forecasts the boss’s
parting shot in the following section. The color red repeatedly signifies fem-
inine allure. A great, mysterious fish, at home in the natural surroundings
of the novel’s opening, ironically anticipates the desperate human “fish,”
Curley and his wife, that Lennie maims and kills. Larger rhetorical units
form patterns, too. The end of the novel recapitulates almost verbatim the
description at the beginning, although by the end Steinbeck has progres-
sively educated his audience about the symbolism of incidental detail. The
unassailable dispassion with which a water bird swallows a snake throws
in starkest contrast George’s agonized resignation to Lennie’s death. Less
overtly, the series of references to the characters’ literary tastes draws atten-
tion to the much greater capability and complexity of Steinbeck’s own. Even
the mechanical procedure of noting the length of the novel’s six sections
illuminates Steinbeck’s self-conscious artistry. The initial sections expand
at a measured tempo into the spacious central episodes; then follows the
compression and acceleration that leads to the denouement.
In closing, it is worthwhile reemphasizing an issue raised in the in-
troduction: in every way, Of Mice and Men reflects Steinbeck’s exceptional

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JOHN F. SLATER

concern for the implications of his craft at the time he wrote the novel.
The novel arbitrates between an urgent need for freedom and a no less
importunate need for control, personal needs that appertain more to the
universal history of artists than to the passing history of the mid-1930s.
Steinbeck’s characters are equally engrossed in the private dilemmas and
decisions common to untutored creativity in every age. George has the
faculty of creating dream worlds that seem real as long as he can improvise
an audience. With Lennie’s death, he falls from grace. Recognizing that
his audience, like his fable, has been ephemeral, the captive of circum-
stances, he accommodates himself to a more mundane version of reality
than the one he has made in his mind. The importance for any story
teller of a suitable audience is a principal theme of the novel. Crooks can-
not read without a companion; George cannot sustain his story without
Lennie. In this respect, the end of Of Mice and Men seems purposefully
equivocal. George has located a new audience in Slim, a man whose con-
summate elan and professional composure is the clearest surrogate for the
finesse Steinbeck’s literary proficiency represents. Vicariously, George is
compensated for Lennie’s loss by participating in the special amalgam of
stylistic ingenuity and compassionate sensibility, the blend of pragmatism
and idealism, that Steinbeck displays at his very best. Unlike the ending of
Tortilla Flat when, after the death of Danny, “no two walked together,”24
George is not alone. But unlike the ending, too, of the opening section of
Of Mice and Men, when “a coyote yammered, and a dog answered from
the other side of the stream,” Lennie has gone “acrost the river,” but the
final question, “Now what the hell ya suppose is eatin’ them two guys?”
(OMM 107) remains unanswered. Steinbeck had won an audience, but its
understanding was not necessarily proportionate to its size. . . .

Notes
[Editor’s note: Portions of this article have been omitted as the content does not directly
apply to Of Mice and Men. Thus, several notes have also been omitted.]

1. As quoted in Lewis Gannett, “John Steinbeck’s Way of Writing,” in Stein-

beck and His Critics: A Record of Twenty-five Years, Ed. E. W. Tedlock Jr. and
C. V. Wicker (Albuquerque: The University of New Mexico Press, 1957), 30.
2. Gannett, “John Steinbeck’s Way,” 28.

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 STEINBECK’S OF MICE AND MEN (NOVEL) (1937)

3. As quoted in Peter Lisca, “Of Mice and Men,” in The Wide World of John
Steinbeck (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1958), 133.
4. Lisca, Wide World, 133.
9. Burton Rascoe, “John Steinbeck,” in Tedlock and Wicker, Steinbeck and
His Critics, 61.
22. Lisca, Wide World, 138–39.
23. Lisca, Wide World, 139–40.
24. John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat, 1935 (New York: Viking, 1963), 179.

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 Part Four
THE 1980s

P
aul McCarthy’s 1980 study, John Steinbeck (New York: Frederick
Ungar), concentrates on dreams and the importance of sharing and
cooperation in attaining them. Calling Mice one of the best short
novels of the decade, McCarthy emphasizes Steinbeck’s use of the Greek
unities—time, place, and character—as he employed simple and dramatic
action and eliminated the superfluous and complex. McCarthy also dis-
cusses the symbolism of Steinbeck’s settings and praises the variety and
depth of his characterization, directly contradicting earlier commentaries
that found these elements lacking in the novel. Definitely disagreeing
with detractors, McCarthy stresses that Steinbeck’s excellence is reflected
in his ability to draw credible characters.
Peter Lisca’s second book on Steinbeck, Nature and Myth (New York:
Crowell, 1978), linked the novel with Steinbeck’s previous work In Dubi-
ous Battle (1936) and drew attention to its similarly paired characters, Mac
and Jim. Once again defending the novel against charges of sentimental-
ity, altruism, and middlebrow appeal, Lisca incorporates a Jungian and
religious analysis into his second reading. Relying on Goldhurst’s 1961
essay, Lisca extends the Cain and Abel parallels and calls attention to the
complex imagery and the circular plot structure as evidence of Steinbeck’s
artistry. In addition, he develops a reading of the theme of loneliness and
the need for companionship and loyal camaraderie.
John Timmerman’s 1986 study entitled John Steinbeck: the Aesthetics
of the Road Taken (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986) also
pairs Mice with In Dubious Battle and praises the crafted structure as an

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PART FOUR

indication of its stature as one of the most compressed and unified works
in Steinbeck’s canon. Specifically, he mentions the novel’s meticulous
framing and foreshadowing and the richness of Steinbeck’s themes of
friendship and the fragile nature of all human dreams. In addition, Tim-
merman asserts that although the theme of loneliness may appear to be
dark and depressing, the inevitable doom is countered by the potential for
human glory and its ability to seek a hopeful future as mankind strives for
seemingly unattainable desires.
Louis Owens’s 1985 analysis, John Steinbeck’s Re-Vision of America
(Athens: University of Georgia Press), is the first study of the author that
does not utilize a chronological approach to assess the Steinbeck canon.
Instead Owens uses physical locations as an organizing principle and
divides his comments into three sections: “The Mountains,” “The Val-
leys,” and “The Sea.” Placing Of Mice and Men in the second category,
he entitles his chapter on Mice “The Dream of Commitment.” In his
discussion of the novel, Owens stresses Steinbeck’s use of the Eden myth
and the lush valleys of middle California that grow much of the nation’s
produce. Concentrating on George and Lennie’s isolation and their social
position as outcasts, Owens then goes on to reiterate many of the previous
observations about Mice, including the Cain myth, animalism and Jungian
psychology, making it clear that the characters’ descent into the valley
(read despair and death) is countered at the end of the novel by two men
(Slim and George) walking off together, an ending which suggested a
strong note of hope and affirmed Steinbeck’s belief that the commitment
of mankind to other humans has not perished.

Other Significant Studies from the 1980s

McCarthy, Paul. “Conflicts and Searches in the 1930s.” In John Steinbeck, chap.
3, 57–64. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980.
Owens, Louis. “Of Mice and Men: The Dream of Commitment.” In John Steinbeck’s
Re-Vision of America, 100–106. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985.
Wyatt, David. “Steinbeck’s Lost Gardens.” In The Fall into Eden: Landscape and
Imagination in California, 124–57. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1986.
Fensch, Thomas, ed. Conversations with John Steinbeck. Jackson: University of
Mississippi Press, 1988.

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 CHAPTER SEVEN
A GAME OF CARDS IN STEINBECK’S
OF MICE AND MEN
Michael W. Shurgot

M
idway through section two of Of Mice and Men, after George
and Lennie have met Candy, the boss, and his son Curley,
Steinbeck describes George walking to the table in the bunk-
house and shuffling some of the playing cards lying there. Often during
the rest of section two and throughout section three, Steinbeck pictures
George playing solitaire with these cards. Although George’s card-playing
may seem just a means of passing time during his and Lennie’s first night
on the ranch, the frequency of George’s card games and Steinbeck’s careful
juxtaposition of them with the prophetic events of sections two and three
indicate that the game of cards is the central symbol of the entire novel.
George’s card games are generally symbolic in three ways. Lester Jay
Marks writes that Steinbeck’s novel is “disciplined by his non-teleological
methods of observing ‘phenomena.’ He is concerned not with the why but
with Of Mice and Men the what and how of the individual’s illusions.”1
Steinbeck’s original title, “Something That Happened,” is, according to
Marks, an unsentimental comment upon the “tragic reversal of fortunes”
that George and Lennie experience (59). A non-teleological world is one
of chance, of reversals of fortune beyond man’s comprehension or his
power to control. And a game of cards is an exact symbol of this kind of
world. In card games there is no pattern to the cards’ random appearance;
their sequence is solely a matter of chance. Analogically, although George

Previously published in Steinbeck Quarterly 25, nos. 1–2 (Winter–Spring 1982): 38–43.
Used by permission of Archives and Special Collections, Ball State University Libraries.

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MICHAEL W. SHURGOT

tries to control Lennie’s activities and movements on the ranch, he cannot

prevent Lennie’s tragic meeting with Curley’s wife in the barn.
Further, George’s card game is solitaire. From the opening dialogue
between George and Lennie, to the novel’s final, terrifying moments,
Steinbeck’s characters talk about the isolation, rootlessness, and alienation
of their lives. Steinbeck introduces the theme of isolation shortly after
George and Lennie arrive at the clearing in part one. George laments,

Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world.
They got no family. They don’t belong no place. They come to a ranch
an’ work up a stake and then they go inta town and blow their stake, and
the first thing you know they’re poundin’ their tail on some other ranch.
They ain’t got nothing to look ahead to. (OMM 13–14)2

George’s sense of the loneliness and rootlessness of ranchhands is echoed

several times in the novel. In section two, Slim observes, “Ain’t many guys
travel around together. . . . I don’t know why. Maybe ever’body in the
whole damn world is scared of each other” (OMM 38). Early in section
three, Slim elaborates on the uniqueness of George’s relationship with
Lennie:

Funny how you an’ him string along together. . . . I hardly never seen
two guys travel together. You know how the hands are, they just come
in and get their bunk and work a month, and then they quit and go out
alone. Never seem to give a damn about nobody. It jus’ seems kinda
funny a cuckoo like him and a smart guy little guy like you travelin’
together. (OMM 39)

George tells Slim he “ain’t got no people,” and insists that, although
Lennie is a “God damn nuisance most of the time,” nonetheless traveling
with him is preferable to the loneliness and misery of most ranchhands’
lives: “I seen the guys that go around on the ranches alone. That ain’t no
good. They don’t have no fun. After a long time they get mean. They get
wantin’ to fight all the time” (OMM 41).3 Later, after George has told
Candy about his and Lennie’s dream of owning their own place, Candy,
obviously enthralled at being included in their plans, says that he would
leave his share of the place to them “. . . ’cause I ain’t got no relatives nor
nothing” (OMM 59).

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On the ranch itself, the most hopelessly alienated characters besides

Candy are Crooks and Curley’s wife. Crooks, the crippled black stable
buck, although serving an important function, is nonetheless isolated in
a world of physically powerful white men. Because he is disfigured, and
thus less mobile than the ranchhands, he is ironically more permanent
than they, but he is barred from their quarters and sleeps in a “long
box filled with straw” (OMM 66), a symbolic coffin. Echoing George’s
remarks about the psychological effects of constant loneliness, Crooks
complains bitterly to Lennie, “A guy goes nuts if he ain’t got nobody”
(OMM 72). [Curley’s wife] insists that at one time she “could of went
with shows,” and that “a guy tol’ me he could put me in pictures” (OMM
78). But instead, she now spends Saturday nights “talkin’ to a bunch of
bindlestiffs—a nigger an’ a dumdum and a lousy ol’ sheep—an’ likin’ it
because they ain’t nobody else” (OMM 78).4 Although the circumstances
of their lives on the ranch are quite different, Crooks and Curley’s wife
are similarly isolated within and segregated from the white, predominately
masculine world of the novel. Fortune has been kind to neither Crooks
nor Curley’s wife, and their lives emphasize the pervasive isolation (and
occasionally despair) that haunts Steinbeck’s characters.
Besides symbolizing the lonely, disjointed lives of the ranchhands and
the alienation of Crooks and Curley’s wife, George’s games of solitaire are
symbolic in a third way. George tries, quite naturally, to “win” his games
of solitaire, and when considered along with several of his remarks to Len-
nie, such efforts at victory became quite ironic.5 Early in section one, after
pleading with Lennie not to “do no bad things like you done in Weed,”
George describes, as he does frequently in the novel, what he could do if
he were alone: “God, you’re a lot of trouble,” said George. “I could get
along so easy and so nice if I didn’t have you on my tail. I could live so
easy and maybe have a girl” (OMM 7).
Twice more in part one, George repeats this sentiment. The first time,
Lennie’s innocent wish for some ketchup precipitates one of George’s
most violent explosions against him in the novel. George angrily recounts
their narrow escape from Weed—“You crazy son-of-a-bitch. You keep
me in hot water all the time”—(OMM 11) and brutally claims, “I wisht
I could put you in a cage with about a million mice an’ let you have fun”
(OMM 12). Moments later, after Lennie pathetically insists that had they
any ketchup George could have all of it, George says, “When I think of

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MICHAEL W. SHURGOT

the swell time I could have without you, I go nuts. I never get no peace”
(OMM 12). Just after returning to the clearing in part six, Lennie says,
“George gonna wish he was alone an’ not have me botherin’ him” (OMM
100). Shortly after Lennie’s remark, George is alone, and as lonely as the
other ranchhands he describes earlier in part one. Although he certainly
wants and needs Lennie to fulfill their dream together, George’s frequent
wish to be alone, to be free of the burden of minding Lennie, is ironically
forecast in his frequent resorts to solitaire in the first half of the novel.
Steinbeck enhances the general symbolism of George’s games of
solitaire by carefully interweaving them into the narrative of sections two
and three. George first plays with the cards during his conversation with
Candy about Curley and his wife. Candy explains that Curley is a fighter
and has become “cockier’n ever since he got married” (OMM 27). George
remarks that Curley had better “watch out for Lennie,” walks to the table
and picks up the cards, and fumbles with them continually as Candy de-
scribes Curley’s “glove . . . fulla vaseline” (OMM 27) and his wife:

“Wait’ll you see Curley’s wife.”

George cut the cards again and put out a solitaire lay, slowly and
deliberately. “Purty?” he asked casually. (OMM 28)

Steinbeck’s careful positioning of Candy’s description of Curley’s wife

and George’s first hand of solitaire juxtaposes the immediate cause of the
failure of George and Lennie’s dream and the ultimate consequence of
that failure for George: his solitude. A similar juxtaposition occurs mo-
ments later. Candy says to George, “Well, you look her mister. You see
if she ain’t a tart” (OMM 28). Steinbeck writes: “George laid down his
cards thoughtfully, turned his piles of three. He built four clubs on his ace
pile. . . . George stared at his solitaire lay, and then he flounced the cards
together and turned around to Lennie” (OMM 28–29).
George warns Lennie about Curley, whom he correctly perceives as a
threat to their plans, and repeats his instructions to him about returning
to the pool in the river should trouble occur. Curley’s wife enters imme-
diately, and Lennie’s twice-repeated “She’s purty” elicits George’s fierce
warning to him about her being “jail bait” and his insistence that he and
Lennie must stay at the ranch until they make their stake: “‘We gotta keep
it till we get a stake. We can’t help it, Lennie. We’ll get out jus’ as soon

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as we can. I don’t like it no better than you do.’ He went back to the table
and set out a new solitaire hand” (OMM 33).
George’s card games precede and follow the appearance of Curley’s
wife and Lennie’s reactions to her, thus symbolically framing their first
meeting in a realm of chance. Further, when Slim enters he sits down at
the table across from George. While Slim plays with the cards, he talks
to Carlson about his dog’s pups and Candy’s old dog. This conversation
foreshadows Lennie’s death; and the sense of his and the dog’s similar
fates is suggested by the hand of cards that George and Slim, with ironic
nonchalance, manipulate during this scene. Section two closes with Slim
about a pup, thus initiating the chain of events that leads to Lennie’s pres-
ence in the barn when Curley’s wife tempts him the following Sunday.
Section three opens with George’s confiding in Slim about Lennie’s
troubles in Weed. Twice during their dialogue Steinbeck describes George
playing solitaire: “‘Course he ain’t mean. But he gets in trouble alla time
because he’s so God damn dumb. Like what happened in Weed—.” He
stopped, stopped in the middle of turning over a card (OMM 41) and
“Slim’s eyes were level and unwinking. He nodded very slowly. ‘So what
happens?’ George carefully built his line of solitaire cards” (OMM 42).
Steinbeck’s careful interweaving of George’s hand of solitaire with his
narrative of Lennie’s seizure of the girl in Weed is his most effective ap-
position in the novel. Lennie’s actions in Weed clearly presage his killing
Curley’s wife, and George will be alone after he shoots Lennie.
Steinbeck employs this card symbolism variously in the rest of section
three. Just before Carlson shoots Candy’s dog, George and Whit start a
game of euchre (OMM 49), but when Whit mentions Curley’s wife, he
drops his cards and George immediately lays out another hand of solitaire
(OMM 51). After Carlson and Lennie return to the bunkhouse and Cur-
ley inquires about his wife and Slim, Lennie joins George at the table:
“He got up from his bunk and sat down at the table, across from George.
Almost automatically George shuffled the cards and laid out his solitaire
hand. He used a deliberate, thoughtful, [sic] slowness” (OMM 55).
George’s “automatically” laying out his solitaire hand as he sits across
from Lennie is acutely ironic and prophetic, for George will be as solitary
as the rest of the ranchhands after Lennie’s death. A moment later, as
George “look[s] carefully at the solitaire hand,” he mentions that Andy
Cushman is “in San Quentin right now on account of a tart” (OMM

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MICHAEL W. SHURGOT

56). As an anonymous tart was responsible for Andy Cushman’s fate, so

Curley’s wife, whom Candy describes as a “tart” in section two, will be re-
sponsible for Lennie’s. Even as he and Lennie talk, George’s conversation
obliquely foreshadows the novel’s climatic scene and ironically reinforces
the symbolism of his game of solitaire.
Lennie’s repetitive questioning about their “little place” abruptly
changes the mood in the bunkhouse. “George’s hands stopped working
with the cards. His voice was growing warmer” (OMM 57). Significantly,
George abandons the cards while describing their dream, as if its fulfill-
ment were within their own control, beyond chance. Indeed, Candy’s
unexpected offer of his $300 suddenly convinces George that his and
Lennie’s long quest may finally be successful. “They all sat still, all be-
mused, by the beauty of the thing, each mind was popped into the future
when this lovely thing should come about” (OMM 60). But their illusion
is quickly shattered. It is sheer chance, like the unexpected appearance of
a card, and brutal irony that Lennie is still smiling “with delight at the
memory of the ranch” (OMM 62) when the enraged Curley, after being
repulsed by Slim, enters the bunkhouse spoiling for a fight and misinter-
prets Lennie’s smile. In the ensuing battle between Lennie and Curley,
Steinbeck vividly and prophetically describes the terrible strength that
will destroy the dream and insulate George: “The next minute Curley was
flopping like a fish on a line, and his closed fist was lost in Lennie’s big
hand” (OMM 63). Steinbeck uses the same image to describe the death of
Curley’s wife: “‘Don’t you go yellin’,’ he said, and he shook her; and her
body flopped like a fish” (OMM 91).
In the final moments of section three, Steinbeck’s disciplined non-
teleological vision is clearly evident; chance rules in the bunkhouse as
later it will in the barn. The genius of Steinbeck’s narrative Of Mice and
Men lies in the consistency of this vision, and, in George’s card games,
Steinbeck provides an exact symbol of the unpredictable, often merciless
world in which his characters vainly strive to maintain their dignity and
fulfill their dreams.

Notes
1. Lester Jay Marks, Thematic Design in the Novels of John Steinbeck (The
Hague: Mouton, 1971), 59. Peter Lisca, in John Steinbeck: Nature and Myth

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 A GAME OF CARDS IN STEINBECK’S OF MICE AND MEN

(New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1978), explains that in a non-teleological point

of view “the author assumes that there is no final cause or ultimate purpose in
the universe” (78). The narrator of Hardy’s “HP” summarizes precisely the non-
teleological viewpoint in lines appropriate to Steinbeck’s novel:

How arrives it joy lies slain,

And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
—Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. . . .
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain. (ll. 9–14)

2. John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men, modern critical edition (New York: Pen-
guin, 1993). All textual references are to this edition.
3. Two apparently minor incidents in the novel support George’s and Slim’s
descriptions of ranchhands’ lives. Candy tells George about Whitey, a former
employee, who “just quit, the way a guy will. Says it was the food. Just wanted
to move” (OMM 19). Candy also tells George about the Christmas party during
which Smitty, a skinner, “took after [Crooks]” (OMM 20).
4. Even Curley goes into town on Saturday night, presumably to “Susy’s
place,” thus leaving his wife alone on the ranch.
5. Peter Lisca, “Motif and Patterns in Of Mice and Men,” Modern Fiction Stud-
ies 2 (Winter 1956–1957): 228–34, claims that George’s playing solitaire “reveals
that to some extent George needs Lennie as a rationalization for his failure”
(234). This may be so, but certainly the symbolism of George’s card games is far
more extensive than Lisca allows.

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 CHAPTER EIGHT
JOHN STEINBECK’S FICTION:
THE AESTHETICS OF THE ROAD TAKEN:
“OF MICE AND MEN” (CHAPTER 4)
John Timmerman

F
ortunately, few people have been deterred from serious consider-
ation of Of Mice and Men by Maxwell Geismar’s surprising judg-
ment: “How thin Of Mice and Men is after all, how full of easy
sensations it appears upon a little reflection.” Lamenting the thinness of
the characters, Geismar declare that “Lennie . . . seems rather more like a
digestional disturbance than a social problem.”
“Of Mice and Men is a tribute to Steinbeck’s narrative power, to the
brilliance with which he clothes such mechanical literary types, to the
intensity which somehow gives breath to these poor scarecrows. We see
here the dominance of the creative fire over common sense, so that we are
held by such apparitions as these characters who, when removed from the
framework of the play, crumble under the weight of their own improb-
ability.”
Those are a few of his kinder judgments, but regardless of such
early reactions, readers have found themselves very much intrigued by
Steinbeck’s scarecrows. The popular reception of Steinbeck’s work had, in
fact, grown to the point where he would mutter that fame was “a pain in
the ass,” partly, of course, because of the demands on time that he would
rather give to writing. By the same token, one cannot measure aesthetic
excellence by popular reception, but there are excellences in the work itself
that account for its enduring appeal.

Portions reprinted from John Steinbeck’s Fiction: The Aesthetics of the Road Taken, by John
Timmerman. © 1986 by the University of Oklahoma Press. Used by permission.

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 JOHN STEINBECK’S FICTION: THE AESTHETICS OF THE ROAD TAKEN

. . . Although while he was writing In Dubious Battle, Steinbeck

concentrated on conveying action through dialogue and providing clear
character portraits that in novelistic form contain a forceful sense of con-
centrated action, the novel itself was too unwieldy for successful adapta-
tion to the stage. It is curious that while more films have been made of
Steinbeck’s work than of the work of any other modern novelist, no film
has been made of In Dubious Battle—curious because the movements be-
tween the concentrated actions and the tight sequence of the novel, while
difficult for the narrower confines of the stage, lend themselves very nicely
to cinematic art. Of Mice and Men, however, was written with deliberate
staging design; in fact, over 80 percent of the lines went directly into
the play. Joseph Fontenrose comments on the artistic technique of the
work. Each of the six chapters is confined to one scene and opens with
a description of the scene; there follows dialogue with entrance and exit
of characters. Every descriptive or narrative remark can be considered a
stage direction (of the Shavian kind at any rate). The chapters can easily
be converted, as they stand, into acts or scenes; and this is nearly what
was done when Of Mice and Men was published and produced as a play
in November 1937. The dialogue was altered very little, and the conver-
sion of description and narrative required more changes in form than in
content. As drama or novel, Of Mice and Men is economical, tightly knit,
carefully constructed.
The effect is clear in the novel. Of Mice and Men is one of Steinbeck’s
most compressed and unified works. Nonetheless, it achieves an artistic
richness of structure and theme that ranks it among the best of his works.
Three items in particular distinguish the novel: the framing and foreshad-
owing through structure, the development of Lennie’s character and the
theme of friendship, and the nature of human dreams.
The novel opens with the objective specificity of locale that would
mark stage directions, or perhaps cinema. Like a long pan of the camera,
the opening scene traces the Salinas River where it “drops in close to the
hillside bank and runs deep and green” near Soledad. Following the flow
of the river, the scene narrows and becomes more specific in detail, mov-
ing from the broad expanse of the “golden foot-hill slopes” of the Gabilan
Mountains to the very small setting of “the sandy bank under the trees,”
where we find details as minute as “a lizard makes a great skittering” and
“the split-wedge tracks of deer” (OMM 1). The narrowing vision provides

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a smooth and gentle transition to the two bindlestiffs hunkered by a fire

in the evening of the day. The light, too, narrows and focuses, from the
broad, golden flanks of the Gabilans to the evening duskiness and the
shade “that climbed up the hills toward the top” (OMM 2).
The expertly framed opening is precisely echoed and inverted at the
close of the novel, where the same two bindlestiffs stand by “the deep
green pool of the Salinas River” (OMM 99) in the evening of the day.
Once again shade pushes the sunlight “up the slopes of the Gabilan
Mountains, and the hill-tops were rosy in the sun” (OMM 99). We find
the same, familiarly routine skitterings of birds and animals by the sandy
bank, only now a small something has happened. The original title of the
novel, “Something That Happened,” is precisely the point here; a small
thing occurs, however momentous and tragic in the lives of Lennie and
George, that goes virtually unnoticed in the ways of the world. Antonia
Seixas comments in her article “John Steinbeck and the Non-Teleological
Bus” that “the hardest task a writer can set himself is to tell the story of
‘something that happened’ without explaining ‘why’—and make it con-
vincing and moving.”1 Again, as if viewing the scene through a movie
camera, we observe the “what” without the explanatory “why.” While
Lennie stares into the sun-washed mountains, George recreates the dream
as he levels the Luger at the base of Lennie’s skull.
The mountains that frame the story, as they frame the little thing
that happened in the lives of George and Lennie, always carry large sig-
nificance for Steinbeck. In The Grapes of Wrath, crossing the mountains
represents the entrance into the promised land for the Okies. In East of
Eden, Steinbeck provides two mountain ranges, one dark and one light,
which symbolically frame the struggle between good and evil in the val-
ley between those ranges. In The Red Pony, as in To a God Unknown, the
mountains represent mystery; in the former work old Gitano goes to the
mountains on Easter to die; in the latter Joseph Wayne witnesses strange,
ancient rituals. In Of Mice and Men also, the darkening mountains repre-
sent the mystery of death, carefully sustained in the minor imagery of the
heron seizing and eating the little water snakes.
In between the two scenes of the mountains on those two evenings,
and in the serene willow grove that, as Peter Lisca points out, symbolizes “a
retreat from the world to a primeval innocence,” we have the quiet drama
of George and Lennie’s dream unfolding and unraveling. But this dream

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is doomed, and Steinbeck provides ample foreshadowing in the novel,

most notably in Candy’s dog. According to Carlson, Candy’s dog has to
die because he is a cripple, out of sorts with the normal routine of society,
something in the way. With careful detail, Carlson describes how he would
shoot the dog so that it would not feel any pain: “‘The way I’d shoot him,
he wouldn’t feel nothing. I’d put the gun right there.’ He pointed with his
toe. ‘Right back of the head. He wouldn’t even quiver’” (OMM 45). Candy’s
huge regret is that he didn’t do so himself. It would have been kinder to
have the dog die by a familiar and loved hand than to have a stranger drag
him to his death. The same feeling motivates George as he leads the social
cripple Lennie to his dream world. For Steinbeck, this act constitutes a rare
heroism. Years later he wrote in a letter to Annie Laurie Williams:

M & M may seem to be unrelieved tragedy, but it is not. A careful read-

ing will show that while the audience knows, against its hopes, that the
dream will not come true, the protagonist must, during the play, become
convinced that it will come true. Everyone in the world has a dream
he knows can’t come off but he spends his life hoping it may. This is
at once the sadness, the greatness and the triumph of our species. And
this belief on stage must go from skepticism to possibility to probability
before it is nipped off by whatever the modern word for fate is. And in
hopelessness—George is able to rise to greatness—to kill his friend to
save him. George is a hero and only heroes are worth writing about.2

Lennie is not the only dreamer in the novel, however, and each of the
other dreamers also seems afflicted with the loneliness of non-attainment.
Most notable is the woman known only as “Curley’s wife,” a mere thing
possessed by her flamboyant husband. From the start, George recognizes
the incipient danger posed by Curley’s wife, a recognition that proves
prophetically true: “She’s gonna make a mess. They’s gonna be a bad mess
about her. She’s a jail bait all set on the trigger” (OMM 51). But Curley’s
wife is also caught in a hopeless little valley of small dreams. She dreamed
of being an actress, of sweeping Hollywood, but when Curley came along
he simply represented escape, and that was better than nothing. When
Lennie shares his dream in response to her candor, she exclaims: “You’re
nuts. . . . But you’re a kinda nice fella. Jus’ like a big baby. But a person
can see kinda what you mean” (OMM 90). Similarly, Crooks, the stable
hand and another small outcast, has his dream, one of companionship to

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assuage the terrible, haunting lonliness: “Books ain’t no good. A guy needs
somebody to be near him. . . . A guy goes nuts if he ain’t got nobody”
(OMM 72). And Candy too, another social outcast, is captivated by the
dream: “Sure they all want it. Everybody wants a little bit of land, not
much. Jus’ som’thin’ that was his. Som’thin’ he could live on and there
couldn’t nobody throw him off of it. I never had none” (OMM 76).
But through his careful foreshadowing, Steinbeck suggests that each
dream is doomed. Curley, the flamboyant fighter, stands ever ready to
goad someone into a fight, particularly those larger than he, and who is
larger on the ranch than Lennie? The dead mouse that Lennie strokes
prefigures the dead girl’s hair and the impossible dream of rabbits. And
George knows these things; he senses the inevitable end. Early in the
novel he tells Lennie to remember good hiding places, even as he tells him
once more of the dream farm and the “fatta the lan.”
What keeps these little social outcasts going? What motivates them
when all dreams seem doomed? In a sense, the large-scale battle of In Du-
bious Battle is played out here in a small, quiet, but equally tragic scene, as
if George and Lennie are the Everymen in a microcosmic universe. They
are drawn together by the human need born of loneliness. George’s words
to Lennie, which form a dark refrain in the book, might have occurred
equally well in In Dubious Battle or The Grapes of Wrath: “Guys like us,
that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world. They got no
family. They don’t belong no place. They come to a ranch an’ work up a
stake and then they go into town and blow their stake, and the first thing
you know they’re poundin’ their tail on some other ranch. They ain’t got
nothing to look ahead to” (OMM 13–14).
Even though the dream seems inevitably doomed, that is also at once
man’s glory—that he can dream and that others participate in the dream.
Finally, this sets Lennie apart from the animal that he is imaged as be-
ing. At first the novel seems to set forth one more reductionistic pattern
of imagery so familiar to Steinbeck’s work. Lennie seems little more than
an animal in human form: “Behind him walked his opposite, a huge man,
shapeless of face, with large, pale eyes, and wide, sloping shoulders; and
he walked heavily, dragging his feet a little, the way a bear drags his paws”
(OMM 2). Lennie bends to the water and drinks “with long gulps, snort-
ing into the water like a horse” (OMM 3). After drinking, he “dabbled his
big paw in the water and wiggled his fingers so the water arose in little

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splashes” (OMM 3). But as Tularecito [in The Pastures of Heaven] rises
above the animal by virtue of his creative gift, Lennie also rises above the
animal in several ways. He is, for example, marked by kindness, a trait
that at once sets him above Curley. Lennie is sensitive to the small and
the forlorn, and it is no accident that Crooks and Curley’s wife confide
freely in him. But he does lack the rational acuity to survive in this society;
killing Curley’s wife is not qualitatively different for Lennie from killing
the mouse. As Howard Levant points out, “The relative meaningless of
his victims substitutes pathos for tragedy.” Clearly Lennie is not a tragic
figure, for he has nothing of the required nobility about him. But, in a
sense, the deeper tragedy lies in his pathos; there is no place for a Lennie
in society. Yet in the novel there is a kind of subtle reversal of animal im-
agery that makes animals of those who establish society’s norms that dis-
allow the survival of a Lennie. In the story of Tularecito, Miss Martin is
closer to the animal in her fanatical insistence that Tularecito be whipped.
In Of Mice and Men, Curley is closer to the animal in his predatory desire
to fight. Oppression of any life is the animalistic trait, the struggle for
survival that kills off or hides away the weaker members. For Steinbeck,
on the other hand, that human life, which might be observable upon first
glance as animalistic, often carries a warm dignity. While Lennie is a so-
cial misfit, it may be because society itself is ill.
Although Of Mice and Men quickly became one of Steinbeck’s most
popular works, it met with a great deal of puzzlement. Readers may have
expected another angry In Dubious Battle from him and got instead this
sad little drama of something that happened, something so small it es-
capes common attention. George walks away at the end, just one more
bindlestiff. Yet part of Steinbeck’s success here lies in investing those
small, barely noticeable lives with both pathos and dignity. If, as Carlson
points out, there is a right way to kill a cripple, one still wonders why the
cripple has to be killed.
But Steinbeck himself was dissatisfied with the novel, largely on
aesthetic grounds. With the failed effort to block In Dubious Battle for
the stage, he wanted very much to succeed with this effort. Steinbeck
referred to the book as an experiment “designed to teach me to write for
the theatre” (LIL 132), and he often spoke of it in pejorative terms such
as a “simple little thing,” or “the Mice book.” Whatever his attitude, the
dramatic adaptation, like the novel, was a commercial success, opening at

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the Music Box Theatre in New York on November 23, 1937, and running
for 207 performances.
Steinbeck at this time, however, was back home in California, well into
the background work for his greatest achievement, The Grapes of Wrath.

Notes
1. Antonia Seixas. “John Steinbeck and the Non-Teleological Bus,” in Stein-
beck and His Critics. Ed. E. W. Tedlock, Jr. and C. V. Wicker (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1958), 277.
2. Elaine Stenbeck and Robert Wallsten, eds., Steinbeck: A Life in Letters (New
York: Viking Press, 1975), 562–63. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically
in the text as LIL followed by the page number.

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 Part Five
THE 1990s

T
he appearance of “Of Mice and Men”: A Kinship of Powerlessness
(New York: Twayne) by Charlotte Cook Hadella in 1995 marked
the first critical book length study that concentrated solely on Of
Mice and Men. As such, it devotes eighty-two pages to a wide variety of
issues, including historical content, importance of the work in Steinbeck’s
career, a survey of the novel’s critical reception and an exploration of its
experimental structure and the layers of complexity the author discovered
in the symbols and myths that lay beneath its surface. Hadella’s final
chapter also discusses the stage and screen adaptations of the novel and is
designed to help readers to see the changes that were made in each differ-
ent production of Steinbeck’s novella.
The 1990s also brought a number of studies of Steinbeck’s supposed
“misogynistic” portrait of Curley’s wife while still other critics began to
examine the “supposed” homosexual innuendos that had caused numer-
ous objections by conservative readers and that accounted for the fact that
the novel had become a frequent target for advocates of censorship and
book-banning. Along with its questionable language (the use of the n
word and swear words) and its frequent sexual innuendo (the “cat” house,
Curley’s wife’s reputation as a promiscuous flirt or “rat trap”), the implied
sexual relationship between Lennie and George had been consistently
cited by those who objected to the fact that the novel addressed far too
many issues that had previously been taboo for writers. Specifically, such
critics cited the implications of improper sexual bonding that had been

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suggested by the suspicion of both Curley and the Boss that Lennie and
George’s travel together implied they were more than just friends. Several
studies (see the chapters by Irr and Person) now found it comfortable to
directly confront this “gay” issue. Certainly, these essays are helpful in
seeing why, despite its sentimental appeal, Steinbeck’s novel ranks fourth
on the Most Challenged Books of The Twentieth Century list and sixth
on the list of Most Frequently Challenged Books of the 1990s. As the
1990s drew to a close, the days of seeing the novel as merely about loneli-
ness or about prejudice gave way to more complex readings, readings that
acknowledge that the novel offers far more than an examination of the
American dream, a look at the demise of the Jeffersonian land ethic, or
a study of the moral dilemmas of “I” versus “we” ethics. While over sixty
years had passed since its publication, the slim novella still had much
more to offer than anyone in the thirties had imagined when it was first
appeared.

Other Significant Studies from the 1990s

Benson, Jackson J., ed. The Short Novels of John Steinbeck. Durham: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 1990.
Chadha, Raini. Social Realism in the Novels of John Steinbeck. New Delhi: Har-
mon, 1990.
Fensch, Thomas. “Reflections of Doc: The Persona of Ed Ricketts in Of Mice and
Men.” In John Steinbeck, The Years Of Greatness, 1936–1939, ed. Tetsumaro
Hayashi, 106–10. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993.
Hadella, Charlotte. “The Dialogic Tension of Curley’s Wife.” In John Steinbeck:
The Years of Greatness, 1936–1939, ed. Tetsumaro Hayashi, 64–76. Tusca-
loosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993.
Hayashi, Tetsumaro, ed. John Steinbeck: The Years of Greatness, 1936–1939. Tus-
caloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993.
Morsberger, Robert. “Tell Again, George.” In Steinbeck: The Years of Greatness,
ed. Tetsumaro Hayashi, 111–31. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press,
1993.
Scarseth, Thomas. “A Teachable Good Book: Of Mice and Men.” In Censored
Books: Critical Viewpoints, ed. Nicholas J. Karolides, Lee Burress, and John
M. Kean, 388–94. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1993.
French, Warren. “Of Mice and Men.” In John Steinbeck’s Fiction Revisited, 72–74.
New York: Twayne, 1994.

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Railsback, Brian. Parallel Expeditions: Charles Darwin and the Art of John Stein-
beck. Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1995.
Atell, Kevin. “Of Mice and Men.” In Novels for Students, ed. Diane Telgen. Vol.
1. Detroit: Gale Research, 1997.
Johnson, Claudia Durst. Understanding “Of Mice and Men,” “The Red Pony” and
“The Pearl”: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources and Historical Documents.
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997.
See especially chapter 1: “The Triumph of Our Species: A Literary
Analysis,” 15–19; chapter 3: “Land Ownership”; chapter 4: “The Vagrant
Farmworker: Homeless in Paradise”; and chapter 5: “Losers of the American
Dream.”
Lisca, Peter. “Motif and Pattern in Of Mice and Men.” Fiction Studies (Winter
1956–57): 228–34. Reprinted in Novels for Students, ed. Diane Telgen. Vol.
1. Detroit: Gale Research, 1997.
Telgen, Diane, ed. Novels for Students. Vol. 1. Detroit: Gale Research, 1997.

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 CHAPTER NINE
A HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION TO
OF MICE AND MEN
Anne Loftis

S
teinbeck wrote Of Mice and Men midway through the 1930s, the
most creative decade of his career. During this time he was becom-
ing increasingly concerned about current social and economic prob-
lems in California, and he published three successive novels about farm
workers, each distinctive in tone and conception.
Of Mice and Men was a deliberate change from his previous book, In
Dubious Battle (1936), an imaginative interpretation of a contemporary
farm strike and a study of the movement and action of crowds. In the new
project, he set out to work within a narrow framework, concentrating on
a small number of characters in carefully detailed settings, telling his story
as economically and dramatically as possible. He explained that he was
teaching himself to write for the theater, and, in fact, he soon did translate
the novel into a play.
The subject was less controversial than that of his previous book. He
was writing about people who were isolated in the society of their time,
who belonged to a group that was fast disappearing from the American
scene. Only a short time before, thousands of itinerant single men had
roamed the Western states following the harvests. Their labor was essen-
tial to the success of the bonanza grain-growing enterprises that had been
started in the second half of the nineteenth century and had proliferated

Anne Loftis, “A Historical Introduction to Of Mice and Men,” in The Short Novels of
John Steinbeck, by Jackson J. Benson, Ed., pp. 39–47. Copyright, 1990, Duke University
Press. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the publisher.

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ANNE LOFTIS

so rapidly that by the year 1900 some 125,000 threshers were migrating
along a “belt” that extended from the Brazos Bottoms in Texas north to
Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and from Minnesota west to the state of
Washington. Many of them traveled by rail, arriving in the fields in empty
boxcars that were later used to transport the grain.
In the early years, they were paid an average wage of $2.50 to $3 a day
plus board and room. The “room” was frequently a tent: living conditions
were spartan. But wages rose at the time of the First World War when
the price of wheat was high, partly through the action of the Industrial
Workers of the World, which established an eight-hundred-mile picket
line across the Great Plains states.
In California, where grain was the chief farm commodity in the 1870s
and 1880s before the advent of irrigated agriculture, some of the early
harvesters were disappointed miners returning from the goldfields. In the
social and occupational hierarchy, they were on a level considerably below
the mule drivers, who, like Steinbeck’s character Slim, were valued for
their skill in handling as many as twenty animals “with a single line” and
who were generally employed permanently on the ranches.
Steinbeck’s recognition of the status of the mule driver epitomizes his
re-creation of a working culture that was undergoing a historic change
even as he wrote about it. In 1938, the year after Of Mice and Men was
published, about half the nation’s grain was harvested by mechanical com-
bines that enabled five men to do the work that had been done formerly
by 350. The single farm workers who traveled from job to job by train,
or like George and Lennie by bus, were disappearing. They were being
replaced by whole families migrating in cars, like the people in Steinbeck’s
next novel, The Grapes of Wrath.
The physical background for Of Mice and Men came from Steinbeck’s
own early years in a California agricultural valley. His native city of Salinas,
eighty miles south of San Francisco, is the seat of Monterey County. . . .
More important in planting the germ of the novel was an experi-
ence he had during a period when he dropped out of college. He entered
Stanford in 1919, already ambitious to become a writer and determined
to follow his own particular interests in the curriculum. Experiencing
some difficulty with courses and grades the following year, he decided to
break away, shed his identity as a university student, and make his way
for a while as a workingman. “I was a bindlestiff myself for quite a spell,”

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he told reporters some years later. “I worked in the same country that the
story is laid in.”1
Tall and husky, he was hired as a laborer on a ranch near Chualar, a
short distance—in miles—from the prosperous neighborhood in Salinas
where he was born, and, for a time, he became a part of this very different
world. The fact that he was promoted to straw boss suggests that he got
on well with his fellow workers.2 He had a talent for being inconspicu-
ous: they probably learned very little about him while he was gathering
impressions of them.
After he returned to the campus, he published a story in the Stanford
Spectator about a runaway girl who takes shelter during a storm in the
bunkhouse of some Filipino farm workers. She marries the crew leader,
who alternately showers her with presents and beats her. Eventually she
leaves him.3 Although the prose is vigorous, this sketch, full of bizarre
details that strain the reader’s credulity, is an amateur’s experiment.
It is instructive to compare this apprentice effort with Steinbeck’s
achievement as a mature artist a dozen years later. Of Mice and Men is a
work of symmetry and balance in which the action moves with a compel-
ling momentum toward an inevitable conclusion. The social history which
he had learned firsthand is woven seamlessly into the fabric of the story.
In the first scene by the river, he introduces the mute evidence of the
past: the ash pile left by previous campers and the tree limb overhanging
the water, worn smooth by tramps who have come there over the years to
jungle up. Linking the past with the present, George and Lennie make
their entrance in the tradition of bindlestiffs, carrying blankets on their
backs. The story then moves into the opening dialogue, justly famous in
American literature, through which we come to know and believe in the
touching partnership of the moronic giant and his gruff protector.
The next scene at the ranch opens with a description of the empty
bunkhouse with its tiers of beds, each with an apple box nailed to the wall
to hold the meager possessions of men who travel light. The place is not
particularly clean. Flies dart through the motes of dust stirred up by the
push broom of Candy, the old swamper; a can of bug powder suggests lice
or bedbugs in the mattress ticking.
The characters who come in one by one create the social dimensions of
the place. This rough lodging in which nothing has been provided beyond
the bare necessities is governed by the harsh code of the men who live

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ANNE LOFTIS

there for a week, a month, or a year. It is a society intolerant of weakness

or difference. Old Candy, helpless to stop the shooting of his dog, knows
that he too will be banished when he is no longer useful. Crooks, the black
stable hand, is excluded except on Christmas when the boss brings in a
gallon of whiskey for the entire crew. The rest of the year Crooks plays
horseshoes outside with the others, but when they come indoors to sleep,
he goes off alone to his bed in the harness room of the barn.
Women are not welcome in the male enclave. Curley’s wife, wander-
ing around the ranch in a wistful quest for some kind of human contact,
is stereotyped by the men, whose experience of women comes from “old
Suzy” and her girls in town. Curley’s wife (in the novel she has no other
name) goes along with the typecasting by playing the vamp, inflaming her
jealous husband, who, as the son of the boss, is as powerful as he is vicious.
It is on this explosive situation that the plot turns. Lennie, sensing trouble
too complicated for a simple mind to unravel, begs to leave after George
tells him that Curley’s wife is “poison” and “jail bait.”
Steinbeck had a different view of her, as he explained in a letter to
the actress who played the role in the Broadway production of the play.
Curley’s wife acts seductively because she “knows instinctively that if she
is to be noticed at all, it will be because someone finds her sexually attrac-
tive.” But her pose is deceptive. “Her moral training was most rigid.” She
was a virgin until her marriage and had had no sexual experience outside
her unfulfilling union with Curley. She had grown up “in an atmosphere
of fighting and suspicion” and had “learned to be hard to cover her fright.”
But she is fundamentally “a nice, kind girl” who has “a natural trustfulness.
. . . If anyone—a man or a woman—ever gave her a break—treated her
like a person—she would be a slave to that person.”4
Steinbeck captured this aspect of her character in her final scene with
Lennie. In the presence of this childlike man, she drops her defenses and
expresses her real feelings. Her rambling monologue of blighted hopes
and tawdry fantasies is, in effect, a last confession.
Steinbeck has prepared his readers for the shocking climax of the
novel through his portrait of Lennie. He might have created a caricature
in the mental defective who crushes soft creatures in his powerful hands.
He had worked with a real-life Lennie, he told reporters, when he was
writing the stage version of Of Mice and Men. “He didn’t kill a girl. He
killed a ranch foreman. Got sore because the boss had fired his pal and

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 A HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION TO OF MICE AND MEN

stuck a pitchfork right through his stomach.”5 The fictional Lennie is pas-
sive and nonviolent. Would he be capable of a murderous rage if George
was threatened? Perhaps. It is through his connection with his intelligent
partner that he becomes believable. In the opening scene, Steinbeck estab-
lishes the dynamics of their relationship, in which George’s exasperated
bossing of Lennie appears as a form of protectiveness that masks their
mutual dependence.
Loneliness is a recurrent theme in the novel, articulated in George’s
speech that begins:
“Guys like us, that work on the ranches, are the loneliest guys in the
world. They got no family. They don’t belong noplace.”
“But not us,” Lennie replies. “And why. Because . . . because I got
you to look after me, and you got me to look after you, and that’s why.”
(OMM 13)

Their plan to find a place of their own, which Candy and Crooks,
outcasts on the ranch, are hungry to share, is straight out of the American
Dream. They have set down the details in a kind of litany which George
recites while Lennie chimes in with the chorus. They repeat the comfort-
ing words from time to time like an incantation to ward off trouble and
rekindle hope. In the last scene—a final irony in a work compounded
of ironies—George, in order to calm Lennie, utters the familiar refrain,
which becomes an epitaph for his friend.
Before he found the apt title from Robert Burns’s poem, Steinbeck
called his work in progress “Something That Happened.” While he was at
work on the book, he sent revealing bulletins to his literary agent and his
friends. Describing a state of mind familiar to writers, he commented in
February 1936, “I have to start and am scared to death as usual—misera-
ble, sick feeling of inadequacy. I’ll love it once I get down to work.”6
It was as he predicted. In a postcard to the same friend, he reported
that “after two months of fooling around my new work is really going and
that makes me very happy—kind of excitement like that you get near a
dynamo from breathing oxygen.” He explained, “I’m not interested in the
method as such but I am interested in having a vehicle exactly adequate
to the theme.”7
On April 4: “. . . my new work is moving swiftly now.”8
Eleven days later: “Pages are flying.”9

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ANNE LOFTIS

Toward the end of May, he reported a setback. His setter pup had
“made confetti” of half of the manuscript. “Two months work to do over
again. . . . There was no other draft.” He tried to be philosophical. The pup
may have been “acting critically. I didn’t want to ruin a good dog for a ms.
I’m not sure is good at all.”10 He finished the work during the summer.
Almost immediately after sending the manuscript to his publishers,
he set out on a research trip around California in preparation for writing
a series of newspaper articles on newly arriving Dust Bowl migrants and
the employers who were making life difficult for them. While starting in
a direction that led eventually to The Grapes of Wrath, he could not ignore
the book he had just completed. He reported that there was a mixed re-
action to the manuscript. (He didn’t say whose reaction.) His publisher,
Pascal Covici, liked it.11
Steinbeck said that he was not expecting a large sale, and he was sur-
prised that Of Mice and Men was chosen as a Book-of-the-Month Club
selection and that 117,000 copies were sold in advance of the official pub-
lication date, February 25, 1937. The reviews were enthusiastic. “The boys
have whooped it up for John Steinbeck’s new book,” Ralph Thompson
wrote in the New York Times.12 The novel was praised by, among others,
Christopher Morley, Carl Van Vechten, Lewis Gannett, Harry Hansen,
Heywood Broun, and Eleanor Roosevelt. Henry Seidel Canby wrote in
the Saturday Review of Literature that “there has been nothing quite so
good of the kind in American writing since Sherwood Anderson’s early
stories.”13
In early April, it was on the best-seller list in six cities across the coun-
try, and it continued to be among the top ten best sellers in fiction into the
fall. Steinbeck, who said that he would never learn to conceive of money
in larger quantities than two dollars, was surprised by the large checks he
received from his agents. He was not by any means an unknown writer.
Tortilla Flat (1935) had been a popular success, and In Dubious Battle
and some of his short stories had been praised by critics. But he was now
treated as a celebrity, something he had always feared. As he and his wife
Carol passed through New York en route to Europe, his appearance in his
publisher’s office was considered newsworthy in literary circles.
On his return, he worked with playwright George F. Kaufman, who
was going to direct the stage version of Of Mice and Men. Kaufman wrote
Steinbeck that the novel “drops almost naturally into play form,” but he

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had a couple of suggestions for changes. He thought that Curley’s wife

“should be drawn more fully: she is the motivating force of the whole
thing and should loom larger.” He told Steinbeck: “Preserve the marvel-
ous tenderness of the book. And—if you could feel it in your heart to
include a little more humor, it would be extremely valuable, both for its
lightening effect and the heightening of the subsequent tragedy by com-
parison.”14
Steinbeck seems to have ignored the latter idea, but he considerably
enlarged the role of Curley’s wife, who is presented in the play as a person
with strongly articulated feelings about her past history and family rela-
tionships. Another change was his decision to end the play with George’s
speech to Lennie just before he pulls the trigger, an improvement over the
anticlimactic group scene in the novel.
Of Mice and Men opened at the Music Box Theatre in New York on
November 23, 1937, with Wallace Ford as George and Broderick Craw-
ford as Lennie. Claire Luce appeared as Curley’s wife. Will Geer, who was
prominent in many plays in the 1930s, took the part of Slim. The reviews
were ecstatic, and the play drew enthusiastic audiences during a season in
which Tobacco Road, Golden Boy, Stage Door, and You Can’t Take It with
You were among the offerings on Broadway. It ran for 207 performances
and won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award in competition with
Thornton’s Wilder’s Our Town.
The film version of Of Mice and Men, written by Eugene Solow from
the novel and the play, is considered by Joseph R. Millichap to be the
most faithful screen adaptation of any of Steinbeck’s works.15 It was a
labor of love on the part of the director, Lewis Milestone, who consulted
with Steinbeck and visited ranches in the Salinas Valley in his company.
Although he shot most of the outdoor sequences in southern California,
the landscape has an authentic look. He commissioned Aaron Copeland
to compose the background music, and he took pains with the casting. He
hired Burgess Meredith to play George, Lon Chaney, Jr., was Lennie, and
Betty Field played Curley’s wife, called Mae. Charles Bickford appeared
as Slim. Milestone brought Leigh Whipper from the Broadway cast to
repeat his performance as Crooks.
The movie, released in 1939, was not a box-office success. Never as
famous as John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath, it deserves more recognition
than it has received. An excellent television version Of Mice and Men

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ANNE LOFTIS

based on Milestone’s film was brought out in 1981, featuring Robert

Blake, Randy Quaid, Pat Hingle, and Lew Ayers. In 1970, an opera by
Carlisle Floyd, who wrote both the music and libretto, had its premiere in
Seattle. The composer changed the story slightly (he eliminated Crooks,
the black stable buck, and created a chorus of ranch hands), but he was
faithful to Steinbeck’s theme. One critic, obviously no lover of the origi-
nal work, thought that the new form was an improvement: “The operatic
conventions impose a frame that makes Steinbeck’s basic sentimentality
infinitely more acceptable.”16
Warren French has suggested that readers who spoke of Of Mice and
Men as sentimental should “think of it as an expression of Steinbeck’s
outrageous compassion for the victims of chaotic forces.”17 Criticism of
the novel became noticeable at the end of the 1930s when there was
an evaluation of Steinbeck’s total literary achievement up to that point.
On the one hand, he was praised for his versatility, and on the other,
denounced for trying to do too much, for mixing romance and realism,18
for “weakness in characterization” and “puerile symbolism.”19 The most
damaging assessment, one that would be echoed by later critics, was Ed-
mund Wilson’s statement that Steinbeck’s preoccupation with biology led
him “to present life in animal terms,” to deal “almost always in his fiction
. . . either with lower animals or with human beings so rudimentary that
they are almost on the animal level.” Wilson found a prime example of his
point in the character Lennie.20 (More recently Jackson Benson has given
a different interpretation of Steinbeck’s concern with biology. According
to this view, science and nature provided a philosophical framework for
Steinbeck’s writing, his conviction that meaning and stability came from
a sense of connection with the natural universe.21 This thesis supports
Peter Lisca’s emphasis on the importance in Of Mice and Men of the
camp by the river, “a retreat from the world to a private innocence,” and
of George and Lennie’s dream of the farm, “a safe place,” as a symbol of
happiness.)22
Wilson summarized the novel as “a compact little drama, contrived
with almost too much cleverness, and a parable which criticized humanity
from a nonpolitical point of view.”23 During the 1940s and 1950s Stein-
beck’s fiction, in particular the three farm-worker novels on which his
reputation was largely based, was criticized on ideological grounds. His
work had been popular when it appeared because it expressed the values

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of the Depression decade: a passion for social justice and concern for the
common man. Yet, fittingly for a man of independent judgment, he was
attacked by both radicals and conservatives. Left-wing critics complained
of his nonconformity to the doctrines with which he was identified by the
growers’ groups whose actions he had exposed in In Dubious Battle and
The Grapes of Wrath.
It is interesting that Of Mice and Men, which represents a break in the
sequence of Steinbeck’s “problem” novels, took on some political color-
ation from his other writings and from his ongoing connection with the
controversies of the 1930s. In the summer of 1937, the Theatre Union
of San Francisco, which supported maritime workers in their fight for
unionization, gave what was probably the first stage performance of the
work, creating their own script from the novel. Two years later, Steinbeck
gave permission to some Stanford students to give a benefit reading from
the book to raise money to help the migrants. In the 1970s, scenes from
the play were presented to the supporters of Cesar Chavez’s United Farm
Workers’ Union.
Yet the continuing popularity of Of Mice and Men, both as a drama
and in its original novel form, indicates the degree to which it has tran-
scended its historical context. As a work of literature, it has attained the
status of a modern classic. A staple of the middle-school curriculum in
England and the United States, it has been translated into a dozen foreign
languages. The arguments of the critics will go on, no doubt, but we have
come to acknowledge that Steinbeck’s “little book”24 has a quality that de-
fies analysis. It touches our deepest feelings and enlarges our understand-
ing of the human condition. As a tragedy, with the power to arouse pity
and terror implicit in that art form, it has drawn readers for half a century
and, it seems safe to predict, will reach new generations in the century to
come.

Notes
1. “Mice, Men and Mr. Steinbeck,” New York Times, 5 December 1937,
quoted in Jackon J. Benson, The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer (New
York: Viking, 1984), 364.
2. Steinbeck’s college roommate, Carlton Sheffield, gives an account of Stein-
beck’s experience on the ranch in his introduction to Letters to Elizabeth: A Selec-

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ANNE LOFTIS

tion of Letters from John Steinbeck to Elizabeth Otis, ed. Floran Shasky and Susan
F. Riggs (San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1978).
3. John E. Steinback [sic], “Fingers of a Cloud: A Satire on College Proter-
vity,” Stanford Spectator, February 1924.
4. John Steinbeck to Claire Luce, 1938, from Steinbeck: A Life in Letters,
ed. Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten (New York: Viking Press, 1975),
154–55.
5. “Mice, Men and Mr. Steinbeck.” Jackson Benson suggests that Steinbeck
may have been putting on a “wild west” act for reporters.
6. Letter to Louis Paul, February 1936, in Life in Letters, 120.
7. Postcard to Louis Paul, undated in Life in Letters, 123–24.
8. Letter to Elizabeth Otis, Stanford University Library, Department of
Special Collections.
9. Letter to Elizabeth Otis, 15 April 1936, Stanford University Library, De-
partment of Special Collections.
10. Letter to Elizabeth Otis, 27 May 1936, Stanford University Library, De-
partment of Special Collections.
11. Letter to George Albee, 1936, in Life in Letters, 132.
12. 27 February 1937 review.
13. 27 February 1937 review.
14. Quoted in Life in Letters, 136.
15. Joseph R. Millichap, Steinbeck and Film (New York: Ungar, 1983), 13.
16. Frank S. Warnke in Opera News Review, 14 March 1970.
17. Warren French, John Steinbeck (New York: Twayne, 1961), 74.
18. James D. Hart, The Oxford Companion to American Literature (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1941), 722–23.
19. Margaret Marshall, quoted in Peter Lisca, The Wide World of John Stein-
beck (New York: Rutgers University Press, 1958), 5.
20. Edmund Wilson, The Boys in the Back Room: Notes on California Novelists
(San Francisco: Colt Press, 1941), 41–43.
21. Jackson J. Benson, “Hemingway the Hunter and Steinbeck the Farmer,”
Michigan Quarterly Review 24, no. 3 (Summer 1985): 452–53.
22. Lisca, Wide World, 134–36.
23. Wilson, The Boys in The Back Room.
24. So described by Steinbeck in a letter to George and Anne, 11 January
1937, in Life in Letters, 133–34.

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 CHAPTER TEN
MANHOOD BESET:
MISOGYNY IN OF MICE AND MEN
Jean Emery

O
f Mice and Men is not, as most critics would have us believe, a
poignant, sentimental drama of an impossible friendship and
an unattainable dream. Rather, the story actually demonstrates
the achievement of a dream—that of a homogeneous male fraternity not
just to repress, but to eliminate women and femininity. Of Mice and Men
depicts the rescue of men from women, “a melodrama of beset manhood,”
to use the words of Nina Baym (70).
Textual evidence suggests that John Steinbeck, as chronicler of Ameri-
ca’s social inequities, intended Of Mice and Men as a critique of our society’s
most fundamental injustice. George and Lennie represent the duality of
masculinity and femininity, their partnership a kind of marriage. Ultimately,
George’s need and desire to confirm his membership in the powerful and
dominant male community drives him to kill his partner as a sacrificial rite
of initiation. Bolstered by smaller, less dramatic, but nonetheless signifi-
cant sacrifices, the text illustrates the insidious presence of this practice in
our culture at large. That for more than 50 years literary critics have read
the text purely as an exposé of a failed economic dream corroborates a basic
blindness to this issue and complicity in preserving the patriarchy.
George and Lennie as a couple display the stereotypical attributes of
husband and wife. Lennie’s refrain, “I got you to look after me, and you
got me to look after you,” solemnizes a kind of marriage vow between

Previously published in San Jose Studies 15, no. 1 (Winter 1992): 33–41. Used by per-
mission of the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies.

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JEAN EMERY

them (14). “We got a future,” George says in reply. The glue that binds
George and Lennie is the dream of a house and a couple of acres where
they can “live off the fatta the lan’” (14). George, the masculine creator of
this dream, gives it voice and grounds it in the realm of possibility. But it
is “feminine” Lennie who nurtures it and keeps it alive with his boundless
obsession for hearing George tell it “like you done before” (13).
As in many traditional marriages, this is not a partnership of equals
but one of lord and vassal, owner and owned. George as the patriarch
makes the decisions, controls the finances, decides where they’ll work
and live, dictates the conditions of the relationship (“no rabbits” is the
threat employed), even regulates when Lennie can and cannot speak. Yet
George wants power without the burden of responsibility. “God, you’re
a lot of trouble,” he says more than once to Lennie. “I could get along so
easy and so nice if I didn’t have you on my tail” (7).
George’s droning retelling of the dream is done primarily for Lennie’s
benefit. George’s own dream is really something quite different: “If I was
alone I could live so easy. I could go get a job an’ work, an’ no trouble. No
mess at all, and when the end of the month come I could take my fifty
bucks and go into town and get whatever I want” (11). The latent mes-
sage, of course, is that life would be better without the complications of a
relationship of a dependent “other.”
Relationships in this story center on the issue of power: who will have
it and who will not. Obsessed with his ability to control Lennie’s behav-
ior (just as Curley is driven to regulate his wife’s), George admonishes
Lennie for carrying dead mice in his pocket, for directly responding to
a question from the Boss, for bringing a pup into the bunkhouse. Such
power frightens and, at the same time, thrills George. “Made me seem
God damn smart alongside him,” George tells Slim. “Why he’d do any
damn thing I tol’ him. If I tol’ him to walk over a cliff, over he’d go” (40).
George then recounts the time Lennie nearly drowned demonstrating
exactly such obedience.
Peter Lisca suggests that George needs Lennie as a rationalization
for his own failure (141). But George’s failure is not just his inability to
establish his own autonomy. It is also his struggle to assure himself of
his own masculinity and reject the disturbing influence of such feminine
traits as gentleness, compassion, submissiveness, and weakness. Lennie’s
size and strength, a constant reminder of George’s own physical puniness,

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presents a constant threat to George’s vulnerable masculinity, clearly dis-

played in Lennie’s effortless emasculation of Curley when Lennie crushes
the bully’s hand.
Demonstrations of masculinity suffuse the text. The ranch George
and Lennie come to work—a stronghold of physical effort, rationality,
and orderliness—reeks with maleness. The bunkhouse, utilitarian and
void of decoration except for “those Western magazines ranch men love
to read and scoff at and secretly believe” (23), exemplifies the heroic male
struggle to control nature, other men, and, inevitably, women.

Women as Intruders
Woman and, correspondingly, feminine traits are intruders and threats to
this world, “entrappers” and “domesticators” in Baym’s words, woman as
temptress thwarting man in his journey of self-discovery and definition
(73).
In the novel some of the central female figures are the whores, who
use their sexual powers to seduce men, robbing them of their financial
stake. Women are poison, George tells us, “jailbait on a trigger” (51).
George and Lennie’s dream, one all the men subscribe to in some mea-
sure, is, not surprisingly, devoid of women. The female taint precipitates
the pathetic destruction of Lennie and, invariably, the ruination of every
man’s dream.
Curley’s wife, the evil, disloyal seductress, personifies the “fallen”
woman. She flaunts her sexuality (her only effective weapon in this arena),
dressing like a bordello whore—heavy makeup, painted fingernails, red
ostrich feathers on her slippers. She triggers the story’s tragic events and
George foresees this. “Been any trouble since she got here?” he asks (51).
Curley’s wife (the only woman appearing in the story aside from the
spectral Aunt Clara), is, in fact, so antagonistic to this environment that
she remains nameless. She’s called “tease,” “tramp,” “tart,” “rat-trap,”
“jailbait,” “bitch,” “Curley’s wife”—identities always contingent upon her
relationship to men. By refusing to speak her name, these men attempt to
rob her of her power over them, just as a superstitious and primitive native
might refuse to invoke the name of a feared spirit.
George’s reaction to her is particularly intriguing, since his vehemence
seems vastly out of proportion to her possible influence on his life. “I seen

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’em poison before, but I never seen no piece of jail bait worse than her”
(32). George clearly doesn’t trust or even like women; to him they are
liars and manipulators like the girl in Weed who cries rape when Lennie
clutches at her dress. Curley’s wife threatens the same action when Crooks
and Candy try to throw her out of Crooks’s room.
The essential conflict of the story—the strength of the bond between
George and Lennie—hinges upon this desire for a world without the con-
taminating female. Lennie, despite his size, possesses characteristics tra-
ditionally identified as feminine; and his continued habitation of the male
sphere eventually becomes intolerable for everyone, including George.
Stereotypically feminine, docile and submissive, dependent and lack-
ing in self-assertiveness, Lennie obeys George like a good woman. “Baf-
fled, unknowingly powerful, utterly will-less, he can not move without a
leader,” observes Harry Thornton Moore (50). Lennie is a pleaser, seeking
approval, desiring love. We first see him mimicking George’s behavior, a
conscious ploy to endear himself to his protector. Lennie loves soft, sensual
objects: mice, puppies, silky curls. He possesses maternal cravings, revealed
in his affection for small animals. And playing into long-held prejudices
against women’s intelligence, Steinbeck makes Lennie a half-wit.
Lennie’s superhuman strength does not contradict this interpretation
of him as a feminine figure, but rather confirms it. Throughout history,
taboos surrounding virginity, menstruation, and sexual intercourse have
expressed men’s dread of female sexuality. Images such as vagina dentata
exemplify men’s inordinate fear of submitting to a force that is unseen,
uncontrollable, and menacing to their essential nature—“a generalized
dread of women,” in Freud’s assessment: “The man is afraid of being
weakened by the woman, infected with her femininity and of then show-
ing himself incapable” (198–99).
George displays mistrust, disgust, and barely disguised rage on the
topic of women. He seems particularly to resent the shackles of his prom-
ise to Aunt Clara to care for Lennie (a vow, notably, given to a woman).
Of Mice and Men’s solution to this strangling bind is the rescue of men
by men from the grip of women. Freud, of course, vigorously promoted
the significance of a boy’s separation from his mother in achieving his
sense of masculinity. Here the struggle manifests itself in the creation
of what anthropologists call “men’s house institutions.” These cultural
centers of male ritual and values ensure male solidarity and the overall seg-

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regation of the sexes within the tribal group. Any breach of house norms
meets with severe censure and even social ostracism.
Sexual segregation is de rigueur on the ranch. “You ain’t wanted here,”
Candy hisses at Curley’s wife when she invades Crooks’s room (79).
Curley’s wife and Lennie are excluded from the male rituals of card games,
trips to town, and horseshoe tournaments. But then, so too are Crooks
and Candy, despite their possession of the correct biological anatomy.
Crooks is ostracized because of race, a nonconformity to the norms of
the tribal group. Candy’s case is more complicated. His strength and use-
fulness are on the wane. He has been crippled; hence he is less of a man.
More importantly, however, he fails to uphold the standards of desired
male behavior. Just as his muscle has withered, Candy’s emotional state has
grown soft and sentimental. Male power demands a code of behavior that
asserts control over property and possessions, whether they be wife or dog.
Sentiment and attachment—dare one mention love—is of no consequence.
Candy’s dog is too old and feeble for work and has a “bad stink” to boot. But
Candy cannot bring himself to perform his manly duty of ridding himself of
this no-longer-useful appendage. Carlson, rational, cold-hearted, eminently
practical, the antithesis of femininity, takes on the job himself, in the pro-
cess sealing Candy’s expulsion from the male community.

Lesson for George

The lesson is not lost on George. When the crisis comes and Lennie is
no longer “manageable,” George, like a rancher suddenly confronted with
a pet dog that has taken to killing sheep, follows Carlson’s example, right
down to shooting Lennie in the very spot Carlson marked on the dog’s
head. George’s killing of Lennie is, in effect, his sacrificial rite of initiation
into the male enclave.
By his action, George chooses virility over compassion, masculinity
over femininity. Stoic, calm, and nearly emotionless, George’s behavior,
unlike Candy’s, is manly. His lie about the actual events of Lennie’s death,
which on the surface suggests deep-felt emotion, actually serves to en-
hance his own male stature: diminutive George wrestling the giant, bone-
crushing brute, Lennie, for a loaded Luger—and winning, getting off a
clean shot to the back of the neck like a skilled marksman—a narrative
straight out of a Western pulp magazine. Slim’s proposal to go into town

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for a drink validates George’s membership in the clubhouse. “Ya hadda,

George. I swear you hadda” (107).
By murdering Lennie, George rids himself of the very thing that sets
himself apart from other men. Without Lennie, he is no longer a curios-
ity, a man of questionable masculinity because he travels with another.
The demise of Lennie is also the demise of the dream. George thus estab-
lishes his solidarity with the other men for whom the dream will remain
just talk.
Lennie’s death need not necessarily mean the end of the dream,
however. After all, Candy is still eager to pursue it. But partnership with
Candy requires a different kind of relationship than the one George had
with Lennie; and unwilling to reestablish a new hierarchy of dominator
and dominated, one where George is not so obviously superior, he quickly
abandons the dream.
What really stands in the way of the dream, however, is George’s in-
ability to accept the implied responsibility of the dream: shared contact
with another—equal—human being. As Louis Owens writes, “It is Len-
nie’s need for contact with other living beings, a craving the men of this
world deny, that brings about his destruction” (104). George, of course,
is the instrument of this destruction and the ultimate judge of its validity.
The inherent message of the text is that a partnership based on mutual
caring and respect is doomed and the model of marrying masculine with
feminine is by nature destructive and tragic. Ironically, while the mascu-
line world despises female dependence and submissiveness, membership
in the male community in fact rejects the possibility of true independence
and autonomy.
The melodrama of beset manhood neatly rescues the men on this Sa-
linas Valley ranch from the entrappers and domesticators. By story’s end,
all vestiges of femininity have been eliminated—Lennie, Curley’s wife,
Candy’s dog, Lennie’s mice and rabbits, even the deer that bound silently
across the path through the willows to the pool; a path, it should be noted,
“beaten hard by boys” and men.
Despite the prevailing belief that this story portrays the pathos of the
quest for the American dream, the foregoing evidence suggests that Of
Mice and Men is a Steinbeckian condemnation of the American male’s in-
ability to accommodate diversity and nonconformity, a terse commentary
on misplaced values.

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Carlson and Slim epitomize this conflict between domination and

compassion. Warren French notes that Carlson is insensitive and brutal;
Slim, kindly and perceptive (78). There is no sentiment in Carlson, an
eminently practical, albeit destructive man. Curley’s wife and Lennie, like
Candy’s dog, are to Carlson useless, intrusive, and annoying. A man of
action, Carlson does not let emotional weakness keep him from doing
what a man’s got to do. His having the last word in the story—“Now what
the hell ya suppose is eating them two guys?” (107)—attests to the weight
given the text’s masculine message.

Slim’s Characterization
The characterization of Slim, however, suggests some slight hope for rec-
onciliation between male and female components and saves the text from
a completely cynical misogyny. Slim is androgynous, what Carolyn Heil-
brun defines as “a condition under which the characteristics of the sexes,
and the human impulses expressed by men and women, are not rigidly
assigned” (x). Kindly, perceptive, compassionate, tender, intuitive, Slim
is described in feminine terms. Even his hands are lean, delicate and as
graceful as a temple dancer. “His ear heard more than was said to him, and
his slow speech had overtones of thought, but of understanding beyond
thought” (34).Yet his feminine traits are coupled with images of virility.
“His authority was so great that his word was taken on any subject, be it
politics or love” (33). He is “the prince of the ranch, capable of driving ten,
sixteen, even twenty mules with a single line to the leader” (33). Physically
strong, powerful and in control, the others take their cue from Slim, who
combines the finest attributes of male and female.
When he finds George and Lennie beside the pool, Slim perceptively
recognizes George’s internal struggle. He soothes George as a woman
might; and yet, unlike a woman, he instructs George as to what he must
do next, what “story” he must tell. The two leave together, as George and
Lennie first arrived, a couple. This partnership may be different. Slim,
the only character to integrate the masculine and feminine attributes of
his own nature, may well influence the man who has so forcefully denied
this integration.
Steinbeck’s sympathy clearly lies with the feminine. Lennie tugs at a
reader’s heart in the same way that a child or defenseless animal might.

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So, too, his portrayal of Curley’s wife in death softens earlier, vituperous
images of her: “And the meanness and the plannings and the discontent
and the ache for attention were all gone from her face. She was very pretty
and simple, and her face was sweet and young” (92).
But most revealing of Steinbeck’s attitude toward the material is a
simple image he creates in the opening pages, one that becomes a meta-
phor for the text. Shortly before we meet George and Lennie, “a big carp
rose to the surface of the pool, gulped air and then sank mysteriously
into the dark water again, leaving widening rings on the water” (10). If
Steinbeck had intended our sympathy to lie with the status quo, the fish
that rises to the surface would have been something other than a carp—a
rainbow trout or a cut-throat perhaps, game fish known as strong, wiley
fighters. Instead Steinbeck gives us the carp, a sucker fish, an invader that
eventually takes over a pond or stream, muddying the waters and irrevo-
cably altering the environment it penetrates. Smaller, weaker, and less ag-
gressive species are quickly subsumed. Diversity cannot be accommodated
once the carp arrives. Over time, all except the carp disappear. The pond
is no longer a very interesting or “wild” place. It is ruined.
“Violence without tragedy; that is the weakness of this book,” writes
Moore (50). “Sentimental,” say others, dismissing the work as minor. The
dictionary tells us sentimental means “influenced more by emotion than
reason; acting from feeling rather than from practical and utilitarian mo-
tives.” In short, feminine.
Steinbeck’s carp, the men of the Salinas Valley, eliminate diversity
and complexity out of a fear for their own survival. They huddle like a
school of fish in their bunkhouse, confidence in their own self-definition
residing in the absence of contrasting existences. They reign homoge-
neous, unvarying, sterile—big fish in ever-dwindling ponds.

Works Cited
Baym, Nina. “Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fic-
tion Exclude Women Authors.” In The New Feminist Criticism, ed. Elaine
Showalter, 65–79. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985.
French, Warren. John Steinbeck. New York: Twayne, 1961.
Freud, Sigmund. “The Taboo of Virginity.” In the Standard Edition, ed. James
Strachey, 191–208. London: Hogarth Press, 1961.

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 MANHOOD BESET: MISOGYNY IN OF MICE AND MEN

Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Toward a Recognition of Androgyny. New York: W. W.

Norton, 1964.
Lisca, Peter. The Wide World of John Steinbeck. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 1958.
Moore, Harry Thornton. The Novels of John Steinbeck. Chicago: Normandie
House, 1939.
Owens, Louis. John Steinbeck’s Re-vision of America. Athens: University of Geor-
gia Press, 1985.
Steinbeck, John. Of Mice and Men. New York: Penguin Classics, 1993.
———. Cannery Row. New York: Penguin, 1937.

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 CHAPTER ELEVEN
STEINBECK’S OF MICE AND MEN (1937)
Charlotte Hadella

[Editor’s note: Portions of this article have been omitted when the content does
not directly apply to Of Mice and Men.]

I. Background

B
y 1937, the year that Of Mice and Men was published and also
produced as a Broadway play, Steinbeck had survived the poverty
of his writing apprenticeship and achieved commercial success
with Tortilla Flat (1935). . . . With the popular and critical success of Of
Mice and Men and the enormous reaction to The Grapes of Wrath just two
years later, Steinbeck never again had to worry about making his living
as a writer.
Curiously, what did concern the writer while he was composing Of
Mice and Men was that financial security and public attention would make
him unfit for his craft. . . . After Mice was chosen by the Book-of-the-
Month Club, Steinbeck informed Otis that the news was both gratifying
and frightening. He claims, “I shall never learn to conceive of money
in larger quantities than two dollars. More than that has no conceptual
meaning to me” (LIL 134). Perhaps the subject matter of the novel, which
took him back to his earlier, more frugal years of working on the Spreckles

Previously published in A New Study Guide to Steinbeck’s Major Works with Critical
Explications, ed. Tetsumaro Hayashi, 139–63. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1993.
Reprinted with permission.

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Sugar Company ranches, intensified Steinbeck’s uneasiness with financial

security. As his biographer, Jackson J. Benson, observes, the composition
of Of Mice and Men “was certainly an exercise in humility. For an author
who lived through the lives of his characters, [Steinbeck] was remind-
ing himself on the gut level what it was to have nothing, truly, and very
little hope for anything.”2 Details of the writer’s financial struggles in the
early years of his marriage to Carol Henning underscore the authentic-
ity of Steinbeck’s interest in marginally subsistent characters whose fiscal
futures are always uncertain.3
Artistic uncertainty also plagued Steinbeck during the 1930s. Though
there were times while he was composing Mice that he judged the work
to be going very well, he did not allow himself to assume success (LIL
123–24). Steinbeck insisted that Of Mice and Men was different from any-
thing else that he had ever written. He referred to the book as an experi-
ment, “a tricky little thing designed to teach me to write for the theater”
(LIL 132). The relative ease with which the novel was transformed into
a playscript testifies to the validity of Steinbeck’s plan; but since the form
was experimental, Steinbeck maintained a note of modest skepticism
whenever he commented on the project. In fact, when the earliest version
of the manuscript was partially devoured by his dog, Steinbeck wrote to
Otis that although he was “pretty mad,” he only gave the dog “an ordinary
spanking.” Maintaining that “the poor little fellow may have been acting
critically,” Steinbeck writes, “I didn’t want to ruin a good dog for a ms.
I’m not sure it is good at all” (LIL 124). Thus, in spite of previous ac-
complishments, Steinbeck’s distrust of publishers and critics tempered his
enthusiasm for the book.
With Of Mice and Men Steinbeck was breaking new ground philo-
sophically as well as formally, a circumstance which may also have con-
tributed to his reticence concerning its critical reception. By 1936, he had
become very interested in non-teleological thinking. Benson explains that
in In Dubious Battle the author wanted to present a conflict without tak-
ing sides. In Steinbeck’s non-teleological fictions, he attempted to create
situations with “no cause and effect, no problem and solution, no heroes
or villains.”4 Working within this philosophical framework, which might
best be described as “is” thinking, Steinbeck originally titled George and
Lennie’s story “Something That Happened.”5 Happily, the novel proved
to be a successful marriage of form and philosophy. With the dramatic

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structure focusing upon the characters’ dialogue and action, Steinbeck

achieved a narrative intensity in the story which is largely untainted by
authorial voice. Ironically, the “little book” (LIL 129) which received such
a tentative evaluation from its author would not only find an immediate
audience, but would be recognized decades later as a minor American
classic.

II. Plot Synopsis

[Editor’s note: This section of text merely repeats the plot line of Of Mice and
Men.]

III. Critical Explication

The frugal text of Steinbeck’s little book has inspired a wealth of critical
commentary. Moreover, a number of interpretive strategies have been ap-
plied to Of Mice and Men, producing varied readings of the text over the
last few decades. Though this discussion will highlight what has already
been said about Of Mice and Men, the primary aim is to offer a fresh analy-
sis by subjecting the novel to various critical probes.7 The eclectic nature
of this study suggests that productive examination of Steinbeck’s work can
follow any one or several critical approaches: a New Historical consider-
ation which notes the interconnections between the work of literature
and the culture of its period; interpretive strategies such as structuralist
or psychoanalytic readings which assume that the text is integrally whole;
and discourse analysis which views the text as open and self-conflicted.

New Historical
Certainly each of Steinbeck’s stories about California farm workers
includes realistic details which were gleaned from the writer’s own experi-
ences as an agricultural laborer and his journalistic investigations of farm
labor conditions. The description of the land and the river, the names of
real California towns like Soledad and Weed, the language of the men in
the bunkhouse, the details of everyday life such as the horseshoe matches
and the trips to town on payday, all contribute to the realistic impres-
sion of Of Mice and Men. Nevertheless, Steinbeck mined his sources for

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convincing detail, but he was primarily interested in constructing power-

ful metaphors. For example, in reference to In Dubious Battle, Steinbeck
wrote, “I have used a small strike in an orchard valley as the symbol of
man’s eternal, bitter warfare with himself.”8
Though In Dubious Battle has most often been discussed as a work
of realism, recent critics have noted that Steinbeck virtually ignored the
important roles played by women and minorities in the California work-
ers’ strikes in the 1930s.9 Likewise, Steinbeck did not attempt to draw a
realistic picture of the lives of racial minorities in Of Mice and Men. Just
before George and Lennie first enter the grove by the Salinas River, the
author sets the stage with this description: “In front of the low horizontal
limb of a giant sycamore there is an ash pile made by many fires; the limb
is worn smooth by men who have sat on it” (2). Judging by the characters
depicted in the novel, we might assume that all (or most) of the men who
have sat on that sycamore limb have been white men. Crooks, the stable
buck, is the sole representative of a racial minority in the story. Yet, when
Steinbeck worked on the Spreckles Sugar Ranches during the 1920s
(while he was on and off as a student at Stanford), most of the workers
were foreign nationals: Japanese, Mexican, or Filipino. Benson identifies
Spreckles Ranch Number 2, just south of Soledad on the west side of
the Salinas River, as the ranch where George and Lennie hire on.10 Of
course, Steinbeck also worked alongside migrant laborers of Anglo-Saxon
stock—workers like George, Lennie, Slim, Carlson, and Candy; but it
is unlikely that every hired hand in the bunkhouse during haying season
would be Caucasian. In fact, in a very early piece, “Fingers of Cloud,”
published in a Stanford literary magazine, Steinbeck tells the story of a
retarded teenage girl who wanders away from home and finds refuge in
the bunkhouse of a Filipino work gang.11
Other historical and biographical details might lead us to question
Steinbeck’s choice of a cast of Anglo characters for his play-novelette.
Cletus E. Daniel, in Bitter Harvest: A History of California Farmwork-
ers, 1870–1941, states that Mexicans had become the mainstays of the
agricultural labor force in California by the mid-1920s as growers took
advantage of the liberalized federal immigration policy toward Mexico
and as the flow of illegal immigration from Mexico steadily increased.12
Furthermore, Steinbeck’s choice of the “land dream” as a central motif
in the story may have even been inspired by his trip to Mexico in 1935

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during which he witnessed the struggle of masses of poor people longing

to own a piece of land. Also during this trip, the Steinbecks had observed
poor, illiterate workers attending concerts and theatrical productions.
Benson believes that this experience prompted Steinbeck to consider writ-
ing a play instead of a novel because his work was not reaching the people
he was writing about. In keeping with this original intention, Steinbeck
read his novel-as-play to the Green Street Theater Union, a group which
presented works with a socialist-worker philosophy. The Union opened
its new theater in North Beach, California, on May 21, 1937, with Stein-
beck’s Of Mice and Men—six months before George Kaufman produced
it on Broadway.13
Given the multi-racial configuration of the California farm labor
force in the 1920s and 1930s, along with the possible Mexican influence
on the form and theme of Steinbeck’s novel, we must conclude that Stein-
beck was not attempting to render an accurate socio-historical picture in
Of Mice and Men. However, the subsistence-level economy, the tensions
between workers and owner, and the social marginality of the migrant
laborers in Of Mice and Men ring true to the historical details of the actual
setting. Most importantly, the American Dream theme of owning a piece
of land, becoming self-sufficient, and realizing a sense of place, was a re-
alistic facet of the American psyche. By 1936, the year that Steinbeck was
writing Mice, the technological revolution in agribusiness was threatening
what little job security itinerant workers had. Anne Loftis reports that
mechanical combines enabling five men to do the work of 350 men were
responsible for half the nation’s grain harvest in 1938.14 Cletus E. Daniel
writes that

[b]y the twentieth century, employment in California’s large-scale ag-

riculture had come to mean irregular work, constant movement, low
wages, squalid working and living conditions, social isolation, emotional
deprivation, and individual powerlessness so profound as to make oc-
cupational advancement a virtual impossibility.15

He goes on to stress that

whatever the differences of race, national origin, language, and psychol-

ogy that existed among farmworkers in California from 1870 to 1930,
working for wages in industrialized agriculture normally conferred mem-

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bership in an unhappy fraternity whose cohering force was a kinship of

powerlessness.16

Daniel’s phrase “kinship of powerlessness” aptly describes the brother-

hood of George, Lennie, and Candy as they plan for their escape from the
ranch to the dream farm. Thus it seems that in spite of Steinbeck’s failure
to render “truthfully” the racial identities of his California farm-workers, he
does create an accurate social milieu in Of Mice and Men. Loftis contends
that the “social history which [Steinbeck] had learned firsthand is woven
seamlessly into the fabric of the story.”17 The rapid decline in family farming
and the impersonal profile of the burgeoning agribusiness in California at
the turn of the century contributed to the decline of small communities and
the rise of economic class distinctions. Family farming as a way of life be-
came even more difficult as a result of the Great Depression. Hence, when
Of Mice and Men appeared in 1937, many Americans could identify with
the powerlessness and social marginality of Steinbeck’s characters.
Finally, it would seem that though America has experienced un-
countable cultural and economic changes since the publication of Of Mice
and Men, the isolation of individuals in our modern society still persists.
In fact, the social problems of unemployment, underemployment, and
homelessness, problems of which Steinbeck was acutely aware, plague this
country even as we enter the final decade of the twentieth century. Pic-
ture, if you will, the disheveled transient standing on the street corner of
any large American city today with his dirty cardboard sign which reads,
WILL WORK FOR FOOD. Would he not be captivated by George
and Lennie’s dream? Perhaps he, too, dreams of “a vegetable patch and
a rabbit hutch and chickens. And when it rains in the winter, [he could]
say the hell with goin’ to work, and . . . build up a fire in the stove and set
around it an’ listen to the rain comin’ down on the roof . . .” (14–15). But
even if the details of the dream vary, the fact that some people have little
else but dreams to sustain them has not changed.
The selection of subject and theme for Of Mice and Men reveals Stein-
beck’s understanding of basic human needs, and the author’s social con-
sciousness has appealed to a wide audience for five decades. However, to
appreciate Steinbeck’s achievement as a storyteller, we must go beyond the
socio-historical fabric of his novella and give some attention to its struc-
ture, its psychological framework, and the complexity of its discourse.

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Symbol, Myth, and Theme: Structuralist Interpretations

The allusive title Of Mice and Men signals from the outset of the
story that mice symbols will appear and that the schemes of men will go
astray.18 Before the central characters delineate those plans specifically,
however, Steinbeck physically associates George with mice by describing
him as “small and quick, dark of face, with restless eyes and sharp, strong
features” (2). Lennie’s connection with mice is more obvious: he carries
a mouse in his pocket because he loves to pet soft, furry things. Conse-
quently, Lennie associates mice with the dream of owning a farm and
keeping rabbits which, unlike the mice, will be able to survive his petting
them.
Of Mice and Men is a tightly structured work which unfolds as a series
of scenes, each of which develops naturally from the preceding dialogue or
action. In The Wide World of John Steinbeck, Peter Lisca analyzes recurring
motifs of language, action, and symbol in Mice. Discussing the sense of
inevitability in the novel, Lisca notes that for Lennie, the rabbits, and by
extension all soft, furry things, represent the dream of owning the farm, a
dream that has Edenic overtones.19 Louis Owens, in John Steinbeck’s Re-
Vision of America, expands upon Lisca’s discussion of the Eden myth in Of
Mice and Men to show that “[t]here are no Edens in Steinbeck’s writing,
only illusions of Eden.”20 Steinbeck indicates the inevitable failure of the
land dream by introducing a dead mouse into the opening scene of the
story to show that Lennie destroys soft, furry things—as his later killing
of the puppy indicates. In this symbolic system, Curley’s wife is simply
another nice-to-touch object that is doomed for destruction when Lennie
pets her. Her death is just the “something” that was bound to happen to
insure the shattering of George and Lennie’s plans for escaping from their
transitory existence as migrant workers.21
To reinforce the notion of illusive dreams, Steinbeck also has the girl
recount her fantasy of escaping the lonely, restricted life of the ranch.
When Candy, Crooks, and Lennie shun her company on Saturday night,
she tells them contemptuously, “I could of went with the shows. Not jus’
one, neither. An’ a guy tol’ me he could put me in pitchers . . .” (78).
Curley and most of the hired men have gone into town to carouse at the
saloons and whorehouses. Just “the weak ones” (77) have been left behind,
and Curley’s wife seeks the only companionship available to her. The next
day she describes her dream again in a conversation with Lennie in the

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barn just before he accidentally breaks her neck. Here she tells her story
“in a passion of communication, as though she hurried before her listener
could be taken away” (88). With this narrative commentary Steinbeck
emphasizes that being able to share one’s dream with a sympathetic
audience—the companionship implied by such an action—is as important
as realizing the dream.
Following this same line of thought, Owens argues convincingly that
loneliness is the central theme of Of Mice and Men and that the novel
is not as pessimistic as some critics have insisted. If we accept the non-
teleological premise of the story, we understand that human beings are
flawed and that their hopes of regaining Eden are illusory. In Steinbeck’s
novel, the characters’ commitment to the dream and to each other, how-
ever, is not flawed. Owens explains:

The dream of George and Lennie represents a desire to defy the curse of
Cain and fallen man—to break the pattern of wandering and loneliness
imposed on the outcasts and to return to the perfect garden. George and
Lennie achieve all of this dream that is possible in the real world: they
are their brother’s keeper.22

Similarly, William Goldhurst offers an allegorical reading of Mice as

Steinbeck’s parable of the curse of Cain.23 The question “Am I my broth-
er’s keeper?” permeates the story as other characters are affected by the
commitment between George and Lennie. Curley is suspicious of it, Slim
admires it, and Candy and Crooks briefly participate in the brotherhood
by looking after Lennie when George is not around. Although all of the
plans for buying the farm are shattered when Lennie dies, Steinbeck still
leaves the reader with an image of two men together as George and Slim
walk away from the grove by the river where the story had begun.

The Unconscious
In addition to analyzing the patterns of symbol and myth in Of Mice
and Men, we might also employ psychoanalytic strategies to interpret the
action of the novel and to understand the major characters. Because Stein-
beck uses animal imagery on several occasions to describe Lennie, critics
often speak of Lennie as a symbol of humankind’s animal nature. When
Lennie drinks from the pool in the grove, he “dabble[s] his big paw in the

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water” (3); when he returns to the river at the end of the novel, “Lennie
appear[s] out of the brush, and he [comes] as silently as a creeping bear
moves” (100). Obviously, Lennie often functions on the level of the un-
conscious. His violent responses to fear illustrate that strong, destructive
forces loom just beneath the surface of his consciousness. Even hypotheti-
cal threats, such as cats eating the rabbits on the imaginary farm, move
Lennie to violent outbursts: “You jus’ let ‘em try to get the rabbits,” he
tells George. “I’ll break their God damn necks. I’ll . . . I’ll smash ‘em with
a stick” (58). It is also clear that George tries to exert a conscious control
over Lennie. George tells Lennie when to speak and to whom; he makes
Lennie promise to return to the grove by the river if there is any trouble on
the ranch. But, as evidenced by the earlier incident in Weed and the fracas
in the bunkhouse during which Lennie crushes Curley’s hand, George’s
control of his partner’s powerfully destructive physical strength is actually
quite tenuous.
In this interpretive frame, we might say that Lennie acts as an exten-
sion of George, a powerful id to George’s ego. Mark Spilka develops this
kind of Freudian reading of the novel, though he does not use the terms id
and ego to describe the relationship between the two characters.24 Clearly,
Lennie, without thinking about what he is doing, seems to be carrying out
George’s wishes when he severely injures Curley in the bunkhouse fight.
Earlier in the story, George had expressed his hatred for Curley, declar-
ing, “I’m scared I’m gonna tangle with that bastard myself” (37). George
also instantly detests Curley’s wife and honors her with such invectives as
“bitch” and “jail bait” (32). Though Lennie responds to the girl sensually
and thinks that she is “purty,” that stroking her hair is “nice” (32, 91), he
becomes the instrument of her destruction.
This analysis of characters and events gives a reasonable account of
the partnership between the two central characters; it even suggests that
George needs Lennie as much as Lennie needs George. However, it does
not satisfactorily explain why George so vehemently despises Curley’s wife
or why he kills his partner at the end of the novel. We may come to terms
with these issues by recognizing the antagonistic forces within George’s
psyche, forces which may be interpreted as Jungian archetypes. We know
from Carol Henning, Steinbeck’s first wife, that Steinbeck’s friendship
with the Jungian psychologist Joseph Campbell in the early 1930s had
a discernible effect on the writer’s intellectual development. The two

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men met frequently at Ed Ricketts’s laboratory in Monterey where they

discussed ideas and books.25 Recognizing Steinbeck’s familiarity with
Jung’s work, critics have noted the psychoanalytic influences in To a God
Unknown, In Dubious Battle, and in several stories in The Long Valley.
Likewise, Jung’s ideas about the ego and the unconscious self are useful
in interpreting Of Mice and Men. In Jungian terms, we may see Lennie as
George’s “shadow self” and Curley’s wife as his “anima,” archetypes which
invade the personal unconscious of one’s ego personality.26
Jung describes both the shadow and the anima or animus as projec-
tions which “change the world into the replica of one’s unknown face.”27
The shadow is always of the same sex as the subject and may even be
recognized as the subject’s evil nature. But the contra-sexual figure—the
animus of a woman, and the anima of a man—represents the face of “ab-
solute evil” and is usually not recognized by the subject as part of his or
her own psyche.28 One face of a man’s anima is the seductress, a projec-
tion which embodies the negative, unconscious, and unlived aspects of
the psyche to which a man responds with fear. At the same time that the
anima arouses libidinal drives within the psyche, a patriarchal conscious-
ness strives to repress the feminine force.29
Curley’s wife represents a mysterious and autonomous force which
stimulates George’s sexual consciousness, challenges his manhood, in-
spires self-doubt, and taunts him for his meanness. At various times
throughout the story, George gives conscious expression to these feelings.
For instance, he admits that it is mean of him to lose his temper over
Lennie’s wanting ketchup with his beans (12); and he tells Slim about the
tricks that he played on Lennie when they were youngsters (40). Also,
George seems reluctant to express himself sexually, and when Whit tries
to interest him in visiting Suzy’s place on Saturday night, he insists that
if he does go to the whorehouse, it will only be to buy whiskey. The overt
sexuality of Curley’s wife is an inversion of George’s puritanical nature,
and, as George’s anima, she sparks an intensely negative reaction from
him. She also serves as a conscious reminder of his longing to “live so easy
and maybe have a girl” (7), the dream that he represses because of his as-
sociation with Lennie.
The shadow, on the other hand, is a lower level of personality than
the ego. Jung explains that the shadow self is a projection of the ego’s
dark characteristics, inferiorities of an emotional, obsessive, or possessive

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quality. Jung writes: “On this lower level with its uncontrolled or scarcely
controlled emotions one behaves more or less like a primitive, who is not
only the passive victim of his affects but also singularly incapable of moral
judgment.”30 We see Lennie at once as a primitive entity who responds
instinctively to various stimuli and is incapable of moral judgment. Yet, it
just so happens that Lennie manages to harm the people towards whom
George harbors animosity. At times, George even expresses an extreme
dislike of Lennie. He complains that because of Lennie he can’t keep a
job, or “[g]et a gallon of whiskey, or set in a pool room and play cards
or shoot pool” (11). Ultimately, Lennie brings about the circumstances
which allow George to rid himself of the illusive land dream and the re-
sponsibility of taking care of his mentally deficient partner.
If we look closely at the text, we see that in the opening scene Stein-
beck subliminally defines Lennie as George’s shadow. But first the author
draws our attention to the river, a symbol of the Jungian collective uncon-
scious. Then as Lennie follows George into the sycamore grove, Steinbeck
underscores the fact that they are dressed exactly alike; they walk single
file down the path, “and even in the open one stayed behind the other.
. . . The first man stopped short in the clearing, and the follower nearly
ran over him” (2–3). After both of them have had a drink of water from
the pool, George

replaced his hat, pushed himself back from the river, drew up his knees
and embraced them. Lennie, who had been watching, imitated George
exactly. He pushed himself back, drew up his knees, embraced them,
looked over to George to see whether he had it just right. He pulled his
hat down a little more over his eyes, the way George’s hat was. (3–4)

The shadow motif is unmistakable in this scene which serves as our intro-
duction to the main characters.
That Lennie has survived as long as he has testifies to George’s con-
scious commitment to his care. George, however, has a violently aggres-
sive nature. Both fearing and repressing the primitive impulses in himself,
he projects them onto Lennie. The dream farm represents a haven in
which George’s aggressive nature (represented by Lennie) can be re-
pressed. George devises the plan to escape from the real world of migrant
life—bunkhouses, rough men, whiskey, and whorehouses—because he is

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disturbed by the qualities in himself that such a life brings to the surface.
Unconsciously, he projects these disturbing qualities onto his shadow self
and feels the need to control that self by isolating it in the safe haven of
the Edenic dream farm. Meanwhile, George inadvertently directs Lennie
towards disaster by staying at the ranch even after the trouble with Curley,
and by making Lennie afraid of Curley’s wife. Though George realizes
that Lennie will eventually do something so terrible that he will have to
be incarcerated or destroyed, he does not take him away from the ranch
because of an unconscious desire to rid himself of his shadow. Not until
Lennie’s death is George really free to join the community of men repre-
sented by Slim. As the only character in the novel who understands that
George did not kill Lennie in self-defense, Slim expresses his approval of
George’s actions. Then he offers to buy George a drink, and together they
walk away from the river grove where Lennie has died.
This Jungian interpretation of Of Mice and Men highlights the con-
flict of personalities and priorities in the story. It hints that there is more
to the characterization of Curley’s wife than has previously been assessed,
and it suggests that the novel does not simply relate the story of disillu-
sioned dreamers. By focusing on the conflicting forces in George’s life, we
discover that the text itself may be ambiguous and self-conflicted.

Discourse Analysis
Several times in the novel, George expresses the desire to change his
life. Sometimes he imagines himself free of the responsibility of looking
after Lennie: he could keep a job and not always have to be on the move;
maybe he could have a girl, or he could go into town with the guys when-
ever he wanted to; he could shoot pool, drink whiskey, and so on. At other
times, he talks about buying a little farm where he could raise a garden,
and Lennie could tend rabbits. These “dreams” have several elements in
common: each represents a change from the status quo and each holds
forth some form of freedom for George. Nevertheless, the two scenarios
are mutually exclusive.
In a sense, George’s dreams compete throughout the text for actualiza-
tion and verbalization; and though they are voiced by the same character
each time, they are spoken in different “voices.” The narrative expletive at-
tached to George’s speech about life without Lennie is, “George exploded”

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(11). His description of living “so easy” comes out in anger; the words spew
forth in an unrehearsed explosion. In contrast, when George tells Lennie
about the dream farm, his voice “became deeper. He repeated his words
rhythmically as though he had said them many times before” (13). The
signal is clear: we are not experiencing George’s “voice” as we had been
in the present-tense situation of the story, and the words of his speech
may not even be his own. Eventually, we learn that George’s partnership
with Lennie and the notion of living in a place where he can keep Len-
nie safe from the real world are the results of a promise made to Lennie’s
Aunt Clara. The plan reflects the illusion of the American Dream and the
mythic innocence of pre-lapsarian Eden.
This close examination of the narrative syntax in the passages re-
lated to the competing dreams reveals that Steinbeck consciously creates
dialogic tension in the text. To explain this dialogic tension, or double-
voicedness, in Of Mice and Men, I am borrowing from Mikhail Bakhtin’s
theory of discourse as dialogue between a speaker and a listener, about a
hero or subject.31 In verbal and written utterances, the subject becomes an
active agent, interacting with the speaker “to shape language and deter-
mine form,” and the subject (or hero) often becomes the dominant influ-
ence.32 Dialogic tension exists in all discourse because words, the elements
of the dialogue, are loaded with various social nuances which influence
each other and perhaps even change as a result of the association. Accord-
ing to Bakhtin, “Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which
it has lived its socially charged life; all words and forms are populated by
intentions. Contextual overtones . . . are inevitable in the word.”33
The contextual overtones of the dream-farm passages in Of Mice and
Men are twofold: mythical and communal. Sometimes the description of
the land dream is delivered as if it were a religious incantation, as when
George deepens his voice and speaks rhythmically. Sometimes the story is
related as a dialogue or as a chorus of two or more speakers who combine
their “speech acts” (Bakhtin’s term) to create a composite image. This
happens when Lennie interrupts George’s recitation and is coaxed into
completing the story himself (14). Later, in the bunkhouse, after George
has agreed to a partnership with Candy, Steinbeck notes that “each mind
was popped into the future when this lovely thing would come about”
(60). With their minds on the future, Lennie, George, and Candy discuss
their plan, each one adding a specific detail to the description of life on

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the farm. Lennie, of course, mentions feeding the rabbits; Candy asks if
there will be a stove; and George imagines taking a holiday and going to
a carnival, a circus, or a ball game (60–61).
Notice that both Lennie’s and Candy’s comments deal with specific
details of farm life. On the other hand, George’s contribution to this idyl-
lic picture focuses on activities which would take him away from the farm,
not on the farm itself. Though his comments are in keeping with the spirit
of camaraderie which flows through the conversation, the narrative shift to
non-farm activities is a subtle clue that George’s version of the future does
not coincide with his partners’. What George seems to be doing in this
speech is reconciling the mythic vision with the more personal vision of
how he would live his life if he did not have to look after Lennie. Though
George gives lip service to the dream-farm myth, it is possible that he is
not really committed to it. After all, the primary reason for acquiring the
farm is to remove Lennie from the everyday working world in which he
cannot seem to stay out of trouble. While Lennie’s presence necessitates
keeping the dream alive, his uncontrollable strength and outbursts of vio-
lence virtually assure that the dream will not come true.
By introducing both of George’s dreams in the opening scene of the
story, and by emphasizing the differences in the way they are “voiced,”
Steinbeck highlights the dialectical nature of the narrative. From scene to
scene, as George appears to be working conscientiously toward achieving
the land dream, he is actually moving closer and closer to the competing
dream which is not a dream at all, but a rather realistic description of the
bunkhouse life which might be possible for George if he did not have to
worry about Lennie.
Through the dialogical structure of the text, Steinbeck maintains
narrative tension without imposing moral judgments. George is neither
unreasonable nor unrealistic when he imagines himself unencumbered by
his promise to Lennie’s Aunt Clara. Any moral judgments which might
influence our interpretation of the final scene must come from outside
of the text. Lennie’s death, of course, leads to the inevitable resolution
of the narrative tension, but Steinbeck offers few syntactical clues to
help the reader decide exactly what motivates George to kill Lennie. As
George calmly tells Lennie about the farm, he hesitates to raise the pistol
even after he hears the footsteps of Curley and the other men. Steinbeck
prolongs the inevitable resolution of the crisis with this comment: “The

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CHARLOTTE HADELLA

voices came close now. George raised the gun and listened to the voices”
(106). Though Steinbeck lets the reader decide which George speaks
through the pistol—the one who creates the world of protected innocence
or the one who expresses a desire for freedom—he makes one thing very
clear: George’s pulling the trigger is a reaction to the voices of cruelty from
which neither he nor Lennie can escape any longer.

Notes
[Editor’s note: Portions of this article have been omitted, including notes 1 and 6. Those
notes are reprinted here for easy reference:
Note 1: John Steinbeck, Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, ed. Elaine Steinbeck and
Robert Wallsten (New York: Viking Press, 1975). Subsequent references to the letters
are from this edition and are cited in the text as LIL with page number.
Note 6: John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men/Cannery Row (New York: Penguin,
1993). Subsequent references to the novel are from this edition and page numbers are
cited parenthetically in the text.]

2. Jackson J. Benson, The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer (New

York: Viking, 1984), 326.
3. Benson, True Adventures, 163–413.
4. Benson, True Adventures, 327.
5. Louis Owens, John Steinbeck’s Re-Vision of America (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 1985), 103.
7. For the structure of this critical explication, I credit Eugene K. Garber,
“‘My Kinsman, Major Molineux’: Some Interpretive and Critical Probes,” in Lit-
erature in the Classroom, ed. Ben F. Nelms, 83–104 (Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1988).
8. Benson, True Adventures, 304.
9. Benson refers to the Mexicans and the Mexican-Americans involved in
the 1933 cotton strike (304). Also, Louis Owens discusses the role played by
women and minorities in the strikes in “‘Putting Down the Thing’: Irony of In
Dubious Battle,” a paper delivered at The Third International Steinbeck Congress
in Honolulu, Hawaii, on May 30, 1990.
10. Benson, True Adventures, 39.
11. Benson, True Adventures, 61.
12. Cletus E. Daniel, Bitter Harvest: A History of California Farmworkers,
1870–1941 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 67.
13. Benson, True Adventures, 326, 351.

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 STEINBECK’S OF MICE AND MEN (1937)

14. Anne Loftis, “A Historical Introduction to Of Mice and Men,” in The Short
Novels of John Steinbeck, ed. Jackson J. Benson (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1990), 39.
15. Daniel, Bitter Harvest, 64.
16. Daniel, Bitter Harvest, 64.
17. Loftis, “Historical Introduction,” 41.
18. The allusion is to Robert Burns’s poem, “To a Mouse.”
19. Peter Lisca, The Wide World of John Steinbeck (New Brunswick, NJ: Rut-
gers University Press, 1958; reprint, New York: Gordian Press, 1981), 136 (page
references are to the reprint edition).
20. Owens, John Steinbeck’s Re-Vision, 101.
21. Lisca, Wide World, 136–38.
22. Owens, John Steinbeck’s Re-Vision, 102.
23. William Goldhurst, “Of Mice and Men: John Steinbeck’s Parable of the
Curse of Cain,” in Benson, Short Novels, 48–59.
24. Mark Spilka, “Of George and Lennie and Curley’s Wife: Sweet Violence
in Steinbeck’s Eden,” in Benson, Short Novels, 59–70.
25. Benson, True Adventures, 223–25.
26. Carl G. Jung, “Aion: Phenomenology of the Self,” in The Portable Jung, ed.
Joseph Campbell, 139–62 (New York: Penguin, 1976).
27. Jung, “Aion,” 147.
28. Jung, “Aion,” 148.
29. Bettina L. Knapp, Women in Twentieth-Century Literature: A Jungian View
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1987), 164–65.
30. Jung, “Aion,” 146.
31. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael
Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1981), 314–15.
32. Charles I. Schuster, “Mikhail Bakhtin as Rhetorical Theorist,” College
English 47 (October 1985), 595.
33. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 293.

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 CHAPTER TWELVE
OF MICE AND MEN: STEINBECK’S
SPECULATIONS IN MANHOOD
Leland S. Person Jr.

U
ntil Jean Emery’s recent essay, Mark Spilka’s 1974 Modern Fiction
Studies article represented the most thorough analysis of gender
questions in Of Mice and Men. Spilka emphasizes George Milton’s
flight from adult sexuality and his use of Lennie Small to rid his world of
the sexual “trap” embodied in Curley and his wife (64). Spilka works with
traditional gender categories, invoking a normative heterosexuality, for
example, as the ground from which George imagines a “boy’s world” of
friendship, predicated on a “retreat” from “masculine grossness” and “from
whorehouse visits and combative marriages like Curley’s” (63).
Emery unaccountably ignores Spilka in her provocative feminist
reading of Of Mice and Men, which she derives from Nina Baym’s classic
essay on “beset manhood,” but she too assumes that masculine identity
is constructed out of misogyny and a desire of eliminate “all vestiges of
femininity” (40). Lennie is George’s “wife,” she claims, because he is
“stereotypically feminine, docile and submissive, dependent and lacking
in self-assertiveness,” and he “obeys George like a good woman” (35).
Unlike Spilka and Emery, who defuse male relationships in the novel by
infantilizing or heterosexualizing them, I want to examine Of Mice and
Men within a pluralized discourse of masculinity—as a novel about men’s
relationships to other men. My reading will be “homosexual” in the sense
that Robert K. Martin uses the term for male friendships in Melville’s sea

Previously published in The Steinbeck Newsletter 8, nos. 1–2 (1995): 1–4. Used by per-
mission of the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies.

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novels—for intimate same sex relationships that do not necessarily involve

genital sexuality (13).
Like Melville’s novels, Of Mice and Men destabilizes conventional
constructs of masculinity (patriarchal, heterosexual, and phallocentric)
in order to explore alternative and subversive masculinities—indeed, a
utopian dream founded on male bonding and a sublimated homosexual
domesticity. Of Mice and Men resembles Moby Dick in particular in mark-
ing out an imaginative space where male-to-male relationships can flour-
ish. The novel opens at a “deep pool” in the Salinas River to which both
ranch boys and tramps have beaten hard paths (1), and it is tempting to
hear echoes of the “twenty-eighth bather” section of Whitman’s “Song of
Myself” and of the sperm-squeezing scene in Moby-Dick each scene sug-
gesting the potential fluidity of male identity and male-to-male relation-
ships. Martin notes two erotic forces in Melville’s fiction: a “democratic
eros” expressed “in male friendship and . . . the celebration of a general-
ized seminal power not directed toward control and production; and a
hierarchical eros expressed in social forms of male power” (4). Whereas
heterosexuality remains deeply rooted in subject-object power relation-
ships, men who enter into homosexual relationships abdicate their roles
in an “economy of power” over women and other men (Martin 14). Male
friendships, such as the one between Ishmael and Queequeg, have the
potential to subvert the economic, political, and sexual hierarchies that
the normative heterosexual economy supports and to install cooperation
rather than competition as the founding principle of male relationships.
Of Mice and Men positions its male characters between similar male
sexual economies. The ranch economy is patriarchal and capitalistic—
heterosexual and homosocial. The hierarchy descends from the boss
through his son Curley to the jerkline skinner, Slim, and then to the
workers. This fragile economy is homosocial in precisely the ways Eve
Sedgwick describes in Between Men, because it depends upon the repres-
sion and sublimation of sexual desire, enabling men to get along and
produce work. “Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys
in the world,” George tells Lennie. “They got no family. They don’t be-
long to no place. They come to a ranch an’ work up a stake and then they
go inta town and blow their stake, and the first thing you know they’re
poundin’ their tail on some other ranch” (13). Trapped within a vicious
cycle of hard work, low wages, and wasteful expenditure, “guys” who work

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the ranches are perpetually exploited and then, like Curley’s dog, put out
to a “pasture” they cannot own. Instead of saving for the future, the men
spend their wages and their sexual selves in town at “old Suzy’s place,”
where they can get a “flop” or “have a couple of shots” (51). Heterosexual
desire is carefully policed, in other words, relegated to the margins and
incorporated into the capitalistic economy that governs the normative
world of the ranch.
Curley’s wife emphasizes the fragility of this economy because she
crosses the carefully drawn lines between the ranch house and the bunk
house, the owners and workers, and she exaggerates the fault lines be-
tween homosocial and heterosexual desires. A kind of outlaw virgin, Cur-
ley’s wife is a “jail bait all set on the trigger,” in George’s terms. “Ranch
with a bunch on it ain’t no place for a girl, specially like her” (51), precisely
because she threatens the homosocial working relationship between men.
Instead of cooperating with one another, the men compete with each
other—often violently, like Cain and Abel (see Goldhurst and Lisca),
as Curley’s compulsive effort to thwart his wife’s relations with the men
clearly show. Or as she herself puts it, “You’re all scared of each other.
. . . Ever’ one of you’s scared the rest is goin’ to get something on you”
(77). Her appearance in the bunk house, her suggestive comment that
“Nobody can’t blame a person for lookin’” (31), her open invitation of
the male gaze as she throws her body forward (31)—her actions require
immediate interdiction and especially the proscription of Lennie’s desire.
“Listen to me, you crazy bastard,” George tells Lennie. “Don’t you even
take a look at that bitch” (32). Lennie’s libido, or desire, seems largely
narcissistic—expressed in petting behavior that seems more masturbatory
than object-oriented. Indeed, Lennie’s preference for mice that he can
keep in his pocket and pet with his thumb as he walks along (5) pointedly
suggests the masturbatory quality of his desire. Proscribing Lennie’s attrac-
tion to Curley’s wife enables the translation of Lennie’s desire to vengeful
violence—Curley’s symbolic castration through the gloved hand he keeps
“soft for his wife” (30). In contrast to Ishmael’s, Lennie’s “squeeze of the
hand” perverts the sort of homo-subjective bond that Melville realizes in
Moby-Dick, converting desublimated desire into triangulated heterosexual
and homosocial competition—dominant-subordinated mastery.
In contrast, the “little house” dream that George and Lennie regularly
invoke features democratic cooperation and communalism—an all-male

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version of the matriachy that Warren Motley has detected in Ma Joad’s

role in The Grapes of Wrath. The two men collaborate dialogically to re-
hearse a mutual fantasy that subverts the conventionally entrepreneurial
“ranch” ideal predicted on owner-worker and subject-object relationships.
In effect, the two men share a single subjectivity in the act of collabora-
tion. “You got it by heart,” George tells Lennie. “You can do it yourself”
(14). But Lennie prefers to supplement George’s rhythmical narrative
with interpolations of his own—melting his desire into George’s in a
verbal analogy to Ishmael’s mergence of body and mind with other men’s
in the big tub of sperm. “Someday,” George begins, “we’re gonna get the
jack together and we’re gonna have a little house and a couple of acres an’
a cow and some pigs and—.” “An’ live off the fatta the lan’,” Lennie shouts.
“An’ have rabbits. Go on George! Tell about what we’re gonna have in the
garden and about the rabbits in the cages and about the rain in the winter
and the stove” (14).
Let me emphasize that what I am calling the homosexual dream is
not genitally sexual. Indeed, it depends upon the sublimation of sexual
energy in shared labor and homemaking. “We’d have a little house an’ a
room to ourself,” George says. “An’ when we put in a crop, why we’d be
there to take the crop up. We’d know what come of our planting” (58).
Lennie’s sexuality, furthermore, is pointedly sublimated in stroking and
petting—fantasmatically invested in tending rabbits, traditional symbols
of unrestrained sexuality.
Not only does the homosexual dream dissolve competitive relation-
ships, but it attracts and encourages other men to enter imaginatively into
an all-male fantasy. Much like Melville, who discovered in the Ishmael-
Queequeg bond a “radical potential for social reorganization, based on
principles of equality, affection, and respect for the other” (Martin 94),
Steinbeck explores alternative economic and social structures through the
interdependent bond between George and Lennie. Not unlike Ishmael’s
reverie in “the Squeeze of the Hand,” when George and Lennie share the
dream with Candy, “They all sat still, all bemused by the beauty of the
thing, each mind was popped into the future when this lovely thing should
come about” (66). The stoop-shouldered, one-handed Candy volunteers
to invest his $350 stake for the chance to “cook and tend the chickens and
hoe the garden some” (59)—his proposal reflecting the diversification of
gender roles on which such a male utopia would be founded. “An’ it’d be

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our own, an’ nobody could can us,” George says. “If we don’t like a guy we
can say ‘Get the hell out,’ and by God he’s got to do it. An’ if a fren’ come
along, why we’d have an extra bunk, an’ we’d say, ‘Why don’t you spen’
the night?’ and by God he would” (58). George and Lennie’s homo-topic
dream even dissolves racial barriers, as the crippled stable buck Crooks
offers to “work for nothing—just his keep”—if he can be allowed to join
them (76). “A guy needs somebody—to be near him,” Crooks says. “Don’t
make no difference who the guy is, long’s he’s with you” (72–73).
George and Lennie’s relationship obviously represents the emotional
and thematic center of Of Mice and Men—microcosmically embodying
the possibilities and the limitations of the world outside. Allegorical ex-
amples of partial manhood, the two men are opposites (2)—“two parts of
a single being,” with Lennie representing “the Freudian id” and George
“its controlling ego” (Lisca 79). In the gendered terms that concern me
here, however, it is more useful to look back to Plato’s Symposium than to
Freud. In Aristophanes’ famous parable, the sexes were originally three:
man, woman, and the union of the two (30). Zeus cut man in two, how-
ever, leaving him “always looking for his other half” (32), and Aristophanes
imagines a plurality of potential pairings—homosexual as well as hetero-
sexual. They who are “of the male,” he says, “and while they are young,
being slices of the original man, they hang about men and embrace them,
and they are themselves the best of boys and youths because they have the
most manly nature” (32). Linking the greatest manliness with same-sex
bonding, Aristophanes constructs a utopic masculine identity—a super
Manhood of sorts that Of Mice and Men intertextually explores.
I want to focus on the execution that ends the novel—and violently
destroys the possibility of intra-psychic union that Plato describes—be-
cause the ending bears so heavily on what I am calling Steinbeck’s specu-
lations in manhood. Positing the Lennie-George relationship in terms of
investment and exchange helps show how personal relationships exemplify
large male-to-male economies—how the violent end of their relationship
represents death of the homosexual dream and, by default, the recovery of
the patriarchal, capitalistic economy that the dream challenged.
Steinbeck carefully stages the murders in chapters 5 and 6 to em-
phasize the trade offs necessary in this complex sexual economy. When
Lennie kills the puppy—in effect by loving it too much—he reasons that
George will no longer let him tend the rabbits at their little place (85–86).

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One experience cancels the other. Similarly, as he shifts his attention to

Curley’s wife, he understands the “economic” consequences of his actions.
“If George sees me talkin’ to you,” he tells her, “he’ll give me hell” (87),
and even as she talks to him in a “passion of communication,” Lennie
strokes the dead puppy and thinks of his rabbits—exchanging heterosex-
ual desire for autoerotic fantasy and the homosexual utopia that promotes
such innocent pleasure. The crisis comes, of course, when Lennie crosses
the line between narcissistic and object-oriented, homosocial and hetero-
sexual, desire. Lennie likes all soft things equally—a puppy, a mouse, a
piece of velvet, a woman’s hair—but petting Curley’s wife subjects him to
the same police action he had suffered in Weed when he grabbed the girl
in the red dress. He kills Curley’s wife so that George won’t find out that
he has “messed up” again, because “messing up” jeopardizes the homo-
sexual dream he shares with George.
That dream remains imperiled throughout the novel—questioned
repeatedly by the other men. Slim, for example, tells George that “It jus’
seems kinda funny how a cuckoo like him and a smart little guy like you
travelin’ together” (39). Although Emery considers Slim an androgynous
character who integrates masculine and feminine attributes (41), she exag-
gerates Slim’s femininity. Despite having hands “as delicate in their action
as those of a temple dancer” (34), Slim illustrates the successful masculin-
ization of a male character along lines of classic manhood: “he moved with
a majesty only achieved by royalty and master craftsmen”; he was “capable
of killing a fly on the wheeler’s butt with a bull whip without touching
the mule”; there was a “gravity in his manner and a quiet so profound that
all talk stopped when he spoke”; his “authority was so great that his word
was taken on any subject, be it politics or love” (33). If Lennie reflects
a regressive, narcissistic stage of undistributed desire, Slim suggests the
inscription of a stereotypically masculine self-image that writes over any
potential androgyny. Slim’s crucial part at the very end of the novel—
consoling and leading George away from Lennie’s dead body—reinforces
the message that killing Lennie has meant killing and repressing the ho-
mosexual dream and the male bond.
George, like Slim, will eventually offer another example of successful
repression. Earlier in the novel, in the bunkhouse, Slim had “fastened” his
“calm, God-like eyes” on George while he described his relationship to
Lennie. Under the gaze and sign of the patriarch, George adopts a “tone

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of confession” (40), guiltily recalling the jokes he played on Lennie and,

most importantly, the incident in Weed—the girl who cried rape when
Lennie touched her red dress (45–46)—both of these memories suggest-
ing the dangers of unregulated sexuality. This tê.te-a-tê.te also foreshadows
the final scene when Slim helps George compose himself, as well as com-
pose the story of why he finally shot Lennie. Both scenes position George,
as Sedgwick might say, “between men”—triangulating and mediating his
desire between competing discourses of manhood.
The collective police action that closes the novel is designed to restore
order to this male economy. Such vigilantism executes a final solution
to the problem of destabilized manhood by eliminating the homosexual
dream—and the homosexual dreamer. Not by accident does George posi-
tion Lennie on his knees, tell him to stare vacantly “across the river” and
imagine their little house, and then shoot him in the head. Despite the
subtle references to Nazism in the images of the Luger and the behind-
the-head execution, it would be going too far to compare George to the
“fascist male” that Klaus Theweleit has anatomized in Male Fantasies, but
executing Lennie does suggest a similar desire to purge the male self of an
“other” manhood that threatens traditional masculine integrity. George is
careful, therefore, to show the other men that he wasn’t “in on” the mur-
der of Curley’s wife, and he tells Lennie just before he shoots him that he
wants a life with “no mess”—alone and living “easy,” taking his fifty bucks
at the end of the month and going to a “cat house” (104)—in other words,
the traditional masculine life of the ranch and the other “guys.”
Where some critics see hope at the end of the novel—in the form
of a new partnership between Slim and George (Emery 40; Owens
105)—I see the recuperation of traditional masculinity and George’s re-
incorporation into the normative heterosexual and homosocial economy
of the ranch. “Now what the hell ya suppose is eatin’ them two guys?”
(107)—Carlson’s concluding rhetorical question—may be answered later
for George and Slim via some return of the repressed, but immediately,
it seems to me, this new pairing simply confirms George’s place within
a traditional patriarchal economy. “Me an’ you’ll go in an’ get a drink,”
Slim says (107), and he leads George up toward the highway—away from
the liminal space of the homosexual dream and into town, presumably to
old Suzy’s place, where “It’s a hell of a lot of fun” and a guy doesn’t even
have to “want to flop” (52). Unlike the fantasmatic bond between Lennie

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and George, this male bonding occurs within a framework of carefully

invested heterosexual desire in which the homosocial and the heterosexual
conspire to repress the homosexual fantasies George and Lennie once
shared. In effect, the “squeeze of the hand” becomes a squeeze of the trig-
ger that blows away the utopian homosexual dream.

Works Cited
Benson, Jackson J., ed. The Short Novels of John Steinbeck: Critical Essays with a
Checklist to Steinbeck Criticism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1990.
Emery, Jean. “Manhood Beset: Misogyny in Of Mice and Men.” San Jose Studies
18 (Winter 1992): 33–42.
Goldhurst, William. “Of Mice and Men: John Steinbeck’s Parable of the Curse of
Cain.” In Benson, Short Novels, 48–59.
Lisca, Peter. John Steinbeck: Nature and Myth. New York: Thomas Crowell,
1978.
Martin, Robert K. Hero, Captain, and Stranger: Male Friendship, Social Critique,
and Literacy Form in the Sea Novels of Herman Melville. Chapel Hill: Univer-
sity of North Carolina Press, 1986.
Motley, Warren. “From Patriarchy to Matriarchy: Ma Joad’s Role in Grapes of
Wrath.” American Literature 54 (1982): 397–412.
Owens, Louis. John Steinbeck’s Re-Vision of America. Athens: University of Geor-
gia Press, 1985.
Plato. Symposium. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial
Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.
Spilka, Mark. “Of George and Lennie and Curley’s Wife: Sweet Violence in
Steinbeck’s Eden.” In Benson, Short Novels, 59–70.
Steinbeck, John. Of Mice and Men (1937). New York: Penguin, 1993.
Theweleit, Klaus. Male Fantasies (1978). Trans. Erica Carter and Chris Turner.
2 vols. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

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 CHAPTER THIRTEEN
QUEER BORDERS:
FIGURES FROM THE 1930s FOR
U.S.-CANADIAN RELATIONS
Caren Irr

“C
anada as a separate but dominated country,” wrote Marga-
ret Atwood during the free trade debates of the late 1980s,
“has done about as well under the United States as women
worldwide have done under men. About the only position they have ever
adopted toward us, country to country, has been the missionary position,
and we were not on top. I guess that is why the national wisdom vis-à-vis
them has so often taken the form of lying still, keeping your mouth shut
and pretending you like it.”1 Like many opponents to the Canada-U.S.
Free Trade Agreement (the predecessor to the North American Free
Trade Agreement [NAFTA]), Atwood expressed her disapproval of the
treaty by implicitly comparing its effects to rape. Above all, this depiction
of international power relations involved figuring the United States as a
man and Canada as a woman. Of course, in Atwood’s passage, the meta-
phor suggests that Canada’s status as female victim will not be rectified
until she acts up, opens her mouth, and tells the truth. The assumption
is that Canadians, like women, have something to say as a group about
efforts to subsume them under a larger, putatively generic category.
Strangely, though, during the free trade debates, this gendered meta-
phor was also used by the treaty’s proponents; pro–free trade economists
wrote pieces with titles such as Canada at the U.S.-Mexico Free-Trade
Dance: Wallflower or Partner? and “The Draft Agreement: Cohabitation

Previously published in American Quarterly 49, no. 3 (1997): 504–30. Reprinted by

permission.

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 QUEER BORDERS

Worth A Try.”2 These pieces also figure a feminine Canada, but they
suggest that courtship and marriage—or at least “fruitful and mutually
invigorating intercourse”—are the most desirable outcomes of a relation-
ship between masculine and feminine entities. The assumption for these
writers is that having a voice is less important than having a home inside
the walls of Fortress America. Despite their alternative goals, though, the
economists share with Atwood and generations of Canadian intellectuals
before her, the premise that Canada is a smaller, gentler, weaker body
bound by contract and affection to an invasive, domineering, and often
inconsiderate partner; for persons across the ideological spectrum, the
gendered metaphor expresses an important power differential between the
United States and Canada.
Even while noting the expressiveness of this metaphor, though, we
should recall a few situations in which it also operates as a limit. For
instance, several pieces in the semiotext(e) collection canadas draw at-
tention to the fractures and stresses that disrupt the association between
gender and nation. Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood’s meditations on
“quadrophenia”—the dissonance produced by hearing English, French,
masculine and feminine voices simultaneously—show that the United
States : Canada :: man : woman metaphor can also be retooled to describe
conflicts within Canada, such as the long-standing dispute over the status
of Francophone culture; for Lotbinière-Harwood, English Canada is to
Québec as man is to woman. Similarly, Marie Ann Hart Baker’s piece
“Gotta Be on Top: Why the Missionary Position Fails to Excite Me”
recycles Atwood’s metaphor as a description of relations between white
and Native writers; for Baker, white women’s efforts to appropriate Na-
tive stories can also be read as efforts to enforce the top-bottom hierarchy
of the missionary position.3 This chain, in which a “feminine” Canada
becomes “masculine” when the points of reference shift, suggests that the
gendered metaphor for national power differentials may have lost some
of its descriptive power through proliferation. Because the male-female
metaphor is so commonly used to describe relations of unequal power, it
may well be that it does not describe any link on the chain precisely. If this
is the case, it will be to our advantage to locate descriptive metaphors for
U.S.-Canadian relations that not only articulate features of this relation-
ship but also locate that relationship in an extensive and complex field of
power and disempowerment.

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CAREN IRR

One suggestion offered in canadas is that we “see Canada not so much

as effeminate, but as a kind of ‘queer’ country.” Especially in relation to
a hegemonic U.S. popular culture, Canadians are put in queer positions,
Thomas Haig argues; passing, ironizing, and outing are strategies as
familiar to Canadians in the United States as to queers. This is the the-
sis that I would like to explore in this essay—although with the crucial
proviso that we will be examining relations between nations rather than
intervening in what Haig calls “the incessant (and often tedious) ques-
tion of Canadian national identity.”4 By shifting the metaphor for U.S.-
Canadian relations from a gendered to a queer one, I hope also to sug-
gest that the multinational narrative in which we situate this relationship
might be rethought. If the gendered metaphor encourages us to imagine
U.S.-Canadian relations as a monogamous courtship leading to marriage
or break-up, a queer metaphor might draw attention to the wider field of
global relations in which the U.S.-Canadian encounter is an important,
but not necessarily an exclusive, alliance.
Now, to shift attention from the gendered metaphor for U.S.-
Canadian relations it will be useful to move away, for a while, from the
historical situation which it most accurately describes. That is, in so far as
it does articulate an important relationship, the Atwood metaphor is most
appropriate for the period of U.S.-Canadian relations that began after the
1939–1945 war and came, some have argued, to a close in the 1960s. It
was during this period that the United States’ export of cultural materials
most closely approximated a campaign of cultural imperialism, a cam-
paign designed to be particularly overwhelming to a nearby neighbor that
had only recently begun to foster a sense of national culture.5 By contrast,
before the war—before the homogenizing institution of alliance—the dy-
namics of U.S.-Canadian relations were less completely marked by U.S.
dominance. There was considerably more uncertainty in the relationship,
and a somewhat wider array of figures for North American relations was
available. In particular, I want to turn to the 1930s, a decade during which
ways of conceiving national identity and international relations arose that
were later foreclosed. During the 1930s, certain counter-narratives to
the dominant gender ideology were imagined—counter-narratives that
stressed the utopian side of relations among men.
I will not be arguing that this interest in male-male relations arose be-
cause the language of sexual liberation extended to homosexual men dur-

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ing the 1930s—usually, it did not. Instead, male-male relations became

a site of particular interest because one of the most powerful ideological
effects of the Great Depression was the reformulation of gendered eco-
nomic roles. When basic manufacturing industries slashed wages and laid
off record numbers of workers during the 1930s, the white-male working
class lost much of the ground that it had gained during the prosperity
of the 1920s. Arguably, this group was the most brutally affected by the
depression; many of the jobs traditionally held by women in domestic
and service sectors remained available—although these, of course, paid
little and offered little security.6 Also, racial discrimination and low farm
prices of the 1920s meant that most minorities and agricultural workers
had already begun experiencing the reduced living standard associated
with a depression well before the stock market crash of 1929.7 The result
was that in many white families, the responsibility for “providing” shifted
during the depression from the male wage earner to the female or was
dispersed among the family members; in many cases, the depression led
white working-class men to experience an erosion of the kind of self-
reliance crucial to the ideology of manhood. This is one reason why the
most famous image from the 1930s, Dorothea Lange’s photograph of a
pea picking family, represents the crisis so well: not only does it forcefully
depict the burden of responsibility thrust upon the mother, but also, its
composition dramatically recalls the absent father. In Lange’s Madonna
with children, Joseph is not hovering nearby but, presumably, wandering
far afield. This figure of the man without family, a man unable to support
himself—this figure of the down-and-out white male drifter—was for
many observers the most woeful symbol of the 1930s.
Certainly, many writers used the white male transient as a signal of
social protest during the 1930s. He appears in films such as Sullivan’s
Travels and a number of novels from the period; Nelson Algren’s Some-
body in Boots, Edward Dahlberg’s Bottom Dogs, John Dos Passos’s U.S.A.,
Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, and Nathanael West’s A Cool Million come
to mind. In Canadian literary magazines, this figure was so common
that when asked to comment on the stories appearing in a new radical
periodical, the established novelist Morley Callaghan remarked, “If this
keeps on it will appear that either all the young writers of the country are
out of work, or that they all feel a little frustrated, a little cynical, or even
defeated, and that living in this country doesn’t leave one with a strong

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feeling.”8 This remark reveals the way that the transient figure was most
commonly used; rootless and alone, he signified defeat or even despair
to many readers. Often appearing on the margins of stories about local
communities in crisis, he was a reminder of the crisis being played out at
the national level. Also, as Callaghan’s comment reminds us, it was not
uncommon during the 1930s for writers to identify themselves as spokes-
persons for the nation. Certainly, Callaghan and many of his Canadian
peers understood even their more ephemeral periodical writing as articula-
tions of a national condition.
In this context, it is not surprising that the appearance in the late
1930s of two novels concerned with transient white men would provoke
not only discussion of social issues relating to unemployment but also gen-
eralizations about national culture. These two texts, John Steinbeck’s Of
Mice and Men (1936) and Irene Baird’s Waste Heritage (1939), both push
beyond the stereotype of the lonely drifter to pair men who support one
another in an aggressive, uncomfortable social world.9 Each text offers a
brief glimpse of an all-male utopia, though in each case this projection is
foreclosed by the contradictions of the culture at large. Furthermore, both
texts seem to have been written with a national context in mind, and their
generic projects and reception illustrate much about U.S.-Canadian rela-
tions before 1945. Finally, I will argue that reading these texts together
helps us locate pieces of a counter-narrative of North American cultural
relations that may be of use today.

Imagining Communities of Men during the 1930s

In both Steinbeck’s short best seller and Baird’s longer and relatively
obscure documentary novel, the focus of attention is the male couple. Of
Mice and Men centers on the relationship between Lenny, a physically
large and mentally small innocent, and George, his physically small, but
caring and intelligent companion. From the first scene, Steinbeck fore-
grounds the interdependence of these two characters by outfitting them in
similar apparel, while insisting that their physical qualities make each the
other’s “opposite” (OMM 2). However, by the end of the novel, the fixity
of this opposition has dissolved somewhat; there, Lenny’s major character
trait—his death grip on the objects he loves—is adopted by George. In an
act of love, George kills Lenny in order to preserve his innocence.

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This pattern of entangled binaries also occurs in Waste Heritage. This

novel revolves around the small, smart Matt and the large, humble Eddy.
In Baird’s novel, however, the opposition between the two central charac-
ters does not turn on violence versus nonviolence as it does in Of Mice and
Men, since both Matt and Eddy have violent tempers. The result is that,
in Baird’s novel, the two male characters are less securely opposite. Here
Matt constantly struggles to maintain control of himself and his desire
to control Eddy is partly an externalization of this struggle. So, when,
in the final pages, Matt loses control and indirectly kills his buddy, the
dissolution of the opposition between controller and controllee reads as a
failure, rather than the bittersweet moral triumph we find in Steinbeck’s
conclusion.
Despite this shift in the central relationship, though, in both novels,
the male couple produces similar effects on other characters. “‘I never seen
one guy take so much trouble for another guy,’” the boss says suspiciously
in Of Mice and Men (22); and “‘I heard there was plenty of that kind of
thing down there among you boys,’” a prostitute leers at one point in Waste
Heritage (138). Of course, here the phrase “that kind of thing” implies
that the two men might be lovers. Both novels raise the possibility that
the impregnable, obscurely sentimental relationship between the central
characters could be considered in sexual terms. The relationship is close
and emotional enough to disrupt the conventional patterns of male friend-
ship during this period, and this makes it anxiety-producing. Very little
of this anxiety is confronted directly in either text; instead, the relation-
ship is recoded into other, fairly weak, explanations—explanations which,
in the end, produce as much anxiety as the original relationship. As the
above citations reveal, the potentially queer bond is only articulated as a
nervous joke, while the ties of political or class-based solidarity which are
also implied attain even less credibility. Especially in Waste Heritage, soli-
darity is imagined as a requirement imposed from above, as it were, and
the emotional, psychological or sentimental aspects of the relationship are
regularly contrasted to this political imperative. In both novels, the essence
of solidarity—taking “trouble for another guy”—is a sign of perversion
or idiotic compliance with authority. In the end, the only explanation for
the male couple’s bond that the novels can openly support is transparently
inappropriate: George pretends for a while that he and Lenny are cousins,
and Matt somewhat more plausibly accepts Eddy as a kind of little brother.

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But, in both novels, this screen of family relations is eventually dropped,

and the only remaining link between characters is the excessively signifi-
cant and mysteriously affective relationship between men.
Of course, such puzzling relationships are not unprecedented in mod-
ern literature in English. Readers of D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis,
Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, and even Horatio Alger
will find them familiar, and, in recent years, a number of critics have sug-
gested that the male couple represents to these authors the last authentic
intimacy available in a culture that vigorously commodifies heterosexual
love.10 That is, in these writings, the male couple often reconstitutes the
domestic ideology in which the family is posited as safe haven from the
commercial world. The intimations of illicit or so-called non-productive
sexuality in these writings thus might indicate a kind of resistance to the
fetishization of production in monopoly capitalism.
This recent scholarship implicitly revises Leslie Fiedler’s influential
thesis on the interracial male couple in Love and Death in the American
Novel (1961).11 Fiedler argued that couples such as Natty Bumppo and his
Indian companions, Ishmael and Queequeg, and Huck and Jim represent
American authors’ collective fantasy of escaping from a repressive, orderly,
female-dominated civilization; he tied this fantasy to infantalizing repre-
sentations of women and the absence of a tradition of what he viewed as
the proper topic of the novel—the heterosexual seduction narrative. How-
ever, where Fiedler saw the male couple as a figure for utopian escape from
civilization, today, in light of queer studies, we might see the male couple
as a fractious subculture of “civilization” that is produced in, and shares
qualities with, that civilization.12 In the wake of poststructuralist theories
of textuality as contextuality, this kind of residual excess seems more likely
than escape, especially once we recognize that excess can still provide sites
at which the problematic of the wider field of culture is exposed.
Certainly, it is as a sign of a difficult excess that the male couple
seems to function for Baird and Steinbeck. In Of Mice and Men and Waste
Heritage, the indigence of the male couple exposes crises in the social
fabric, but this anxious bond between characters does not promise a uto-
pia outside the confines of culture. Instead, the relationship is a sign of
excess that links these novels to the major site of social critique during the
1930s. Both Baird and Steinbeck read the male couple through the lens
of Depression-era radicalism; in particular, the opposition both novels

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make between the central characters’ size and intelligence can be traced
to contemporaneous radical representations of the ways that class marks
the body. As cartoons from this period in the Communist magazine New
Masses demonstrate, 1930s leftists habitually represented the working
class with a hyper-muscular male body and the bankers, capitalists or
other representatives of the bourgeoisie with a puny one. Although the
positions were occasionally reversed so that the capitalist was the larger
figure, in leftist cartoons, as in the drawings of small children, the size
of a figure almost always indicated its social power. This symbolist habit
was perpetuated by many New Deal artists working officially in the social
realist vein, such as the sculptors of Post Office friezes.13 While realisti-
cally representing musculature and work habits, pneumatic male bodies
were also used symbolically to represent relations among classes and class
fractions. Frequently, for social realist painters, sculptors, and muralists,
as for Steinbeck and Baird, the thesis proposed visually was that proper
relationships among men had been “perverted” and would only be righted
when the sleeping giant awoke.
These depictions were not “outside” of contemporaneous discourses
on sexuality that read homosocial/sexual relations as a perversion of natu-
ral (because biologically based) power relations; in fact, the radicals’ repre-
sentations often fit fairly seamlessly with modernist homophobia. During
the 1930s, prominent Communist theorists, such as New Masses editor
Mike Gold used the male couple as a figure for everything they disap-
proved of, from the careless sadism of a teacher to the decadence of a fad-
ing cultural aristocracy.14 It is important to note, though, that the 1930s
left was not simply mirroring the values of the period; it was also acting on
and reformulating the ideological scene. Gold’s homophobia—although
powerful and long-standing—did not dominate the entire left movement.
For some of his contemporaries, such as novelist Tess Slesinger, the male
couple also functioned as a sign of intellectuals’ corrupt dependence on
the wealthy classes, but that relationship was of interest precisely because
it also provided an occasion for the transformation of the risky seduction/
pedagogical narrative into something more egalitarian. In The Unpossessed,
Slesinger’s roman à clef about left-wing intellectuals, it is the dynamics of
a male couple’s relationship that rouse the group to a climactic crisis in
consciousness. Since this doubled reference to the same-sex couple—as
site of critique and sign of possibility—recurs in other left-wing fiction of

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the period, such as Fielding Burke’s Call Home the Heart and Nathanael
West’s A Cool Million, we may conclude that it was not a fluke particular
to Slesinger’s work.15 In fact, it is not altogether surprising that an era that
took Whitman as its culture-hero would make use of the male couple in
this doubled fashion. Although the 1930s left did often employ an official
discourse that suggested “natural” relations among men were non-sexual,
it also based much of its literary practice on writings that represented the
more or less openly physical form of camaraderie and solidarity among
men as a conflicted, but culturally central relationship.
With this context in mind, Steinbeck and Baird’s simultaneous choice
to examine the male couple and to employ the small/large opposition
seems a little less surprising. Both writers drew on culturally available
depictions of the male couple, and both muted the conflicts articulated in
contemporaneous leftist rhetoric by transferring the class opposition to a
personal, morally charged relationship within a single class. For Baird and
Steinbeck, the anxiety produced by the male couple figures the instability
of social relations as a whole. Because both had reservations about the
counter-cultural status of Communism, both preferred the language of
“poverty” and moral responsibility to the language of class and struggle.
Unfortunately, this moral critique of economic relationships is at least
as flawed and self-contradictory as a language of class struggle; it certainly
does not provide a secure referential base for either novel. As the difficulty
both novelists have in justifying the relationship between their two main
characters reveals, the moral element conflicts with their conviction that
the social world must be figured as a force field of aggression. Of Mice
and Men, for instance, displays a social world organized around fist fights.
From the moment Lenny and George enter the bunkhouse, they engage
in contests with their peers. As a social microcosm, the farm is organized
into a clear pecking order with women and African Americans at the bot-
tom and layers of hormone-driven white men above them. At the local
pinnacle of this pyramid is Curley, the boss’s super-aggressive son, but
Curley’s testiness is simply a more open expression of the aggressivity
contained by the others. As long as he keeps it relatively controlled, it
supports him in this social Darwinist set-up. That Steinbeck is depicting
a type of Darwinism is confirmed by the shooting of Candy’s sickly dog.
This incident can be read as a barely masked act of aggression against the
equally unfit and aged Candy. Furthermore, it functions as a reminder

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of what is regularly sacrificed to fitness: the excessive, affective relations

described above.
Similarly, in Waste Heritage, Baird stresses the military discipline at
work in the unemployed camps; most of her dialogue reports the endless
squabbling among the men and many of Matt’s adventures document
townspeople’s hostility towards the trekkers. Several times in the novel,
Baird describes gratuitous harassment of the unemployed, and, as in the
following incident, we are repeatedly asked to sympathize with the men’s
ego-driven resistance to being organized, even when organization would
counter such harassment. In this scene, Hep, the Red organizer, asks Matt
to tone down his aggressive behavior:

“You two go on back to the hall so there’s two less to account for.”
“Can’t I come along? I don’t want to miss anything.”
“I said to go along.”
“Yeah? Well, suppose I don’t go.”
Hep glared at him. He hissed like an angry snake, “What th’hell do
you think you are anyway? One little squib or the whole damn revolu-
tion?”
Matt’s chin shot out resentfully. He got set to blow off then caught
Hep’s eye. “Okay,” he muttered sulkily, “I’ll go along.”
“You bet you’ll go along. An’ check right in as soon as you get
there.” . . .
Matt looked after [Hep] resentfully. He said, “I didn’t like that guy
first time I met him an’ I don’t like him any better now.”
Eddy stared at him shocked. “Him?” he said, “Hep?”
“Yeah, sure, Hep. Who d’you think I meant? The king of Spain?”
“I don’t know nothin’ about no king of Spain,” Eddy said gravely, “all
I know is Hep ain’t like other guys, he’s a prince. I heard him called a
prince often.”
Matt laughed, feeling small and angry. He began to walk on fast. “I
guess I’m just too democratic to appreciate him, then,” he said. (WH,
68–69)

The climax of this rambling scene is Matt’s declaration that he is “too

democratic” and feisty to do as Hep asks; this “democratic” impulse
contrasts to an amalgamated view of Hep as snake, “king of Spain,” and
spokesman for “the whole damn revolution.” That is, we find Baird im-
plicitly criticizing leftist organizations for their similarity to a monarchical

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hierarchy. Although it would probably be a mistake to read this scene as

expressing an entirely anti-Tory sentiment, Baird does suggest that Hep is
a “snake” pretending to be a prince, that he too is motivated by a natural,
even Biblical, aggressivity falsely recoded as cooperation. In this schema,
Matt’s macho individualism reads as the more honest expression of their
common condition.
In these novels, then, aggressivity is being used both as a figure for
economic competition and as a critique of political alternatives to com-
petition. Both Baird and Steinbeck imagine a pitiless social world in
which people coded as “poor” (rather than working class, for instance) are
sacrificed to hostile forces beyond their control. In these novels, through
no particular fault of their own, the poor cannot compete, a fact that is
supposed to demonstrate the essential immorality of making competition
the basis of a social or economic system. At the same time, both Baird and
Steinbeck naturalize aggressivity by making it the motivating characteris-
tic of the victims as well as the victors of competition.
This strategy is significant in part because it illustrates the kinds of re-
visions that could be made to the dominant liberal discourse about reform
during the 1930s, a discourse that emphasized the weakness of the poor.
The pathetic note struck by reformers is evident for instance in Roos-
evelt’s famous “forgotten man” speech. Of course, this pathetic appeal was
an improvement on nineteenth-century concepts of reform that stressed
the immorality and shamefulness of the poor, but the New Deal empha-
sis on weakness and the morality of helping the weak had problems that
emerged quite clearly during the 1930s. As letters written by recipients of
the dole to FDR indicate, while New Deal relief funds helped people sur-
vive physically, they also produced a less tangible sense of “emasculation,”
isolation, guilt, dependence, and resentment of relief workers’ maternal-
ism.16 Many of these problems (which are so much a part of contemporary
rhetoric on welfare reform) were widely in evidence by the late 1930s,
and it is partly in response to these psychic structures that Steinbeck and
Baird wrote. Their emphasis on the aggressivity of transient men might
well be taken as a challenge to the moral responsibility of the fit to care
for the weak unfit; their novels might be read as demonstrations of their
heroes’ actual fitness for economic survival. By emphasizing the aggressive
independence of the poor, Baird and Steinbeck shifted the metaphorical
ground underlying the discourse on relief.

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Nonetheless, while there is an activist or empowering element to

Baird and Steinbeck’s emphasis on aggressivity, we should still note that
theirs is a discourse that “saves” the “poor” transients by normalizing
them, by insisting on the identity of their interests and desires with those
of the dominant group. Predictably, certain tensions arise when such a
strategy is deployed, particularly in the representations of non-dominant
or less normalizable persons, such as working-class women. At these sites,
certain limits to the envisioned community become apparent. When we
look closely, we find that both novels create worlds in which only one
kind of woman is significant—the pretty, young tart. Although Baird’s
character Hazel is a more sympathetic one than Curley’s flirtatious wife,
in both novels the young single woman is a prize over which aggressive
males fight. In Of Mice and Men, Curley’s unnamed wife precipitates the
climax of the novel by teasing slow-witted Lenny with her beauty, and, in
Waste Heritage, Hazel’s desires conflict with those of Hep, the organizer,
causing several crises of conscience for Matt. The unifying theme here, as
Matt reflects when Hazel comes to visit him, is that women’s “presence
made war, intruded the natural into the disciplined unnatural, brought
with it forces at once savage and dividing” (WH 209). In these novels,
women endanger social relations because they force men into a narrative
of “natural” and competitive desire.
As numerous commentators on Steinbeck’s work have observed, this
is a very limiting and regressive ideology of gender; both novels clearly
imagine worlds in which women are witless as well as dangerous. Further-
more, the limited roles available to women are not the topic of the novels’
social critique. Neither Steinbeck nor Baird suggests that in a less aggres-
sive world women would play any other roles. On the contrary, in both
novels, we are asked to sympathize with the men’s entirely natural desire
for a family romance that marginalizes and objectifies women.
Of course, neither Baird nor Steinbeck is uniquely malicious in resort-
ing to this domestic ideal. In fact, even today few protests against home-
lessness manage to avoid making reference to the sanctity of the home,
the family, and associated gender roles. As Americans did during the New
Deal, we still tend to ignore or downplay the effect of homelessness on
women.17 Often we do not remember that we forget women, even while
we produce a pathos-ridden discourse about the specific exile of homeless
men. . . .

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One result of this scenario is that the domestic utopia at the heart of
both novels is all-male. Lenny and George repeatedly invoke their dream
of living together “off the fatta the land” on a little farm, and Matt wavers
between two versions of domesticity: one unlikely possibility with Hazel,
who wants a white-picket fence, and another, more promising one in the
union, which promises a home for all the men together. As in many 1930s
novels, the union is a source of security and unusual calm for Matt, and
it figures in Baird’s novel much the same inaccessible happiness that the
farm does in Of Mice and Men. It gives Matt direction and hope briefly,
although he does lose faith towards the end of the novel, just as George
loses his chance for the farm (WH 316–17).
These domestic utopias, then, belong more to the characters than to
the narrative, since the plots ensure their impossibility. Yet there is some
narrative investment in them, since both novels pit their domestic utopias
against the false consciousness of the mass media. Those “Western maga-
zines” in Of Mice and Men that “ranch men love to read and scoff at and
secretly believe” (OMM 17) are paralleled in Waste Heritage by the thrillers
and pornography that the trekkers regularly recommend to one another.
In neither novel are the secret beliefs which these materials encourage
spelled out, but in both we are asked to see mass culture as continuous
with the forces of aggression which the narrators criticize. The ideology
of the Westerns conforms to the aggressive individualism that divides
Steinbeck’s bunkhouse, and the cagey marketing of pornographic pictures
in Baird’s novel is consistently associated with divisive and destructively
individualistic characters. By contrast, the legitimate but impossible all-
male domestic utopias are relatively shielded from implication in the
world of the novel; their deferral outside the bounds of the novel guaran-
tees their utopian potential.
To summarize the argument so far, then, Steinbeck and Baird’s novels
both depict affective relations among men as an ideal—though a strained,
conflicted and repressed one; in so doing, both present a political alter-
native to discourses on masculinity, class and reform that were prevalent
during the 1930s. Although reformulating Communist and genteel char-
acterizations, neither novel’s depiction of transient men strays too far from
a version of liberalism that is still familiar today; in fact, these depictions
of the male couple simply push contemporaneous cultural productions
a little further. They are excessive extensions rather than utopian spaces

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outside the culture. Thus, it is my contention that, when we read these

relations among men back into the dominant metaphorics of the nation,
they present an interesting, relatively unexplored, possibility for rethink-
ing North American international relations. Consequently, it is to the
national context and reception of these novels that I now wish to turn.

Genre and National Culture

The depictions of transient men that John Steinbeck and Irene Baird
confronted in their fictions existed in their cultures in particular genres.
Thus, revising these depictions involved not only stating a difference in
political theory, but also modifying the genres associated with particular
political stances. Furthermore, since the trajectories of national cultures
had granted different genres different places in the United States and
Canada, Steinbeck and Baird were led to experiment with different generic
hybridizations to express similar political positions. That is, variations
in national culture influenced their depictions of a potentially trans- or
international ideal. Most prominent among the genres having different
political significance in the United States and Canada during the 1930s is
the sentimental novel.
In Steinbeck criticism, sentimentalism has been a controversial topic.
Because twentieth-century critical fashion has favored realism, allusive al-
legory and tragedy over sentimentalism, critics defending Steinbeck have
usually emphasized these elements of his writing. Only occasionally has
someone such as Desmond McCarthy claimed that Steinbeck’s tough guy
heroes present a sentimental view of human nature that is typically and
importantly American.18 For most, such an approach veers too close to
likening Steinbeck to mass cultural traditions; and, if such linkages were
to be made, critics have preferred to point to the slightly more respectable
(because less feminized) genre of hard-boiled detective fiction as a point
of comparison. For Steinbeck defenders, the main concern seems to have
been to isolate Steinbeck’s form of sentimental populism from versions of
reform based on mothering; . . .
In recent years, however, a growing body of scholarship on sentimen-
talism has challenged the assumption that led Steinbeck’s defenders to this
strategy. Following the work of Cathy Davidson, Jane Tompkins, Susan
Harris, Ann Douglas, and others, we can understand the sentimental

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novel as a genre which afforded marginalized writers and readers room

to recognize and educate one another.19 Its achievements and values were
decidedly popular, often in conscious rejection or recoding of high cultural
standards, and at times these populist formulas lent themselves to the open
expression of non-dominant ideologies, as in the case of Harriet Beecher
Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Of course, Stowe’s abolitionism came packaged
with paternalistic concepts of race, but it was in part her recognition of
contradictions between the ideologemes of Southern society as a collection
of families and Southern society as racial hierarchy that made her novel a
significant voice for reform.20 In short, it was precisely the formulaic na-
ture of the sentimental novel that allowed it to perform important cultural
work.
With this thesis in mind, we may find Steinbeck’s occasionally Mani-
chean moral vision, his provocation of pathos, his invocation of the family
and so on less of a liability than has previously been thought. These ele-
ments of his writing link Steinbeck to a tradition of sentimental protest
writing and, although they conflict with other elements of his philosophy
(such as his naturalist philosophizing), they suggest that, like sentimental
novelists, Steinbeck might be recoding contemporary standards into an
admittedly nostalgic but politically workable literary vocabulary. Since one
of the most controversial and notably modern literary genres of the period
in which Steinbeck wrote his trademark texts was the proletarian novel, it
may well be that Steinbeck conceived of Of Mice and Men as a variation on
this form. Certainly this was what a number of contemporary commenta-
tors took him to be doing.21
An interesting body of recent scholarship has argued that the pro-
letarian novel was not the single coherent genre that its Depression-era
proponents desired; instead, it took several variant forms—the collective
novel, the strike novel, the proletarian bildungsroman, the intellectual ro-
man à clef and so on.22 What all these variants had in common, though,
was a dialectic between their quasi-realist description of a particular com-
munity and quasi-utopian projection of future struggle and solidarity.
Very often, as Paula Rabinowitz argues, the problems involved in resolv-
ing this dialectic led writers to revert to nostalgic gender stereotypes. For
instance, although often undercut and rewritten, the figure of the good
mother was a common feature in writings in this genre.23 In other words,
in their efforts to politicize popular discourses, the proletarian novelists

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often found themselves entangled in some of the dated stereotypes also

employed by sentimental novelists of the mid-nineteenth century. These
sentimental tropes have been noticed by many readers of the proletarian
novel, but I mean to suggest that they may be read as performing certain
kinds of cultural work, much like that performed by the sentimental novel
proper.
Certainly, in this context, Steinbeck’s sentimentalism looks a little less
compromising. In Of Mice and Men we find him drawing explicitly on a
part of the sentimental formula usually downplayed by the proletarian
novelists—the marginal figure of the weak man, the sensitive man, the
domestic man, the kind of man described in Douglas’s The Feminization
of American Culture.24 Douglas argues that a major source of the sentimen-
tal novel was the institutionally disestablished clergy’s desire to solidify
their power by claiming the “heart” as their domain; hence, sentimental
fiction approved by the clergy often valorized the sensitive man. By de-
classing the so-called feminized men of the sentimental tradition and
placing them in social realist settings, Steinbeck fused modern elements
of the proletarian novel with a politically viable side of the sentimental
novel. In the process, he disrupts some of the oppositions (male/female,
private family/public work) that organized each genre. Furthermore, this
choice of disruptive strategy carries over into other features of Steinbeck’s
novel, and we might say that its most characteristic technique is a sort of
symbolic displacement.25 The central symbol of the novel shifts from the
mice of the title, to rabbits, to women, to beauty generally, to utopia, to
the “best laid plans” of which the Burns’s quotation referred to in the title
reminds us. The novel slides the reader along this chain of displacements,
breaking up the initial opposition between mice and men, just as it slides
us out of a strictly dualistic gender ideology and into a nebulous territory
where men might somehow care for one another.
By contrast, Irene Baird wrote in a context about which one contem-
porary commentator could proclaim “there is no proletarian fiction . . . in
Canada.”26 During the 1930s, Canadian writers seeking a revolutionary
literature were poets more often than they were novelists, and much of
their work involved variations on English modernist verse in the tradition
of Auden and Spender. The dominant mode of fiction in Canada at the
time was strongly sentimental and usually written by women. Occasion-
ally this writing took on a political agenda (as in the work of suffragette

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Nellie McClung), but on the whole the Canadian literary climate during
the 1930s was considerably less left-wing and more middlebrow than in
the U.S. It was, as one observer has asserted, “emphatically middling.”27
Middling here does not indicate the slippery disruptiveness of Steinbeck’s
text so much as an emphasis on reconciliation, on softening discrepancy
and lessening controversy.
In this environment, Baird’s efforts at documentary were an important
and original experiment, and these efforts are most visible in her rendering
of dialogue. Like the author figure in Waste Heritage, Baird seems to have
taken great pains to note the slang of the men she observed, and she takes
pleasure in reproducing it. In fact, sometimes her enthusiasm for certain
phrases, such as referring to a spell in jail as years in “college,” leads to
overuse of slang, as if the interest in language overtook the responsibility
to document social conditions. However, the overall impulse of the novel
is to substitute the focus on feeling and character typical of sentimentalism
with an emphasis on observation; although incompletely realized, Baird’s
documentary project authorizes her in the “man’s world” which, as I shall
explain further below, reviewers assumed she would not be able to repro-
duce through imagination.28
While noting the documentary effort, though, it is important to rec-
ognize how closely Waste Heritage adheres to the sentimental genre. The
novel continues a Biblical allegory from Baird’s first work, transparently
referring to Vancouver as Aschelon and Victoria as Gath. Similarly, Baird
names her characters allegorically; the labor activist hero, for instance,
is Matt Striker. Also, the novel peripatetically follows the events of the
strike; it borrows its structure from events, rather than progressing by a
logic produced by characterization or thematic development. Although
straining at certain points against sentimental structures, Baird ultimately
does not replace them. At one point, she even has her main character
reflect on the possible plotlessness of the novel, wondering whether his
relationship with Eddy is the only fragile thread holding his experiences
together. Such a fear points, I believe, to a desire to remain within recog-
nizable generic patterns.
From this reading, I conclude that Baird’s novel is a hybrid of sen-
timental and documentary impulses. Just as Steinbeck wrote against the
masculinist assumptions of certain versions of the proletarian novel, Baird
tried to supplement the gendered genre of the sentimental novel with doc-

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umentary observation. Each writer confronted a dyadic notion of gendered

genre and reworked it for his or her own purposes. Thus, the particular
history of gendered writing in each nation influenced each writer’s version
of the story of the transient male couple, but not completely. These texts
indicate national differences in gender/genre associations but also disrupt
that difference by pushing towards a common generic hybridization.
Unfortunately, this common project has been largely obscured by the
reception of these two novels. Although there is no evidence that Baird
was familiar with Steinbeck’s work, when Waste Heritage appeared in 1939,
reviewers immediately noticed the “impregnable, obscurely sentimental
relationship between two dispossessed men, one strong, the other weak”
at the heart of Baird and Steinbeck’s work. The major factor troubling
analogies between the two texts resulted from Baird’s gender; “I know of
no woman writer,” the Canadian reviewer continued, “who can write of
men alone and in a man’s world with any sustained credibility. Miss Baird
has tried harder than most but with very little more success.”29 Reviewers
in the United States agreed; they found the novel to be “strongly under the
influence of Steinbeck” and called it “a Canadian Grapes of Wrath.” The
common conclusion was that, within a difference attributed to gender,
Waste Heritage did “for the migratory workers of British Columbia what
the stories of John Steinbeck have done for the migratory workers of the
Pacific Coast.”30 Clearly, the terms of our discussion were laid out early;
in the 1930s, Baird’s novel was read as typically feminine and typically
Canadian in its efforts to portray life among transient men with borrowed
tropes.
This tendency to read the texts allegorically has if anything increased
with time. In an essay originally written in the 1950s, Robert MacDougall
saw Baird’s novel as evidence that Canadian writers as a group could ex-
hibit class consciousness, while literary histories written during the 1960s
stressed Baird’s “imitativeness” and extrapolated from that point to gen-
eralizations about a Canadian resistance to realist fiction during the inter-
war period. After Baird’s novel was reprinted by the Laurentian library in
1973, historian Michiel Horn found the novel’s style less significant than
its politics, which he took to be illustrative of the debates over Canadian
relief camps during the 1930s. The well-known Canadian cultural nation-
alist, Robin Mathews read Baird’s novel as an allegory for class struggle
and compares it to what he sees as the relatively class-bound orientation

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CAREN IRR

of Steinbeck’s fictions and American fiction generally. Similarly, Roger

Hyman also compares Baird’s novel favorably to Steinbeck’s, finding its
didactic elements “representative of a peculiar particularity in the Cana-
dian experience.” Some years later, Anthony Hopkins found the novel’s
aimlessness an effect of the “attack of mass society upon the characters’
essential humanity.” In short, although the allegorical referents varied,
the desire to read Baird’s novel as a microcosm of the national literary
condition was a common one; comparisons to Steinbeck’s work provided
opportunities for differentiating between national cultures—generally on
the grounds of opposition.
This tendency for reviewers to recast the male-male relationships de-
scribed in Baird and Steinbeck’s fictions into a dyadic model of differences
between genders and nations reintroduces the larger dynamics that are our
overarching concern. Most commentators on these texts have attempted
to recode the homo-social relationships into the gendered vocabulary used
to describe relations between national cultures. As a result, these texts
have become not only representations of their cultures but also emblems
of those cultures. It is as emblems of U.S.-Canadian relations, however,
that Baird and Steinbeck’s texts can also serve to dislocate the gender-
nation metaphor. From their novels, I have suggested, we can discern
features of U.S.-Canadian relations other than opposition. First of all,
the relationship is clearly asymmetrical. Discussion of Waste Heritage and
Of Mice and Men as paired texts is a feature only of Baird criticism, not of
Steinbeck criticism. The Steinbeck text is a reference point for discussions
of Baird, much as the United States is a reference point for discussions of
Canadian culture, but the situation is not reversible. Discussions of U.S.
culture or multiculturalism call on comparisons to Canada just as rarely as
discussions of Steinbeck call on Baird’s text. Secondly, it is not simply the
case that the United States habitually ignores Canada; it is also important
that U.S. disinterest leads to a certain over-investment on the part of
Canadian intellectuals in the problem of differentiating Canada from the
U.S. Much as Baird critics work overtime in defense of Baird’s singular
achievements, Canadian cultural commentators, it has been argued, tend
to overemphasize the “special relationship” between the United States
and Canada—a relationship that is, arguably, not much different from
that the United States holds with other so-called middle powers. The
asymmetry of power in U.S.-Canadian relations results in the relationship

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 QUEER BORDERS

being eclipsed or polarized, depending on your national point of view, and

eclipsing and polarization are two sides of the same coin.
The point here has not been to urge the adoption of one strategy
or national viewpoint over another; instead, my goal has been to reflect
upon the relationship as a psychodynamic structure. This relationship—
between a dominant culture which recognizes no boundaries or differ-
ences outside Itself and a marginal one which insists defensively on its
own non-absorption into the dominant orbit—is structurally similar to
the relationships described in the novels we have been considering and,
more generally, to relationships examined in queer theory. In the next
section, I will briefly sketch the theses of recent queer theory in hopes
that the vocabulary provided there will be of use in our efforts to shift
the terms of discussion from the difference-based gendered metaphor for
U.S.-Canadian relations to one that focuses more clearly on power or, at
least, one that can account for asymmetry and doubled strategies.

Theorizing Queer Borders

The central feature of both Baird and Steinbeck’s texts, I have argued,
is a male couple that represents possibilities for social organization other
than those commonly recognized since the 1930s. The texts pair men of
disparate sizes and capacities, and the denouements of both novels show
that neither partner entirely controls the relationship. In both cases, the
strength of the larger partner is something of a threat to the smaller one,
while the intelligence of the smaller partner is not sufficient to save his
larger friend from death at the hands of his fellow citizens. The relation-
ship is asymmetrical in that one partner takes the leading role in most
stations, but power does not flow entirely in one direction. It is possible
to underestimate this bipolar aspect to the central relationship because
in both cases the narratives report the thoughts of the dominant partner
most closely, but nonetheless the sheer physical presence of the larger,
slower partner remains a crucial factor in each story.
Naming and asserting the cultural centrality of just this kind of
unequal, bipolar relationship has, in recent years, become the business
of queer theory. Following Foucault’s work on the history of sexuality,
a number of scholars have concerned themselves with tracing the path
by which a homosexual identity emerged in the nineteenth century out

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of an array of less fixed relations characteristic of earlier periods. After

that emergence, subsequent shifts led to the articulation of gay and queer
positions as well. An important feature of queer theory has been the
insistence that the significance of homosexuality was not generated en-
tirely from within the same-sex community, but rather was continuously
produced in relation to an array of political and policing strategies. The
result of this thesis is a recognition that questions of sexuality are always
already in contact and, often, in conflict with hegemonic discourses
about identity, subjectivity, normality and nationality. Fueled by the
aggressive publicity of the campaigns for AIDS awareness and funding,
1990s queers like 1930s transients have challenged the whole matter of
the privacy of suffering. Drawing attention to the influence that actions
of the state and medical professions have on sexual practices, queers have
also attempted to reverse the terms and make public assertions of queer-
ness politically potent. The street chant “We’re here, we’re queer, and we
don’t like the government” might exemplify this dynamic; in such state-
ments, publicly asserting a collective queer identity becomes continuous
with asserting a critique of standing relations of power. The very fact
of standing in the streets and asserting the presence of an identity that
official powers seek to ignore becomes coterminous with demanding a
rearrangement of power. As a political strategy, this assertion of presence
is not unlike the sit-down strike described in Baird’s novel. Queers, like
the unemployed, have made the assertion of our/their physical presence
the first step in wresting power from a hegemonic power structure that
does not recognize us/them. Like Baird and Steinbeck, then, queer theo-
rists describe relations between two disproportionately empowered but
intimately linked entities.
At the same time that theorists and activists understand queerness
as commonly and inherently critical of the homogeneous powers that be,
a complementary emphasis has fallen on the plurality and proliferation
of forms of sexuality. Understanding queerness as a negation of extant
categories of sexuality, activists and theorists such as Judith Butler have
stressed the non-categorical nature of queerness itself.33 It is often asserted
that there is no single identity, no single style, position, mode of address
or behavior which counts as queer; in theory, no generic norm is being
referenced via queerness. Like unemployment or transience then, queer-
ness is supposedly ironic, marginal, and non-normative.

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 QUEER BORDERS

However, as organizers among the unemployed as well as Canadi-

anists have often found, consolidating political power around an ironic
position presents certain difficulties. Normative identities and narratives
have so much power that figures on the margin who define themselves in
negation to the normative are rarely free from partial integration into the
normative. And, sometimes, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish parody
from reinvention of the norm from which one seeks liberation. This has
especially been the case with the category of M. nation. In the early 1990s,
ACT UP! spawned a brief-lived but dramatically confrontational spin-off
movement called Queer Nation. In a series of image-smart gestures and
performances, Queer Nation sought to recapture the conceptual space
of the nation for its own Utopian counter-cultural purposes, and ironic
recreations of the festivities and representations of the nation were its
primary tools.
As a result, among other questions raised about the viability of a
politics based in irony is the provoctive theory that some forms of queer
activism may be structurally similar to nationalism. Although critical of
the separatist elements of gay and lesbian projects that focused on the nur-
turing of an isolated community within the nation, and although ironic
vis-à-vis the nation in projects such as Queer Nation, certain tendencies
associated with the queer community do remind some observers of a na-
tion. The queer community is an imagined community that generates
a narrative of rebellion and strength, and, despite protestations to the
obverse, it does have insides and outsides, as the controversy over straight
queers demonstrates. Also, within the bounds of queer nationalism, a
commitment unto death applies, as does a kind of “militancy”—although
it is certainly a stretch to analogize the tactics of ACT UP! and, say, the
United States military’s antics during the Persian Gulf War. Nonetheless,
we might ask whether queer positions run the risk of collapsing polyvocal
asymmetry into one-directional homogeneity, as the category of the na-
tion seems to do. Whichever answer we give, this question suggests that
the structure of queer and national identities are potentially isomorphic
and will likely seem more so when a specific history of their emergence is
considered.
With these caveats in mind, then, I want to stress the ways in which
elements of queer theory can help us to think about the problem, not of
national identity, but of international relations. It seems to me that the

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CAREN IRR

stress in queer theory on the performative aspects of gendered and sexual

relations—such that any situation of gender-specific behavior implicitly
cites a retroactive norm, even when it is disrupting that norm—also
describes the logic of U.S.-Canadian relations. Much as Baird’s Matt/
Eddy relationship seems to cite Steinbeck’s George/Lenny relationship,
articulations of U.S.-Canadian relations in any particular moment in time
cite some history, some prior moment of the relationship which is being
continued or changed. This, in fact, is why metaphors are used to describe
international relations. The introduction of metaphors, such as courtship,
for relations between nations places these relations into normative narra-
tives that suggest certain origins and outcomes.
What I hope is that, by locating a possible metaphor for U.S.-
Canadian relations articulated in a period at odds in many respects with
the present, we have shifted this narrative about the past and future from
the limited options of a heterosexual union and revealed a wider array
of narrative components. By recalling the proto-queer relationships de-
scribed in and figured by Baird and Steinbeck’s texts, we might at least
have provided ourselves with an alternate set of citable norms. Certainly
today in light of NAFTA and the emergence of transnational corpora-
tions and global migrations associated with such trading practices, it
seems important to develop descriptions that can admit of triangulation,
variation, and open-endedness—options that exceed the dyadic “special
relationship” so often cited by North American politicians. I hope that the
shift I have proposed from a masculine-feminine to a queer metaphor for
understanding U.S.-Canadian relations might contribute to our ability to
describe the polymorphous, trans-national culture into which we currently
find ourselves backstepping.

Notes
Portions of this paper were presented at the Modern Language Association in
December 1994 and the American Studies Association in October 1995. I would
like to thank Jeffrey Nealon, Susan Harris, and the anonymous reviewers for their
helpful suggestions.

1. Margaret Atwood, “On Being Canadian,” in The Facts on Free Trade, ed.
Ed Finn (Ottawa: Lorimer, 1988), 13–14.

180
 QUEER BORDERS

2. William G. Watson, “The Draft Agreement: Cohabitation Worth a Try,”

in Canadian-American Free Trade (The Sequel): Historical, Political and Economic
Dimensions, ed. A. R. Riggs and Tom Velk, 57–67 (South Halifax, NS: Institute
for Research on Public Policy, 1988); Richard Lipsey, Canada at the U.S.-Mexico
Free Trade Dance: Wallflower or Partner? (Toronto: C. D. Howe Institute, 1990).
Watson mentions “intercourse.”
3. Susanne Lotbinière-Harwood, “The Body Bilingual,” in canadas, ed.
Jordan Zinovich, 279–85 (New York: Autonomedia, 1994); Marie Ann Hart
Baker, “Gotta Be on Top: Why the Missionary Position Fails to Excite Me,” in
Zinovich, canadas, 303–5.
4. Thomas Haig, “Not Just Some Sexless Queen: A Note on ‘Kids in the
Hall’ and the Queerness of Canada,” in Zinovich, canadas, 229.
5. On periodization of U.S.-Canadian relations, see John Herd Thompson
and Stephen Randall, United States and Canada: Ambivalent Allies (Athens: Uni-
versity of Georgia Press, 1994), 77. On cultural imperialism, see Isaiah Litvak
and Christopher Maule, Cultural Sovereignity: The Time and Reader’s Digest
Case in Canada (New York: Praeger, 1974), and Maria Tippett, Making Culture:
English-Canadian Institutions and the Arts before the Massey Commission (To-
ronoto: University of Toronto, 1990).
6. Robert S. McElvaine, The Great Depression, America 1929–1941 (New
York: Crown, 1993), 179–84.
7. So argue interviewees in Studs Terkel’s Hard Times: An Oral History of
the Great Depression (New York: Pantheon, 1970), 213–35. See also Robin D.
G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 1–10.
8. Morley Callaghan, editorial, New Frontier: A Monthly Magazine of Litera-
ture and Social Criticism (April 1936), n.p.
9. John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Man (1937; New York: Penguin Modern Clas-
sics, 1993); Irene Baird, Waste Heritage (1939; Toronto: Macmillan, 1974). Further
references to these texts will be cited as OMM and WH, respectively, in the text.
10. This is Fredric Jameson’s thesis in Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis,
Modernist as Fascist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). Jameson’s
thesis is adapted by Tony Pinkney in D. H. Lawrence and Modernism (Iowa City:
University of Iowa Press, 1990), and modified and greatly expanded by Eve Sedg-
wick in Between Men (New York: Columbia, 1985) and The Epistemology of the
Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); for a particularly insightful
reading of Horatio Alger, see also Michael Moon’s “‘The Gentle Boy from the
Dangerous Classes’: Pederasty, Domesticity, and Capitalism in Horatio Alger,”
Representations 19 (Summer 1987): 87–110.

181
CAREN IRR

11. Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Crite-
rion, 1960).
12. For an influential discussion of the male couple as site of critique and
reinscription, see Sedgwick, Between Men, 201–18.
13. Barbara Melosh, Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New
Deal Public Art and Theatre (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press,
1991).
14. For example, see Mike Gold, Jews without Money (1930; New York: Avon,
1965) and “Wilder: Prophet of the Genteel Christ,” in Years of Protest: A Col-
lection of American Writings of the 1930’s, ed. Jack Salzman, 233–38 (New York:
Pegasus, 1967). See also Paula Rabinowitz’s discussion of homophobia in Labor
and Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 22. We
might also recall scenes from the Joe Williams narrative in Dos Passos’ U.S.A.
(1930; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), which contrast working-class male
virility to the behavior of decadent queens.
15. In Fielding Burke’s Call Home the Heart (1932; New Brunswick, NJ:
Feminist Press, 1983) a similar climax occurs when a black and white woman
embrace at the end of the novel; in Nathanael West’s A Cool Million (1934; New
York: Farrar, Strauss Giroux, 1988), the hero’s experiences as a male prostitute
serve as reminders of both the commodification of the body and of the pleasures
of that commodification.
16. See McElvaine, Great Depression, 170–95. On nineteenth-century dis-
courses of reform, see Dennis Guest, The Emergence of the Social Security in
Canada (Vancouver: UBC, 1985), chap. 1.
17. Contemporary discussions of homeless women usually focus on their role
as mothers; see Barry Jay Seltser and Donald E. Miller, Homeless Families: The
Struggle for Dignity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993) and H. Peter
Oberlander and Arthur L. Fallick, Homelessness and the Homeless: Responses and
Innovations, A Canadian Contribution to IYSH 1987 (Vancouver: UBC, 1988).
Joan M. Crouse points out that it is difficult to estimate the actual number of
homeless women during the Depression, since the policy in U.S. relief camps was
to return transient women to their home state; not surprisingly, women avoided
these camps and were under-counted. See The Homeless Transient in the Great
Depression: New York State, 1929–1941 (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1986), 191.
18. Desmond McCarthy, “The American View of Human Nature,” The New
Statesman and Nation 17 (22 April 1939): 605–6.
19. Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1986); Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs (New York: Oxford, 1985);
Susan Harris, Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Novels: Interpretive Strate-

182
 QUEER BORDERS

gies (New York: Cambridge, 1990); Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American
Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977).
20. Arthur Riss argues in “Racial Essentialism and Family Values in Uncle
Tom’s Cabin,” American Quarterly 46 (December 1994): 513–44.
21. This was Mike Gold’s view. In The Hollow Men (New York: International
Publishers, 1941), he names Steinbeck and Richard Wright as the two major
proletarian novelists of the 1930s.
22. See Barbara Foley, Radical Representations (Durham, NC: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 1993); Rabinowitz, Labor and Desire; James Murphy, The Proletarian
Moment (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991).
23. See Rabinowitz’s discussion of the “Great Mother” in Labor and Desire,
97–136.
24. Although Douglas’ thesis has been criticized by many feminist scholars
of sentimentalism, I consider her discussion of the utility of sentimentalism for
men an important contribution. See Douglas, Feminization of American Culture,
17–49.
25. Peter Lisca describes the action of the novel as a process of displacement
in “Motif and Pattern in Of Mice and Men,” Modern Fiction Studies 2 (Winter
1956–1957): 228–34.
26. Ruth McKenzie, “Proletarian Literature in Canada,” Dalhousie Review 19
(April 1939): 39–64.
27. For instance, one of the most popular Canadien romance novelists of
the period was Mazo de la Roche, whose Jalna series is a family romance. We
should not underestimate the liberating possibilities of this kind of middlebrow
fiction, however; as Roche’s biographer Joan Givner demonstrates in her Mazo
de la Roche: The Hidden Life (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1989). Roche’s
particular blend of sentimental and gothic fiction allowed her to give literary ex-
pression to her lesbian desires in a period and culture which, to understate, were
not friendly to gay people. The phrase “emphatically middling” is Lee Briscoe
Thompson’s in “Emphatically Middling: A Critical Examination of Canadian
Poetry in the Great Depression” (Ph.D. diss., Queen’s University, 1975).
28. Margaret Wallace, “Labor on the March,” New Republic (20 December
1939): 121.
29. Eleanor Godfrey, Review of Waste Heritage by Irene Baird, Canadian
Forum (February 1940): 364.
30. Harold Strauss, “‘Waste Heritage’ and Other New Works of Fiction,” re-
view of Waste Heritage by Irene Baird, New York Times Book Review, 10 Decem-
ber 1939, 7; review of Waste Heritage by Irene Baird, New Yorker, 16 December
1939, 101–2; Margaret Wallace, “Labor on the March,” review of Waste Heritage
by Irene Baird, Saturday Review of Literature, 16 December 1939, 7.

183
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31. Robert L. McDougall, “The Dodo and the Cruising Auk: Class in Cana-
dian Literature,” in Contexts in Canadian Criticism, ed. Eli Mandel, 216–31 (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1971). Literary historical accounts include
W. H. New, Literary History of Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1990), 155. In the influential Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in
English (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), ed. Carl F. Klinck, we find
F. W. Watt noting in passing (in “Literature of Protest,” 457–73) that the “direct
and savagely indignant protests of Irene Baird’s Waste Heritage (1939) have no
doubt permanently given way to the subtler and more profound probings and
ironies of works like Gabrielle Roy’s The Tin Flute and Hugh MacLennan’s The
Watch That Ends the Night” (472). In the same volume, Desmond Pacey (in “Fic-
tion 1920–1940,” 658–93) says Waste Heritage “succeeds very well in evoking the
mass fury which resulted from long years of unemployment and frustration” but
charges that it “suffers somewhat, however, from its imitativeness” (688). Robin
Mathews, “Waste Heritage: The Effects of Class on Literary Structure,” Studies
in Canadian Literature 6 (Spring 1981): 65–81; Roger Leslie Hyman, “Wasted
Heritage and Waste Heritage,” Journal of Canadian Studies 17 (Winter 1982):
74–87; Anthony Hopkins, “Structure and Thematic Vision in Waste Heritage,”
Studies in Canadian Literature 11 (Spring 1986): 77–85.
32. This is Thompson and Randall’s thesis in the epilogue to United States
and Canada.
33. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993).
34. Lauren Berlant and Elizabeth Freeman, “Queer Nationality: The Political
Logic of Queer Nation and Gay Activism,” Boundary 2, no. 19 (Spring 1992):
149–80.
35. See Biddy Martin, “Sexualities without Genders and Other Queer
Utopias,” Diacritics 24 (Summer–Fall 1994): 104–21; Simon Watney, “Queer
Epistemology—Activism, Outing, and the Politics of Sexual Identities,” Critical
Quarterly 36 (Spring 1994): 13–27.
36. Lisa Duggan, “Making It Perfectly Queer,” Socialist Review 22 (January–
March 1992): 11–31.

184
 Part Six
SINCE 2000

W
hile the 1990s saw an interest in analyzing the novel mainly
on the basis of gender and feminist points of view, the twenty-
first-century critics not only revisited earlier contentions about
the novel (see Marilyn Chandler McEntyre’s expansion of William Gold-
hurst’s 1971 study of Cain and Abel imagery in the novel and Mimi Reisel
Gladstein’s analysis of the different portrayals of the feminine in the three
movie versions of the novel), but also attempted approaches to Of Mice and
Men that heretofore had not been explored. For example, fiction writer
Charles Johnson (The Middle Passage, Oxherding Tale) became one of the
first critics to look at the racial issues at play in Steinbeck’s portrayal of
Crooks, the Negro stable buck. Johnson’s keynote address at the Steinbeck
Congress held at Sun Valley, Idaho, in 2006, addresses how Steinbeck
saw racial division despite an apparent class equality (Crooks’s family at
one time owned a small homestead in the area). Johnson also foregrounds
the threat of physical violence to African Americans and the frequency of
lynching threats as a way to keep the black man “in his place.” By noting the
speech of Curley’s wife, Johnson’s unique perspective stresses the fact that
white dominance and privilege was widely accepted during the late 1930s.
A similar original approach is found in the last essay written by Louis
Owens before his untimely suicide in 2002. In his study, Owens places the
issue of eugenics in the spotlight as a central concern of Steinbeck in Of
Mice and Men and posits that the author’s use of the German gun image
(Carlson’s Lugar) indicates that Steinbeck was keenly aware of the tenets of
Adolph Hitler and his Third Reich government regarding the development

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PART SIX

of a master race. Owens suggests that Steinbeck addresses the fascist advo-
cacy of the extermination of the weak, incompetent, and the racially impure
individuals in several episodes of the novel including the drowning of the
puppies by Slim, the execution of Candy’s old sheep dog by Carlson, and
the closing murder of Lennie by George. The latter event is especially por-
trayed as acceptable in George’s recognition that, due to Curley’s need for
revenge. Lennie’s future fate could only be death at the end of the rope. The
question of eugenics as a valid concern of Steinbeck has also been raised in
the criticism of Kevin Hearle, whose article “These Are American People:
The Spectre of Eugenics in Their Blood Is Strong and The Grapes of Wrath,”
appeared in 2002 in Beyond Boundaries: Re-Reading John Steinbeck, edited
by Hearle and Susan Shillinglaw, pages 243–54 (Tuscaloosa: University of
Alabama Press).

Other Significant Studies Published since 2000

Cantor, Gary. “Crooks: Steinbeck’s Illuminizing Victim.” Steinbeck Studies of
Japan 31 (May 2008): 33–41.
Cardullo, Bert. “On the Road to Tragedy: Mice, Candy, and Land in Of Mice and
Men.” American Drama 16.1 (Winter 2007): 19–29.
Cedarstrom, Lorelei. “Beyond the Boundaries of Sexism: The Archetypal
Feminine versus Anima Women in Steinbeck’s Novels.” In Beyond Bound-
aries: Re-Reading John Steinbeck. ed. Susan Shillinglaw and Kevin Hearle,
189–204. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002.
Doyle, Brian L. “Tragedy and the Non-Teleological in Of Mice and Men.” Stein-
beck Review and Steinbeck Studies 3(2) (Fall 2006): 79–86.
Fahy, Thomas. “Worn Damaged Bodies in the Literature and Photography of
the 1930’s.” Journal of American Culture 26(1) (March 2003): 2–16.
Hart, Richard. “Moral Experience in Of Mice and Men: Challenges and Reflec-
tion.” In The Moral Philosophy of John Steinbeck, ed. Stephen K. George,
61–71. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2005.
Meyer, Michael J. Cain Sign: The Betrayal of Brotherhood in the Work of John Stein-
beck. Troy, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2002.
Contains Marilyn McEntyre, “Of Mice and Men: A Story of Innocence
Retained,” 202–22.
Simmonds, Roy. “Of Mice and Men and (Perhaps) Other Things.” In John Steinbeck:
A Centennial Tribute, ed. Stephen K. George. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002.
Takahira, Yuki. “Movie Adaptations of Of Mice and Men: 1939 and 1992.” Stein-
beck Studies of Japan 31 (May 2008): 42–51.

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 CHAPTER FOURTEEN
OF MICE AND MEN:
A STORY OF INNOCENCE RETAINED
Marilyn Chandler McEntyre

T
hough not derived as directly from the story of Cain and Abel as
East of Eden, and certainly not as ambitious as that novel in its
attempts to explore the ramifications of the ancient tale, Of Mice
and Men is still, in its way, a compelling invitation to revisit the biblical
myth and recast its significance in new terms. The bevy of critics who have
dismissed this small “play-novelette” as one of Steinbeck’s lesser works if
not failures, calling it exaggerated, mechanical, woodenly allegorical, and
melodramatically parabolic, may have failed fully to appreciate the lasting
power of allegory and parable even for the presumed audience of post-
Freudian, post-Joycean readers.1
The apparent simplicity of this stark little tragedy (a term some think
carries more weight than the tale can bear) belies the magnitude and com-
plexity of the moral questions it raises. Roughly speaking, those questions
are riddles of discernment: when is “evil” not really evil and “good” not
really good? When do those “conditions which look alike” deceive us into
false judgment? How do we know the good when it can look so like evil?
Like the theologians and folklorists who transfer the logic of “felix culpa” to
Eve’s disobedience and proclaim it the first act of self-liberation, Steinbeck,
along with a number of other modern writers, offers a revisionist perspec-
tive on Cain’s story, attempting to understand this dark “hero” in terms of

Previously published in Cain Sign: The Betrayal of Brotherhood in The Work of John
Steinbeck, ed. Michael J. Meyer, 202–22. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2000. Used by
permission.

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MARILYN CHANDLER McENTYRE

his willingness to accept the burden of consciousness, and ultimately the

responsibility for murder in the effort to be his brother’s keeper.
The situation of George, the “Cain” figure in this novel, is that of
anyone limited by the dependencies of a weaker partner and wondering
why the “virtue” of innocence seems so often to thrust moral and practi-
cal responsibility upon the one who consents to the fall into experience.
Surely one of the questions the story raises is how much responsibility one
can take for another human being. Getting the right relationship between
independence, dependence, and interdependence has been a particularly
vexing matter in American culture where the social contracts of family
and friendship have been so variously and loosely construed, especially in
marginal subcultures like that of the itinerant farm workers in this novel.
To recast Cain and Abel as George and Lennie, dispossessed sur-
vivors of an inequitable economic system, bound by a common vision
of family life and shared labor, protector and protected and, humanly
speaking, each other’s raison d’être, is to clothe the old tale not only with
poignancy and pathos but also with an audacious and uncomfortable im-
mediacy. It is also to reframe our most basic hypotheses about that tale:
What if Abel’s gentleness were in fact weakness of mind or body? What
if Cain’s question to God could be read not as a rhetorical gesture of defi-
ance, but as a cry of anguish wrung from a frustrated elder brother whose
patience with the younger has been worn to the last thread? What if there
are legitimate alternative readings to this moral tale? How shall we travel
the forked path it maps?
In its framework of moral paradox, the story teaches us to reckon
with the shadow. To empathize with Cain is to reevaluate what we call
evil. To see the consequences of Lennie’s “innocence” is to reconsider
“things done ill, or done to others’ harm / which once you took for exer-
cise of virtue.”2 It is to complicate the idea of childlike innocence with a
certain informed skepticism that says neither children nor those we call
“innocents” are free of guile. Thus in the opening scene, when George
catches Lennie with a dead mouse in his hand, Lennie makes “an elabo-
rate pantomime of innocence,” protesting transparently, “What mouse,
George? I ain’t got no mouse.” George replies coldly, “You gonna give
me that mouse or do I have to sock you?”(8)3 The themes of innocence
and violence are introduced and complicated here at one stroke. Lennie
is indeed an “innocent,” and also, like a child, manipulative and schem-

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ing in his own limited way. George’s violence already has to be seen in
the context of his taking responsibility, being the one to see the larger
picture, to foresee consequences and to control Lennie’s behavior for
their mutual welfare.
Critics have attacked Steinbeck’s relegation of the Abel role to a char-
acter who, being feeble-minded, cannot be assigned moral responsibility
and so cannot bear the moral weight of his role in this drama of justice and
mercy. This particular twist on the figure of the “innocent man,” however,
compels the reader to identify closely with the slayer of the innocent, to
participate in his predicament, and to raise a troubling question about the
economy of guilt: one man’s innocence may require another man’s guilt.
To preserve innocence is costly, and finally undesirable. The fall requires
humans to come into consciousness, and therefore into conscience, to
experience guilt, and thereby be pointed toward redemption. Those who
are willing to assume the moral responsibility of full participation in the
muddy and ambiguous human condition, to be soiled and sinful, and to
wrestle with intolerable ambiguities, emerge into a moral maturity unat-
tainable by the “pure.” The difference between becoming like a little child
and remaining like one is vast. The first is an apotheosis of wisdom; the
second either an infirmity or an abdication.
Purity is an old American theme, hardly peculiar to American cul-
ture, but certainly an abiding theme in literature and an axis of the moral
reasoning that characterizes collective self-definition and public debate.4
Every generation has needed its literary and political prophets to remind
them that the pure in spirit may be blessed, but purists are dangerous, and
a simplistic pursuit or valorization of purity is a kind of moral retardation,
if not willful ignorance. When not willful—when it is, as in Lennie’s case,
an infirmity—it still exacts a cost; someone has to take on the burden of
practical decision-making and planning that is required to carve out a
place on earth to call home. And to do that, one must enter into compro-
mising negotiation with world, flesh, and devil.
This was Cain’s enterprise. A farmer and tiller of soil, whose name
means “possession,” he is indicted, among other things, for reducing the
gifts of God to the terms of human economy, for presuming to own the
land, and later for founding and investing his hope in the earthly city. The
builders of the Tower of Babel are referred to as Cain’s descendants—those
who sought to secure and solidify their own base of power, literally to

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monumentalize it and fix it for all time, and by imperializing the territory
between earth and heaven, to stake a final claim to the things of this earth
and seek salvation in them rather than in the promises of their God.
This theme of presumption, brought into the twentieth century and
placed in the framework of American capitalism, where private property
is an index of success and independence, becomes both more personal
and more problematic for modern readers. The Cain and Abel story is
about a zero-sum economy, in which the success of one implies the di-
minishment or failure of the other. Thus the first murder is predicated
not only on an illegitimate seizure of power over life and death, but also
on a radical reduction of divine economy to human terms. Rather than
returning to God to understand the terms of acceptable sacrifice, and
being willing to seek what would please Him, Cain seeks instead to
eliminate the offense of comparison by eliminating the foil that defines
him as a failure. For George to dream of “making a stake” so he and
Lennie can have their “little place” hardly seems culpable, based though
it is on the very notions of private property, possession, ownership, and
exclusion that relate capitalism to the sin of Cain. But for Steinbeck to
make explicit that relationship between capitalistic pursuit of self-interest
and the original crime of murder is to hack at one of the thickest roots
of American culture.
Post-industrial capitalism as a framework of social and therefore
moral life has forced society to reassess the terms in which it thinks about
sin, guilt, and goodness. The erosion of family ties and therefore of the old
tribal ethics of filial piety and fraternal loyalty has made the social contract
more ambiguous. It is less clear now than it once was in what way we are
our brothers’ keepers, who, indeed, are our “brothers,” what we may ex-
pect to give and receive, what are the terms of communal life, and how to
do good in a system whose evils continue to implicate us all in erosion of
intimate life, secularization of social life, and loss of moral direction.
One of the deepest motives in great literature of all ages, and, in a
particular way, in modern literature since Faust’s Mephistopheles and By-
ron’s brooding heroes, has been to seek ways to reframe moral questions
that move us beyond simplistic application of the categories of good and
evil into a larger awareness of how, in human life and the human psyche,
good and evil are deeply and interdependently entangled—how we live in
a realm where blacks and whites turn grey.

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The Cain and Abel story provides a useful vehicle for this kind of
moral reassessment, precisely because it is predicated on strong du-
alities and polarities. Polarities, carefully considered, lead us to paradox.
Extremes of any human attribute tend to point to and often generate
their opposites. So Steinbeck, among numerous other nineteenth- and
twentieth-century novelists and playwrights, returned to that story as an
appropriate paradigm for examining the moral complexities of the time.
His experiments with the Cain-Abel motif invite readers to consider
how opposites may be related, and how “conditions that look alike” may
contradict themselves. In Lennie, the half-wit, we have to consider the
relationship between innocence and vacuity; in George, his protector and
murderer, between cruelty and kindness. In the obvious and extreme op-
positions between them we are finally led to contemplate what is the bond
that unites them and, indeed, in what sense they are not simply opposites
but also doubles, whose deep similarities belie their differences. Superfi-
cially, the differences are archetypal:

The first man was small and quick, dark of face, with restless eyes and
sharp, strong features. Every part of him was defined: small, strong
hands, slender arms, a thin and bony nose. Behind him walked his op-
posite, 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. His arms did not swing at his sides, but hung
loosely. (2)

The sharp physical differences: small and dark, big and fair, sharp
human intelligence posed against animal-like dumbness—suggest larger
contrasts: dark and light, aggression and submission, movement and sta-
sis, and finally life and death.
Indeed, Lennie costs George a great deal in life energy. George expe-
riences his caretaking of Lennie as a sysyphean task: “I ain’t got nothing
to do. Might jus’ as well spen’ al my time tellin’ you things and then you
forget ’em, and I tell you again” (4). He is controller, instructor, protec-
tor. He carries Lennie’s work card and bus ticket for him, undertakes to
foresee the trouble he might cause and prevent it, commits himself to
second-guessing Lennie’s purposes and behavior as watchful parents do
recalcitrant children. George talks; Lennie acts. George has to engage in
careful manipulation to secure the field of action in which he can act—to

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MARILYN CHANDLER McENTYRE

get them hired so the boss can see Lennie work. Once that is done, Len-
nie may be proven to be the better worker. “You jus’ stand there and don’t
say nothing,” George tells his charge. “If he finds out what a crazy bastard
you are, we won’t get no job, but if he sees ya work before he hears ya talk,
we’re set. Ya got that?” (6)
Thus the theme of the “acceptable sacrifice” is refocused in such a
way as to lead us to consider the sacrifice or contribution required of one
partner to enable the work of the other to receive due regard. George’s
reiteration to the boss that Lennie is the better worker, weak of mind,
but exceptionally capable of performing the work he’s being hired to do,
directs the boss’s attention to the goodness of the offering and prevents
Lennie from being judged in the wrong terms. Consequently, the weaker
brother has the means to please the “father” even though the gifts of the
stronger, which ultimately seem to count for little, are necessary to the
welfare of the weaker.
George, as itinerant ranch hand and caretaker of a retarded adult de-
pendent, is caught in a fate that has little to do with the ideals of indepen-
dence and self-determination that so deeply inform national mythology.
He raises an old, old question that precedes and transcends our endless
declarations of independence: how to be good in a bad world where vio-
lence begets violence and innocence itself is both dangerous and destruc-
tive, and where no human action may be fully undertaken or understood
outside the context of community life. The moral categories that can so
conveniently be appropriated to allow us to pass judgment on an individ-
ual’s sins are challenged in this story which forces us to regard “sin” in
systemic terms and individual acts of “evil” as mitigated by the constraints
of economic and social oppression. Thus, though George must in some
way be regarded as responsible for Lennie’s murder, that responsibility is
so modified by circumstances as clearly to warrant complete mercy.
Even the minor characters challenge simple moral categories. Crooks,
the old black stable hand, is both victim and aggressor, one who, having
found no mercy, has little to dispense. Old Candy, whose useless and suf-
fering dog must be shot, an event which adumbrates both Lennie’s fate
and his own fears, finds himself unable to perform the act of violent mercy
that will end the dog’s suffering and so suffers from his own cowardly pas-
sivity. Similarly, Curley and his wife hopelessly mistake lust for love and
vengeance for justice.

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Slim, veteran ranchhand, natural leader, and “prince of the ranch,” is

the only character who seems not to be caught in the web of social and
psychological tensions, whose moral vision is wide enough to compre-
hend the injustices of the system in which all are implicated, and who is
able to hold a delicate balance between pragmatism and compassion, law
and grace. He is a heroic figure in the American vein, descended from
characters like Natty Bumppo and Captain Vere—solitary, seasoned,
self-contained, a natural leader whose power derives not from institu-
tional authority, but from the compelling force of personal integrity and
wisdom born of reflection upon hard experience. Such characters serve
as both critics and mediators in their social worlds. If the story were to
be reduced to its allegorical schema, one might see Slim as the “Christ
figure” and merciful counterpart to the ranch owner, who represents the
absent but threatening “God-figure.” Seen in this way, the two “bosses”
represent two orders of authority and recourse between which George
and Lennie and the rag-tag community of itinerant workers like them
have to negotiate the terms and ethics of their own survival. Slim is not
the focal character in this story. This is a story about life among the rank
and file, life for those who cannot finally either accede to power or “light
out for the territory,” but have to work out their salvation from within the
enmeshing nets of economic necessity and social immobility.
Beyond the social criticism so characteristic of Steinbeck’s work is a
certain bold playfulness in adapting this biblical material, grown large and
weighty over time, to the very local and in some ways burlesque setting
of the American West. The same spirit seems to inform this appropria-
tion as that which allowed the Puritan settlers to regard themselves and
their work in the world in unabashedly allegorical terms, thus dignifying
with the largeness of historical precedent and theological significance the
grubby business of survival. Various elements in the original biblical tale
show up here in recognizable but changed and sometimes comic forms.
Cain, whose name may be taken to be a pun on “I have gotten a
manchild,”5 figures in several early biblical legends. The most noteworthy
of these recounts how his sacrifice of crops to God is refused while the
animal sacrifice of Abel, his brother, is accepted. Cain kills Abel out of
envy (or anger, or frustration, or fear; the motive here offers a rich quarry
for psycho-theological interpretation) and is banished by God to live the
life of a nomad. The Lord, however, in an act of mercy which is in its

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MARILYN CHANDLER McENTYRE

own way inexplicable, puts a sign on his forehead, protecting him, since
nomads were subject to no protective laws but those of vengeance. In
another story, Cain is credited with building the first city and with invent-
ing metalwork, achievements which mark him, the first murderer, as a
founder of civilization with its crafts and industries as opposed to agrarian
and nomadic culture. Thus he represents first the peasant farmer who re-
volts against the herdsman and later the city-dweller whose relationship to
God has been complicated and vexed by power politics and commerce.
This connection of a “foundation murder” to the founding of a com-
munity is one René Girard has explored at length in two works that
detail on a vast canvas the deep linkage between violence and the sacred.
Murder as a symbolic act is one of differentiation, necessary to separate
the fate of one from the other and to define and declare individuality in
order, paradoxically, to provide a more conscious basis for community life.
Another paradoxical consequence of “foundation murder” is the giving of
law against murder: God responds to Cain’s fear (that whoever finds him
will kill him) by putting a mark on him and, further, by enunciating the
law against murder. Girard comments that this divine intervention

makes it clear . . . that the decisive murder, here as elsewhere, has a

founding character. And to talk in terms of “founding” is also to talk in
terms of “differentiating.” . . . I see in this the establishment of a dif-
ferential system, which serves, as always, to discourage mimetic rivalry
and generalized conflict.6

This theory has significant implications for recognizing that the

privately owned and settled West with its rough vigilante “justice” was
a primitive culture that emerged into law, as other cultures have, by en-
acting vengeance and suffering its consequences. Characters like Curley
abound in the literature of the far West—men who not only take justice
and judgment into their own hands, but who actively seek occasions to
exercise those illegitimately seized functions to establish their personal
power as a basis for or in lieu of orderly political process. And men like
Curley are finally defeated by men like Slim, who temper justice with
mercy and the roots of whose authority lie in experience, empathy, and
compassion. Steinbeck’s story leaves us to speculate about what ensues
after George kills Lennie, but the fact that the murder was performed as a
ritual act of mercy instead of being left to the self-serving rage of Curley’s

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jealousy must surely change the consequences for the community; the
power of the owner and his son are modified in George’s taking into his
own hands the power to execute the law even in the act of submitting to
it. Like Cain, George confronts punishment in such a way as to throw it
into question rather than to confirm the terms of the law.
Abel, whose name may be derived from a Mesopotamian word mean-
ing “son,” was the second child of Adam, a herdsman, and thus a pastoral
culture hero.7 He was the first to offer animal sacrifice to God, and his
sacrifice was accepted, thus establishing a tradition of animal sacrifice. In
Christian history he is viewed as one of many forerunners or “types” of
Christ whose stories adumbrate the ultimate story of sacrifice and salva-
tion. He is the original innocent victim whose murder justifies succeeding
generations of herdsmen in their feud against their enemies, the peasant
farmers.
But the differences between the brothers’ gifts, like the differences
between those groups with their respective ways of living on earth, may
not be as profound as their similarities. If murder is, as Girard suggests, an
act of self-differentiation, it is impelled by a deep recognition of fear and
similarity.8 The fear that one’s self or one’s group might be subsumed and
therefore obliterated is the root of rivalry, and rivalry is the first stage in
individuation. Individuation produces both growth in consciousness and
a threat to community life.
Literature has provided numerous reiterations of this story of envy
and fratricide. Ricardo Quinones’ useful study of the large body of “Cain
and Abel” stories distinguishes three lines of development of that tradi-
tion, which he calls “Citizen Cain,” “Monstrous Cain,” and “Cain as
Sacred Executioner.” A fourth, a post-Byronic portrait, he calls “Regener-
ate Cain.” If he is in any sense to be considered a “Cain” figure, George
clearly belongs to the third or fourth type. In those readings, Cain is
Abel’s protector, the one who is able and willing to take on confrontation
with the father and other powers, who is the more courageous and the
more conscious of the two brothers, and who kills Abel out of benevolent
rather than base motives. This describes George’s relationship to Lennie.
George is also a farmer; his work is slinging barley. He understands crops,
finds jobs for himself and Lennie at harvest time, and bends his energies
toward the dream of owning a farm. He understands when that dream is
finally destroyed by Lennie’s innocent but disastrous mistake, that he is

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condemned to wander from one ranch to another, nomadic, homeless,

spending his pay in cities. He kills Lennie with a stolen gun, a Luger (the
pun on “lie” may have some relevance here) which associates him also with
“metalwork” and weaponry. He is dark as Lennie is fair, older than his
companion, more canny, more alert to danger, more suspicious, less trust-
ing, someone who has known temptation, has struck bargains, bent the
truth, and devised strategies of subterfuge to survive and pursue happiness
as he imagines it. That pursuit is not merely a selfish one, but neither is it
transcendent. The very humble character of his ambitions may be a kind
of tragic flaw—that he sought nothing higher.
But even George’s limited ambitions are fraught with ambivalence.
There are moments when having and loving come into conflict, and the
pursuit of happiness as personal desire cannot coexist with commitment
to care for another. One writer’s speculative recreation of Cain’s conflict
might serve as an entrée to George’s predicament as Lennie’s caretaker:
“Cain felt a shadow, cast by his brother Abel, falling across his life. How
could he have his place in the sun with his brother’s shadow in the way?”9
This empathetic representation of Cain’s state of mind before the murder
of his brother locates the root of violence in desire, ambition, and envy.
But possibly a deeper mystery of motive in fratricide lies not in these
impulses, but in ambivalence born of the interdependency and love-hate
paradox that characterize blood relationships, especially that of siblings
who are in a certain sense equals and therefore inevitably rivals. That
rivalry is, of course, exacerbated by the fact that in another sense siblings
are specifically not equals. In both the original story and in Steinbeck’s
tale, the two men hold quite different places in the scheme of things.
One (so the post-Byronic “Cain” tradition would suggest) has the greater
responsibility, the larger imagination, and the greater possibility of both
success and failure.
Throughout Judaeo-Christian history the presumed privilege of the
firstborn son has been cited as the source of subterfuge, insubordination,
and murder. The second, or “lesser,” son resents the privilege of the first-
born and challenges it. When, in the story of Cain and Abel and later in
that of Jacob and Esau, the younger son receives the blessing despite the
legitimate expectations and efforts of the first, the firstborn rises in anger
to avenge himself on his brother. The theme reappears in slightly differ-
ent form in the parable of the prodigal son in the resentment of the elder

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brother who has been faithful and feels as if he is forfeiting something

that belongs to him in witnessing his father’s merciful compassion toward
the younger.
It is this quality of resentment born of the frustrations of genuine
commitment and recognized obligation that Steinbeck foregrounds in
George and Lennie. Throughout the story George alternates between
two visions: one of life with Lennie, one without him. The former is the
binding force in their relationship: a shared vision of a little farm where
they would live “off the fatta the lan’” with livestock and fruit trees, much
abundance and little work, equally invested and equally rewarded. The
other, darker vision George recites in his moments of frustration at shoul-
dering the burden of being “his brother’s keeper” in such a literal way:

God a’mighty, if I was alone I could live so easy. I could go get a job an’
work, an’ no trouble. No mess at all, and when the end of the month
come I could take my fifty bucks and go into town and get whatever I
want. Why, I could stay in a cat house all night. I could eat any place I
want, hotel or any place, and order any damn thing I could think of. An’
I could do all that every damn month. Get a gallon of whisky, or set in
a pool room and play cards or shoot pool. (11)

This is a vision of freedom from responsibility. It is also a vision of

city life, a life free of physical toil, full of sensual indulgence that once
again symbolically links George to Cain, mythological founder of cities.
George periodically considers the meager fruits of his labors and finds
them unsatisfying, recognizes himself as condemned first to work that
yields no personal reward or approbation, and second to nomadic wan-
dering. The city seems a refuge from this monotonous fate for one whose
labors have not seemed to produce their just reward.
George also knows that this is a diminished vision. What he really
wants is a little farm with Lennie. He wants family, companionship,
shared responsibility, community. In a moment of generosity, he even
enlarges the plan to include two other outcasts, men excluded by the
infirmities of age and the social barrier of race from full participation in
whatever community life the ranch offers. Almost, in that moment, we
may see something Christlike in him—something that is willing to say,
“Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden and I will give you
rest.” He would like to be able to dispense such bounty. He would like to

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be as a god. And so the paradoxes continue, because even as he consents

to widen the vision to include others, he fears some loss of control over
the little kingdom he has planned for himself. He asks old Candy, who
wants to cast his lot with theirs, “Say, what’s it to you? You got nothing to
do with us.” And even after the offer of money that will make the vision
possible says reluctantly, “I gotta think about that. We was always gonna
do it by ourselves” (59).
Lennie, though he works the crops with George, is almost wholly
identified by his love of animals and “soft things.” He literally kills crea-
tures out of love, stroking them and playing with them, unaware of the
lethal force of his own large hands. Innocent victim himself, he is also a
murderer; in a very literal way he kills what he loves, making them sacri-
fices to his innocence. He deals his final death blow to George himself in
that his own death means the end of George’s hope and lease on life. The
“brother’s” life consigned to his keeping is impossible to separate entirely
from his own. Their shared fate is shared lifeblood, and both are vulner-
able to what the weaker suffers.
The relationship between George and Lennie, partly because it is not
a relationship of equals, has a ritual character that underscores the mystery
of the bonds of fate and love that transcend or bypass rationality. Their
conversations fall into repeated patterns, confined to recitations by the se-
vere limitations of Lennie’s mind. Those recitations, however, have a kind
of power that rational conversation lacks; like incantation or prayer, they
invoke a vision and a promise and bring both speaker and listener back
to a place of fundamental faith and well-being. The two friends are com-
forted as one is comforted by liturgical formulae; the words they recite to
one another are their heaven here and now—their place on earth to return
to—the shared promise that stands in lieu of the thing promised, the hope
of things to come that sustains in the absence of those things.
In both the opening and closing scenes of the novel, the same con-
versation occurs, both times after a breach of conduct on Lennie’s part,
an apology, and a forgiveness. The story of their private heaven is like an
absolution and a resealing of the bond that keeps them in community and
on their chosen path, and reminds them that they are “a peculiar people,”
different from others, and chosen for a special fate. As George begins the
story, he takes on a priestly persona: “George’s voice became deeper. He
repeated his words rhythmically as though he had said them many times

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before.” Then the words come, trance-like, separated from the preced-
ing conversation in style, substance, and scope. The opening reference to
“guys like us” hypothesizes the larger “mystical body” of the lonely, the
outcast, the dispossessed, who wait, alike, for deliverance:

Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world.
They got no family. They don’t belong no place. They come to a ranch
an’ work up a stake and then they go inta town and blow their stake, and
the first thing you know they’re poundin’ their tail on some other ranch.
They ain’t got nothing to look ahead to. (13–14)

But the next part of the ritual sets these two initiates apart even from
that larger community and asserts their special status. “Now tell how it is
with us,” Lennie demands, playing acolyte to George’s priestly ritual. And
George continues his recitation of their “sacred story”:

With us it ain’t like that. We got a future. We got somebody to talk to

that gives a damn about us. We don’t have to sit in no bar room blowin’
our jack jus’ because we got no place else to go. If them other guys gets
in jail they can rot for all anybody gives a damn. But not us. (14)

Lennie, with the passion of a true believer, breaks into a triumphant

recitation of his catechism: “But not us! An’ why? Because. . . . because I got
you to look after me, and you got me to look after you, and that’s why” (14).
Then he demands that George continue. When George points out that he
could do it himself by heart, Lennie refuses the responsibility. He is unfit:
“I forget some a’ the things.”
George’s priestly responsibility is to remember and utter the sacred
words. So he goes on: “Someday—we’re gonna get the jack together and
we’re gonna have a little house and a couple of acres an’ a cow and some
pigs and—” (Lennie shouts the finish line) “An’ live off the fatta the lan’
. . .” (14). Overcome with the vision, he breaks into his own rendition of
it, complete with rabbits, rain in winter, and thick cream on the milk. The
ritual becomes a kind of revival meeting, a dialogue of call and response
that brings both into a deep place of comfort and hope that obliterates for
a time the bleakness of the present.
When, at the end of the story, this ritual is reenacted, for the third
time in the text, it is to provide a context for Lennie’s murder. Here again

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Girard may help articulate the special nature of the act presented in his
recognition that ritual is often the deliberate breaking of a prohibition—
that in ritual that which is prohibited may be required.10 The concept of
the necessary evil is one of the most problematic of moral conundrums,
and it is to this that the story of George and Lennie leads. The killing of
an innocent victim is justified by the argument that in some way it will
prevent greater harm. The immediate act is culpable. Its consequences
are a presumed benefit to the community. In that way this murder comes
under the large rubric of ritual sacrifice and is as offensive to the modern
mind. But to confront that offense is to enter a specifically religious realm
of reasoning where truth is ultimately paradoxical. Our challenge is to
abide within it, recognizing that moral vision, like the sight of our eyes,
must be binary to give us depth perception.
Thus the answer to the question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” is “yes”
and “no.” So often read as a rhetorical dodge to which Cain resorts when
God calls upon him to confess the murder of Abel, the question might
rather be taken as a real question, which as such leads to others: by what
ordination? Why? Where are the boundaries between my desires, my
needs, my destiny, and his? It is a question that underlies all community
life: in what sense and in what ways are we responsible to and for each
other? What obligations do our interdependencies impose upon us? And
on what, when conflict comes to a choice between individual and com-
munal welfare, as it so often does, are we to base our judgments about
what is the greater good?
Three visions of community come into play in this short tale: first is
the intimate partnership of George and Lennie which in both fact and
fantasy is one of protection, affection, and sharing of labor; second is the
larger community of the ranch, stratified into the owner and his son and
daughter-in-law—the makers of law in this little world—foreman, skin-
ners, swampers, and stable-bucks. The third is the larger world, that comes
into play only as backdrop, and largely in terms of the corruptions of the
city with its brothels and gambling places. None of the three will remain
unchanged by the event of Lennie’s innocent violence and the violent end
to his innocent life. Murder is never an individual act; its consequence, if
it is not simply a step in an unending cycle of revenge, is to lead the living
to reflection and reconfiguration of community which never simply closes

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over the gap the victim leaves, but arranges itself around that absence in
fear and commemoration and reinforced protection.
We are each other’s fate. To turn the question around is to lead
directly to Jesus’ own rhetorical and endlessly resonant question, “Who
is my . . . brother?” implying that the bond of blood is secondary to the
bond of what Martin Luther King called “beloved community,” created
by shared vision.
In this story, then, Steinbeck puts a new spin on the old, mysterious
and open-ended theological questions of guilt and innocence, sacrifice and
reward, and right relation between the natural economy of the fruits of
the earth and the labor of men’s hands, so easily exploited and corrupted
in human enterprise. He also recasts the question of how rightly to live in
community, how to take care of one another, and how to understand our
interdependencies in a way that generates mercy rather than blame. Surely
that way has to do with assuming responsibility for “the least among us,”
for our “younger brothers,” for the “innocents,” like George, and with
discerning, like Slim, what is needful in the moment to maintain balance
between individual desire and collective peace.
It is pertinent to note that in the end, it is Cain who becomes the
protected. The mark of Cain is a sign meant for his protection from
random attack. He goes alone into exile, but goes under the hand of
God. Steinbeck, here and elsewhere, takes on the romantic mythology
of the lone hero by harkening back to a deeper and longer tradition. To
go alone will not be, for George, a liberation so much as a condemna-
tion. Nevertheless, it is an opportunity. It is a tragic fate now to be met.
(Though few consent to call this limited story a tragedy, few would
dispute the tragic character of this moment of loss and release into a
terrible freedom.) What we read is Lennie’s story. What is to come
hereafter is George’s. In a very real sense, his own story starts after the
climactic event that seems to be his defeat. And, as Eliot puts it, “the
end is where we start from.”11

Notes
1. See, for instance, Howard Levant, The Novels of John Steinbeck: A Critical
Study (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1974), 133–44.

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2. T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding” in Four Quartets, included in T.S. Eliot: The

Complete Poems and Plays 1909–1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World,
Inc.), 142.
3. John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men, 1937 (New York: Penguin Modern
Classic, 1993), 8. All further references to this work will be found in the text.
4. For a useful discussion of the idea of “purity” in American politics and
public discourse, see Garry Wills’ Under God (New York: Touchstone Press,
1990), relevant here to an understanding of the particularly “American” character
of Steinbeck’s moral universe.
5. John L. McKenzie, Dictionary of the Bible (Milwaukee: The Bruce Pub-
lishing Company, 1965), 113–14.
6. René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (London:
The Athlone Press, 1978), 146. For other aspects of this argument see also Gi-
rard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Press, 1977).
7. McKenzie, Dictionary, 113–14.
8. See Girard, Things Hidden, 38, for an elaboration of the idea of “enemy
twins”—victim and aggressor as doubles.
9. Dale Aukerman, The Darkening Valley: A Biblical Perspective on Nuclear
War (New York: The Seabury Press, 1981), 2.
10. See Girard, Things Hidden, 20–21.
11. T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” 144.

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 CHAPTER FIFTEEN
OF MICE AND MEN:
CREATING AND RE-CREATING
CURLEY’S WIFE
Mimi Reisel Gladstein

C
urley’s wife in Steinbeck’s poignant tale Of Mice and Men has
been a source of question and query, almost from her conception.
George S. Kaufman, the play’s Broadway director was the first
to suggest that more was needed for her dramatic realization. He encour-
aged Steinbeck to enlarge her part: “The girl, I think, should be drawn
more fully: she is the motivating force of the whole thing and should loom
larger” (Steinbeck and Wallsten 136).
Steinbeck did just that for the play version, giving her a troubled
background of battling parents and an alcoholic and lost father. Obviously,
Clare Luce, who played the role on Broadway, still needed more and Stein-
beck was moved, halfway into the play’s run, to provide a fuller exposition,
explaining her predatory behavior as defensive. She is, he explains “a nice,
kind girl and not a floozy” (Steinbeck and Wallsten 154). We do not have
a record of Luce’s performance, so we cannot see for ourselves how she
resolved the contradictions in this woman who was called a “tart” and “jail-
bait” by the men in the play, but “not a floozy” by her creator.
In the ensuing half-century since “something happened” to Curley’s
wife, Steinbeck’s poignant tale has continued to inspire interpretation in a
variety of media. It has motivated four major film productions, two for the
big screen, 1939 and 1992, and two television productions, one in 1968
and another in 1981, plus a stage-musical (1958) and an opera (1976).

From Beyond Boundaries: Rereading John Steinbeck, edited by Susan Shillinglaw and
Kevin Hearle, copyright 2002 by the University of Alabama Press. Used by permission.

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Luckily, there are readily available copies of three of the film productions
and so we can study how different manifestations of Steinbeck’s timeless
fable have dealt with the apparent contradictions between the outer and
inner being of the only woman in this male domain.
Judith Crist once commented that when Hollywood makes an histori-
cal movie, it tells us more about Hollywood at the time of the making of
the film than it does about the time period the film portrays.1 The same
might be said about the portrayal of Curley’s wife. A cursory exploration
of the multiple possibilities that comparisons of the three film versions
suggest to us are instructive, not only for what they demonstrate about
this problematic character, but also about the times in which each text was
produced. To illustrate, I have chosen three significant components of the
characterization of Curley’s wife as she is presented in the 1939, 1980, and
1992 film productions. They provide a beginning (how we are introduced
to the character); a middle (some justification for her behavior); and, of
course, her end or death. [The reader is directed to the three illustrative
plates that coincide with these three significant junctures in her presenta-
tion: Introduction, Justification, and Death.]2
The earliest film version followed shortly after the Broadway run.
Lewis Milestone’s 1939 cinema rendition starred Lon Chaney Jr. and
Burgess Meredith. Betty Field played the role of Curley’s wife. The audi-
ence introduction to her is spotlighted by Candy’s cue line: “Just wait’ll
you see Curley’s wife.”
And our first sight is a revealing one. Her sexuality is foregrounded;
her legs are what we see first, encased in dark silk stockings. She is wear-
ing high heels, lifting and lowering a puppy, precariously clasped between
her ankles.
The setting is in the barn, where she is lying on her back in the
straw, blond hair, tightly curled. This provocative introduction is softened
emblematically by showing her in conjunction with a cute, fuzzy puppy,
a connection that also foreshadows her demise. Milestone’s semiotic
choices, first silk stockings, then puppy, convey the ambiguity of this
pivotal character. On the one hand, she is dressed in sexually provocative
clothing, like a thirties screen vamp. On the other hand, her universality is
highlighted by her delight in the cute puppy, an emotion the audience can
share. Her petting the puppy in the barn creates motivation for her final
visit to the barn to get it before she leaves (see figure 15.1).

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Figure 15.1. Curley’s wife 1939, 1981, and

1992: The introduction to the character.

Robert Blake’s 1980s television version was produced some two gen-
erations later. However, except for the change from large screen to the
small one and the addition of color, it does not often stray far from its
predecessor.3 In fact, it is consciously modeled on the 1939 production,
even dedicated to Lewis Milestone. For many scenes, the same script was
used. This complicates my thesis somewhat, because sometimes, rather
than being a reflection of its times, it is an homage to its inspiration and
therefore highly derivative. The Blake script replicates not only scenes
added in the Milestone production, such as the farmhouse eating scene,
but exact shots, such as the close-up of the pie, Mae’s fingers breaking off
a piece of crust. There is also a marked similarity between Betty Field’s
and Cassie Yates’ initial scenes with the puppy, a scene that is not in the
novel.
Blake retains the barn setting for our introduction to the character,
but, perhaps in response to some consciousness raising about the sexual
objectification of women, we see Mae’s hands first, not her legs. On the

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other hand, the reason for this change could also be cultural. The sight
of a woman’s legs, in silk stockings, did not carry the same sexual impact
in the eighties that it did in the thirties. The thirties is the decade when
Claudette Colbert, in It Happened One Night stops traffic by lifting her
skirt to show her stockinged leg. By the 1980s the sight of a woman’s
legs, either in or out of silk stocking, did not have the same erotic punch.
Instead, her provocative character is communicated by the camera’s focus
on her cleavage in a tight-bodiced, low-cut cotton dress. Her blond hair is
still tightly curled, but she is not on her back, at least, at first. The sugges-
tiveness of a woman on her back in the hay is another of the time-coded
sexual signs of an era when even married couples could not be shown lying
in bed together. Like her predecessor, she is playing with the puppies, ap-
pealing to the audience’s sense that someone who loves dogs and children
can’t be all bad (see figure 15.1).
In both of these film versions, the contradictions inherent in this char-
acter are telegraphed in this opening scene, a scene not from Steinbeck’s
text, which changes the way Curley’s wife is introduced to the audience.
Rather than having her intrude into masculine space, the bunkhouse, as
Steinbeck does, in the Milestone and Blake versions she is shown first
alone in the barn. In these films, her loneliness, and its connection to her
being the only woman in this male domain, is further underlined by an-
other scene Milestone includes from the additional matter in the Eugene
Solow screenplay. In both of these early productions, a scene just outside
the barn follows this introductory scene. The camera pans from Mae, lying
in the straw, to the open barn door which frames an interaction between
Curley and his father. Curley is looking for his wife; the boss, his father,
suggests that Curley needs to get his mind on his work and leave his wife
alone. In the 1939 version, the boss speaks his understanding of her loneli-
ness, noting that it would be better for her if she had some women to talk
to. She is even named—Mae. Much has been made in the critical literature
of the fact that Steinbeck never named this woman, identifying her only
by her relationship to a man, as Curley’s wife. Both Milestone and Blake
remedy this situation. By giving her a name, she is humanized, achieving
the same status as the men in the story. She becomes subject of her own
story with an identity other than the one given her by marriage to Curley.
By adding the scene in the barn, Milestone can show the audience
that Curley’s wife is alone and innocently engaged in playing with a

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puppy. Therefore, her husband’s suspicions are probably unfounded and

the audience is moved to sympathy. The boss, Curley’s father, also voices
his disapproval of his son’s obsession with his wife’s activities. However,
this sympathy is balanced by her looks, and emphasized by Candy’s prepa-
ratory line, “Just wait’ll you see Curley’s wife.” How she looks helps explain
his disparaging attitude toward her and is accentuated by the voyeuristic
camera focus on legs in the first film, cleavage in the second.
These additional introductory scenes are nowhere in the 1992 pro-
duction. Gary Sinise’s film owes its inspiration, not to either previous
film version, but to Sinise’s early affection for Steinbeck’s work. He played
Tom Joad in the successful translation of The Grapes of Wrath from text to
stage. Sinise and John Malkovich had performed Steinbeck’s Of Mice and
Men onstage in Chicago (1980) while part of the Steppenwolf Company.
With Elaine Steinbeck’s approval, Horton Foote wrote his own adapta-
tion for the screen, a screenplay which is, in some ways, more and, in
other ways, less faithful to Steinbeck’s texts. Like Steinbeck, Foote does
not name Curley’s wife.
As in the play and novel, we first meet Curley’s wife, as do Lennie and
George, at the bunkhouse. In the novel, she plays her first scene in the
doorway, using the doorframe to pose for the new men, leaning against
it to arch her body forward. Foote’s script brings her into the bunkhouse.
However, there is a marked contradiction in the visual message of her cos-
tuming and actions. Unlike her prototype in the novel, she is not “tarted”
up in the little red ostrich feather mules nor is her hair tightly curled into
little sausages. Sherilynn Fenn, as Curley’s wife, definitely shows the ef-
fects of a nineties production. Her sexuality is less dependent on costume
and make-up, better conveyed by her manner than her looks. She bursts
into the bunkhouse with a breathy little girl quality. To add to her youth-
ful mannerisms, she is toying with her skirt, pulling it up and playing
with the hem (see figure 15.1). Her breathy, girlish voice resonates with
a quality reminiscent of Marilyn Monroe.4 This change in the nature of
allure plays into a contemporary infantilization of sexuality, epitomized
by such things as pre-pubescent high-fashion models hawking tight jeans
and/or Calvin Klein’s perfume ads featuring awkward young boys and
girls, photographed in their underwear.5 Her girlish behavior and voice
qualities are a counterpart of what Susan Bordo, in a recent article for the
Chronicle of Higher Education, calls the “eroticization of children.”6 Myra

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Macdonald writes of the creation in the 1990s of the “little girl lost look,”
a reconstruction of feminine sexuality from that of power into a “waif-like
innocence and insecurity” (112). Fenn’s portrayal partakes of those char-
acteristics. The concurrent qualities of innocence and sexuality are em-
phasized by the parting thrust of her breast and her form-fitting dress.
Once the audience is introduced to Curley’s wife, made aware of
her ambiguous nature, both predatory and needy, the script must fur-
nish motivation for her behavior. Why is she so needy? In the novel, the
reader first learns about the situation from the men’s perspective. There
are few early clues to provide understanding of the problems between
her and Curley from her perspective. Curley’s threatening behavior is
explained by Candy to George and Lennie. After their initial unpleasant
encounter, Candy notes that Curley is “worse lately” (27). This change
Candy attributes to the fact that he “got married a couple of weeks ago
. . . [and is] cockier’n ever since he got married” (27). He also calls atten-
tion to Curley’s gloved left hand. Candy tells George that the glove is full
of vaseline, which Curley says is to keep the hand soft for his new wife.
George judges that as “a dirty thing to tell around” (28). However, it is
not until three-fourths of the way through the novel that the reader gets
the wife’s viewpoint, her explanation of the problems in the marriage,
what has created the situation that puts her in such need of company and
consequently such jeopardy. Her words to Lennie, Candy, and Crooks tell
of her frustration with being left at home while Curley goes off with the
boys, “Think I like to stick in that house alla time?” (76). She speaks of
Curley’s one note conversations about how he is going to “lead with his
left twict, and then bring in the ol’right cross” (76). But the men do not
acknowledge her perspective. They view her as a danger and want her out
of their living space.
When her dead body is discovered, Candy reproaches her for “mess-
ing” everything up. His final epitaph, over her dead body, is: “You God-
damn tramp . . . You lousy tart” (95). Is she to blame for her own demise
as Candy’s eulogy suggests? Are we to believe Whit’s diagnosis that “she
can’t keep away from guys”? Or is it that she has “the eye” as Candy ex-
plains? Curley is always looking for her, but then always leaving her alone,
in a situation of such isolation that she is content, in her own words to be
talking to “a bunch of bindlestiffs.” Even on Saturday night. “Ever’body
out doin’ som’pin’. Ever’body! An what am I doin?” (78) In her final

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scene, she corroborates what we already know from Curley’s behavior

throughout the novel, “He ain’t a nice fella” (89).
In the play and the novel, we can only speculate about what life with
Curley is like. This is not true in all three films. Each provides scenes
that counterbalance Candy’s condemnation of her. The Milestone ver-
sion takes us into the ranch house to provide justification for the woman’s
need for congenial company. In a scene created for the Milestone film
we encounter Mae, the boss, and Curley at the dinner table. The camera
focuses on a pie, as Curley and the boss cut off huge pieces, while Mae’s
fingers nip off a small piece of the crust. The men then drench their por-
tions in cream. Noisily, they devour the pie and slurp coffee. There is no
conversation; Mae is so overwhelmed by the eating noises, that she puts
her hands over her ears. Obviously, we are meant to sympathize with
“Mae’s” disgust. The men are uncouth and animalistic. They “wolf” down
huge pieces of pie, while she barely eats. Still, her looks convey another
message, one not so sympathetic. She is bejeweled and made up, wearing
a low-cut dress (see figure 15.2).
Blake’s fidelity to Milestone goes far in proving that imitation is the
sincerest form of flattery. The dinner scenes are almost a carbon copy, the
major difference being the addition of color. The camera eye first focuses
on the pie; the men pack away pie and guzzle coffee. Once again, “Mae”
is revolted by the gross and slurping dinner noises. If anything, either as
a result of better sound equipment or by a conscious choice of the film
editor, the noises are louder. The men are even more unmannered, going
at their food with an added two-handed boorishness, fork in one hand,
coffee cups in the other. We are ready to join her, putting our hands over
our ears. During this entire scene, the audience is put in the position of
empathizing with Mae. After the meal, our sympathy is evoked again
when Curley leaves her at home to go out with the boys, although she
expresses her desire to go out. Since both the men’s bad table manners
and Curley’s lack of consideration for her feelings are material that is not
in the novel, the added text for the 1939 and 1980 film scripts provides
opportunity for audience commiseration with Mae’s plight. The scenes
inside the ranch house make her more sympathetic, justifying her dubious
quest for company, even to her detriment.
There is no analogous scene in Horton Foote’s screenplay. True to the
novel, we are kept outside of the ranch house. But, if a 1992 conception

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Figure 15.2. Curley’s wife, 1939, 1981, and 1992: The

middle, or some justification for her behavior.

doesn’t turn our stomachs against Curley, his brutal nature is transmitted
in another way. Annoying noise making, but of a more violent kind, is
used to telegraph Curley’s failures as a human being and husband. In an
added scene that shows the men coming in from the fields, we encounter
Curley pounding a punching bag. The scene is mid-way through the film
and relevant in that it continues the motif of Curley’s penchant for fight-
ing, his violent nature. His wife’s loneliness, even when they are together,
is transmitted in their separation, the lack of interaction. She is sitting on
the porch, some distance from him, uninvolved and eating something out
of a white bowl. She has no lines. Her dress is pale and nondescript. It is
not provocative in any way (see figure 15.2). Curley’s father, the boss, is
the one who expresses irritation at the noise, wanting a stop to the racket.
The scene ends, punctuated with a last blow to the punching bag. Though

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brief, the scene is not in the play or either of the earlier film versions. It
does not advance the plot in any way. It serves to establish Curley as a
boxer and its purpose may be to sensitize the audience to his brutality
and his wife’s isolation, foreshadowing Curley’s pummeling of Lennie.
Curley’s wife is in the scene, but not part of it.
Further indication of the impact of the time of production on how
Curley’s wife is portrayed in the 1992 film is Foote’s importation of the
contemporary issue of wife-abuse. This is accomplished in another of
the few instances where Foote does tamper with Steinbeck’s plot by add-
ing a scene that clearly conveys an image of this woman as victim, more
sinned against than sinner. First Foote omits her most unappealing scene
from the novel, the one where Curley’s wife goes into Crooks’ room and
throws cold water on the men’s dream of owning a place of their own.
Left out is her threat of lynching. Gone is her derogatory depiction of the
man as “a nigger, a dum-dum and a lousy ol’ sheep” (78). Instead, Lennie
and George come out of Crooks’ room and encounter her in the yard,
almost crying. Curley has gone to town after breaking all her records.
Contemporary audiences, sensitive to wife-abuse, respond all too readily
to her plaintive lament about her broken records. She had only four. Not
only does Curley leave her alone, but also he destroys her means of en-
tertaining herself. What else can she do but seek the company of others?
And even those pitiful outcasts reject her. She runs crying from the yard.
The addition of scenes like this and an earlier one where she and George
have a quiet exchange in the barn, an exchange that is almost suggestive
of a possible romantic connection, elicit our sympathy for her and soften
the femme fatale nature of her character. An added heart-tugging touch
is her naming of the records Curley broke. One is “Am I Blue?” A tell-
ing title.
How, then, if all three films add scenes to provoke our sympathy for
Curley’s wife, is the negative or dangerous side of her nature communi-
cated? The ambiguous nature of the characterization is communicated in
essentially time-coded ways, ways that play on recognized signals of the
time of production. The semiotics of costume and make-up choices is
particularly revealing.7 In other words, the way the character is dressed is
a sign or code by which we evaluate her in her specific cultural context.
The 1939 film’s visual presentation of “Mae” falls clearly in the trampy
category. When we first see her, she is in high-heeled sandal shoes and

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dark-toned hose. This speaks of her alienation from her setting. It is dif-
ficult to negotiate a barnyard in open-toed shoes and easily torn hosiery.
In the farmhouse dinner scene, she is heavily made-up, with a big ring on
her finger, wearing a low-cut dress, all signs of her attempts at appearing
alluring. Her décolletage is emphasized when she pulls a movie flyer out
of the bodice of her dress. In the visual codes of 1930s movie-making,
nice women did not use their bras for storage purposes. Later, in another
added farmhouse scene, she confronts Curley in a ruffled house robe, the
slatternly presentation emphasized by an even wider décolletage and an
inappropriate combination of jewelry and negligee. For her final departure
and death scenes, the outfit is quintessential thirties tart: see-through net
blouse, tight skirt, and high heels. A close-up shows penciled eyebrows,
polished nails, and lots of cheap jewelry (see figure 15.3). She fits the cul-
tural commonplace of her times that if a woman dressed a certain way, she
was “asking for trouble.” Hers is clearly the least sympathetic portrayal,

Figure 15.3. Curley’s wife, 1939, 1981, 1992: The

character’s end or death.

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but then, in the 1930s, society had more rigid standards by which women
were judged. Mae’s dress and make-up mark her. They are not appropri-
ate for a good woman living on a farm.
The 1980s costuming of Cassie Yates is more ambivalent. Little in
her costuming or actions communicates the sign of a “floozy.” Only in
her introductory scene is there some question of décolletage. At the din-
ner table, Mae is wearing a simple plaid cotton dress, with a few pieces of
plastic jewelry. When she reaches into her bodice for the movie flyer, the
action is not highlighted. Her costume for her least sympathetic scene,
the one where she goes to Crooks’ room to dash the men’s dreams, is
markedly contrary to any depiction of her as a tart or jail bait. Her outfit
is almost school-marmish. She is wearing a blouse with a white-eyelet
collar and a blue sweater, clothing appropriate for a farm wife (see figure
15.2). In the farmhouse confrontation with Curley, a little-girl hair rib-
bon offsets her ruffled house-robe. In the death scene, her departure dress
is not provocative; it is plain, black, full-skirted, and except for the bare
arms, appropriate for a funeral, ironically her own (see figure 15.3). No
heavy make-up highlights her close-ups; her face is wistful and tender in
the final moments of her presentation. She does, however, wear bright
red nail polish. Since the scripts for the Milestone and Blake versions are
almost identical, the marked changes in the way the character is made up
and costumed lend credence to the impact of cultural changes in attitudes
toward women. Her verbal and visual signs are sometimes incompatible,
but in a postmodern age audiences are more comfortable with contradic-
tory and conflicting images. She can look like a sweet farm wife and act
like a harpy. It contributes to the complexity of the character.
The costuming in the 1992 production is also sometimes contradictory.
After her initial bodice-enhancing dress, there is little that suggests either
tart or tramp in the shape or color of the costume or the actions of the char-
acter. The dresses are mostly frumpy and formless. We encounter Curley’s
wife, in a barn scene, carrying a book, hardly the emblem of a floozy. This
emphasizes the fact that there is more to her than just body. Her postures
are often casual, careless. Her hair is long and natural looking; she is not
“heavily made up” nor does she have red fingernails. She is a brunette, not a
blonde; her voice is not “nasal and brittle,” but soft and girlish. Barelegged
rather than in black silk stocking, she carries a non-threatening coke bottle
for her final encounter with Lennie. The color of her dress in her final scene

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is white, communicating her innocence. This is in keeping with the earlier

added scenes that portray her more as victim than seductress. There is about
her a strong evocation of a “little girl lost” (see figure 15.3). She is in flat
shoes instead of high heels. The flat shoes connote girlishness. The first
thing little girls do when they want to play grown up is don high heels. It
is significant that the costuming and camera in the earlier versions focus on
those high heels. The fact that she has wandered into the barn purposelessly
highlights her “lost” quality. Mae, in the earlier versions, comes to the barn
for a purpose—to get her puppy before she leaves.
Finally, contemporary sensibilities and audience expectations have sig-
nificantly altered the portrayal of Lennie’s killing of Curley’s wife. Lennie
barely gets to stroke her hair once before Betty Field’s character is worry-
ing that he will mess it up, telling him to stop. The camera eye is averted
from the actual struggle; we see only his hand in her hair and then her feet
in the air, the dropping of one of her high-heeled black shoes emblematic
of her death. When he drops her in the straw, the camera withdraws from
the scene, revealing only a partial view of her hip protruding through the
hay. This is in marked contrast to the novel, where the narrative focus is
on her dead face. Steinbeck’s final narrative retrospective on her character
presents Curley’s wife in a more sympathetic light than elsewhere in the
novel. Although he does use the adjective “meanness,” the other words he
uses to describe her have more to do with her unhappiness and desire for
communication. She is also characterized as sweet and simple (90). None
of this is conveyed in the 1939 film. The protruding hip maintains the
sexualized view of the camera.
Blake’s replication of the scene differs little from the Milestone
version. The camera does hesitate a little longer on the action. We see
Lennie’s rough petting of the back of her head as she asks him not to mess
it up. Again, we are shifted to her feet, this time in red high-heeled shoes.
Television at the time of this filming still showed less graphic violence and
overt sexuality than did the movies. In both versions, a hip is all we see of
the dead body Lennie drops in the hay. Her sweetness is conveyed only
in the close-up of her live face, earlier in the scene, prior to her allowing
Lennie to stroke her hair. Our last image is still partial and not inspiring
of further thought about her aborted dreams.
Contemporary audiences, on the other hand, have become increas-
ingly desensitized to violence and brutality, especially in the movies. Sex

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and mayhem, which were only suggested or symbolized in earlier films,

are all too graphically depicted on today’s big and little screens. Sinise’s
1992 version lingers on the death scene, amplifying not only the violence,
but also the sexual tension of the interaction. If she has been presented in
a more sympathetic method earlier in this film, in this scene, the camera
eye objectifies her in a near-prurient manner. She and Lennie are pre-
sented as much more intimately involved. Rather than beginning side by
side as in the earlier films, they are face to face. The scene is played slowly.
She responds to his petting, there is a sensual quality to their interaction
as she assures him “I like it too. It feels nice.” This addition implicates her
more in what follows. When the scene suddenly turns violent, the camera
does not avert its eye. We see her full body struggle, her bare kicking legs,
her dress hiked up to her thighs. When Lennie drops her inert body, it is
her feet we don’t see. Instead the focus is her backside, dress pulled up,
slip showing, the camera moving directly into her.
In her most recent materialization, Curley’s wife is, in Vincent Can-
by’s words, “sort of sweet and none too bright, which is politically correct.”
She is less blameworthy and more a victim. Jack Garner also registers the
change in her characterization, crediting Sinise and Foote with making
her “a more complex and sympathetic character, a lonely, warm-hearted
woman whose goal is more friendship than seduction.” But, if she is a
more sympathetic character, in terms of plot, she is made less relevant to
the main themes of loneliness and brotherhood, less an actor in the theme
of aborted dreams. Since she is not leaving Curley and the farm, carrying
a coke bottle to the barn rather than a suitcase, she does not achieve the
same tragic status as the men. She is not fleeing to pursue her dream. She
is less actor than acted upon. She does not confront Curley as her prede-
cessors did. She is just there, going nowhere, to blame only because she
is soft and appealing.
What are we to deduce, then, from the examples of these time-bound
presentations of Curley’s wife? There is no single answer. The actresses
who play the role look progressively younger and their clothing and make-
up are less suggestive of the conventional film vamp. Also, as the actresses
become younger, the hardness inherent in the earlier portrayals is lost. But,
even the words “floozy” and “tart” are now culturally anachronistic. The
progressively less provocative costuming can also be the result of changing
societal mores about dress. In the courts, the rationale that women invite

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trouble by the way they dress is no longer acceptable. Sherilynn Fenn does
not need costuming or make-up to transmit sexual tension. In this post-
Lolita era, her very childlike demeanor and voice project their own sexual
message. The contradictions and ambiguity in the character inherent since
her conception continue.
Some of these contradictions derive from the conflict between what
is still a male-centered and male-driven cinema, what B. Ruby Rich
calls “Cinema of the Fathers,” and a less homogeneous audience.8 The
audience, both male and female, for the 1939 version could be expected
to share the cultural codes of the time, whereas the audiences for the
most recent versions are less likely to view the film from a unified
perspective. Today’s audiences must wrest meaning out of the struggle
and negotiation between competing frames of reference.9 Nevertheless,
male gaze continues to dominate the camera in the 1990s as it did in
the original film and Steinbeck’s text.10 Curley’s wife, named or not,
is still circumscribed by her position in relation to the men—a wife to
Curley, a danger to the men. Though she struggles to define herself as
subject, she remains object. If there is anything subversive in the text, as
some commentators on her character have argued, it is still struggling to
reveal itself. Oddly enough, in the most recent version, the one which
should have been most influenced by contemporary cultural critique of
woman as object, Curley’s wife has even less subjectivity than her ear-
lier manifestations. In the two earliest versions, she is at least shown as
challenging Curley’s authority, taking a step toward being the subject
of her own text. This challenge, plus giving her a name and the added
farmhouse scene provide the character some depth and more presence
in the story of the earlier versions. Trapped within the patriarchal struc-
ture, she asserts herself, struggling to escape. Paradoxically, in the 1990s
version, when the women in the audience have enlarged their personal
and professional spheres, Curley’s wife is more circumscribed than ever.
Nameless, unassertive, and purposeless, she is, with a contemporary nod
to her victimhood, considerably reduced. Myra Macdonald has noted
that in Hollywood movies, woman is usually “put in her due place in
the patriarchal order by the end of the film” (27). In the novel, as in the
film versions, the threat woman presents is nullified by destroying her.
Having done this, the 1990s script allows the camera a final violation as
it moves phallically into her backside.

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Of Mice and Men has become a classic in our culture and one char-
acteristic of dramatic classics is that they contain characters who invite
endless new portrayals, characters who present challenges for each new
generation of actors. What else accounts for the numerous film versions
of Hamlet, just in our generation? And while I don’t mean to suggest any
analogy between Curley’s wife and Hamlet, they both embody puzzles for
their interpreters. Steinbeck understood the sexual objectification of this
character, her limitations in a masculine society. He explained to Claire
Luce that “No man has ever considered her as anything except a girl to
try to make” (Steinbeck and Wallsten 154). “It’s a devil of a hard part,”
he concluded, and time has validated his description. In his final view of
her, lying dead in a half-covering of yellow hay, the narrator of Steinbeck’s
novel observes: “the plannings and the discontent and the ache for atten-
tion were all gone from her face. She was very pretty and simple, and her
face was sweet and young” (90). In death, Steinbeck acknowledges her
aborted agency, focusing the narrative eye on her positive characteristics.
The camera eye has not been that respectful. In the first two versions,
once dead, she is gone, her only function to move the plot to it inexorable
conclusion. In the most recent version, while the meanness and the plan-
ning are both gone from her character, so is any sense of agency. The
problem of Curley’s wife, present since her inception, has not been solved.
In the medium of film as on stage and in text, she remains an interpreta-
tive puzzle and challenge.

Notes
1. Judith Crist was a guest for a film festival at the University of Texas at El
Paso in the early eighties. We were discussing Boorman’s Excalibur when she
made this observation to me. Since that time, whenever I am watching a period
piece, I am struck by the perspicacity of her remark. It seems particularly apt in
terms of this text.
2. My thanks to Albert Wong for making the illustrative drawings, taken from
relevant scenes in the videos of these three productions. Though I would have
liked to reproduce stills from the films, permission costs are prohibitive.
3. One marked difference is the addition of the character of Aunt Clara who is
only spoken about in the Milestone original and in Steinbeck’s text. In the Blake
version, a scene where George and Lennie visit with Aunt Clara comes early
in the script. The scene illustrates the close bond between the dissimilar men.

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George tries to leave Lennie with Aunt Clara, but cannot. E. Nick Alexander is
given credit for the teleplay.
4. Marilyn Monroe was the prototype for a new kind of sex-goddess. Unlike
her femme fatale predecessors, Marilyn projected a wraithlike image. She looked
seductive and voluptuous, even hard, but the minute she opened her mouth, she
communicated helplessness and vulnerability. One of her signature songs was her
sensuous rendition of “My Heart Belongs to Daddy.” Gloria Steinem comments
on the critical praise Monroe elicited for acting “babyishly seductive.” Marilyn
(New York: Henry Holt, 1986), 119.
5. Ruth P. Rubinstein, Dress Codes (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), 119. In
her chapter on seductive imagery, Rubinstein notes that in the 1800s and 1900s
sexual liaisons between older men and young females were satirized and discour-
aged, but that in the 1950s “the vulnerable look” as an alluring image initiated
by men was legitimized. (118–19). Audrey Hepburn, whose body was adolescent
and boyish, was seen as a seductive ideal. The baby doll look was the accompany-
ing fashion. Rubinstein also notes that since the 1950s our society has “sexualized
the ‘childlike’ look” (121). The globalization of this infantilization of sexuality is
further evidenced by a story from Japan: “A Plain School Uniform Is the Latest
Aphrodisiac,” New York Times, 2 April 1997: A4. This story reports that school-
girl uniforms is the latest turn-on for Japanese businessmen who frequent the
brothels in Tokyo.
6. “True Obsessions: Being Unfaithful to ‘Lolita’,” Chronicle of Higher Educa-
tion, 24 July 1998: B 7–8.
7. Rubinstein defines clothing semiotics as a “language” of clothing derived
from “the storehouse of images,” in our Western history and “significant only
when used in a specific social context” (7).
8. B. Ruby Rich, “In the Name of Feminist Film Criticism,” in Multiple
Voices in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Diane Carson, Linda Dittmar, Janice R.
Welsch (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1994), 28.
9. Christine Gledhill, “Image and Voice: Approaches to Marxist-Feminist
Film Criticism,” in Carson, Dittmar, and Welsch, Multiple Voices in Feminist
Film Criticism. Gledhill also argues that films present us with a version of woman
that we, as female spectators must reject because of the “ideology privileged as the
film’s ‘message’” (115).
10. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16 (Au-
tumn 1975): 6–18. Mulvey’s influential article established the priority that classic
American film gives to the male perspective, both narratively and visually. She
shifted the questions of gender in film from the representations on the screen to
the psychodynamic between spectator and screen.

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Works Cited
Canby, Vincent. “New Facets Highlighted in a Classic,” New York Times, 2 Oc-
tober 1992, Weekend: C5.
Garner, Jack. “‘Of Mice and Men’ Touches the Heart,” Gannett News Service, 15
October 1992.
Gledhill, Christine. “Image and Voice: Approaches to Marxist-Feminist Film
Criticism.” In Multiple Voices in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Diane Carson,
Linda Dittmar, Janice R. Welsch, 109–23. Minneapolis: University of Min-
neapolis Press, 1994.
Macdonald, Myra. Representing Women: Myths of Femininity in the Popular Me-
dia. London: Edward Arnold, 1995.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16 (Autumn
1975): 6–18.
“A Plain School Uniform is the Latest Aphrodisiac.” New York Times, 2 April
1997, A4.
Rich, B. Ruby. “In the Name of Feminist Film Criticism.” In Multiple Voices in
Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Diane Carson, Linda Dittmar, Janice R. Welsch,
27–47. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1994.
Rubinstein, Ruth P. Dress Codes. Boulder: Westview Press, 1995.
Steinbeck, Elaine and Robert Wallsten, eds. Steinbeck: A Life in Letters. New
York: The Viking Press, 1975.
Steinbeck, John. Of Mice and Men. 1937. New York: Penguin Books, 1993.
Steinem, Gloria. Marilyn. New York: Henry Holt, 1986.
“True Obsessions: Being Unfaithful to ‘Lolita.’” Chronicle of Higher Education, 24
July 1998: B 7–8.

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 CHAPTER SIXTEEN
DEADLY KIDS, STINKING DOGS, AND
HEROES: THE BEST LAID PLANS IN
STEINBECK’S OF MICE AND MEN
Louis Owens

I
n 1950, the eminent American man of letters Edmund Wilson dis-
missed Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath by writing, “it is as if human sen-
timents and speeches had been assigned to a flock of lemmings on their
way to throw themselves into the sea” (42). Thirty years later, in a New York
Times hatchet job on Steinbeck that masqueraded as a review of two new
Steinbeck biographies by Jackson Benson and Thomas Kiernan, Roger Sale
launched what the reviewer must have considered a definitive strike against
Steinbeck’s literary reputation, declaring that Steinbeck “seems a writer
without a source of strength,” and sneering, “there is a story to be told here,
which would stress how hollow Steinbeck’s dreams were, and how much he
did with the little gift he had” (10). There have been a few champions of
Steinbeck’s writing among academic and popular critics, such as Malcolm
Cowley, who wrote of The Grapes of Wrath, “A whole literature is sum-
marized in this book and much of it is carried to a new level of excellence”
(qtd. in Owens Re-vision 128), but voices such as Cowley’s have been in the
minority to say the least, and seldom found in the better universities.1
And the overriding damnation has been one of sentimentality. Alfred
Kazin, in 1956, indicated Steinbeck for “moral serenity” and “calculated
sentimentality” (qtd. in Hadella 19). Edwin Berry Burgum accused Stein-
beck’s values of being “paralyzed in the apathy of the sentimental” (qtd.
in Hadella 20).

Previously published in Steinbeck Studies, Fall 2002, 1–8. Used by permission of the
Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies.

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A writer with such indestructible international popularity as Stein-

beck deserves, perhaps, a closer scrutiny to see if such criticism is valid.
Is Steinbeck guilty of “moral serenity and calculated sentimentality”? If
so, then his popularity is perhaps easily explained by the mass of reader’s
collective appetite for the simple and sentimental, a reality of lowbrow
literary consumerism academic critics like to infer if not quite pronounce
in the more egalitarian late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. If
not, then is there more to his craft than Kazin and Wilson and company,
along with the academy, have been inclined to notice?
Of Mice and Men is an ideal subject for such scrutiny, for despite being
a Book of the Month Club selection and best seller still read in virtually
every high school in America, and, with minimal adaptation by Steinbeck,
winner of the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award as the best stage
production of 1937, this novella has been a particular target for critics
who decry sentimentality in literature. Typical is Freeman Champney,
who, in the Antioch Review, declared that “Of Mice and Men is little else
besides a variation on the theme ‘every man kills the thing he loves’” (qtd.
in Hadella 20).
Of Mice and Men was written to be simultaneously a readable play and
a stageable novel, an experiment that Steinbeck himself described as “a
tricky little thing designed to teach me to write for the theater” (Steinbeck
and Wallsten 132). The tricky little novel was first performed directly
from the text, with no playscript, by the Theatre Union in San Francisco
in the spring and summer of 1937 and then, after being adapted for stage
by Steinbeck and George S. Kaufman, opened on Broadway in November
1937, with 80 percent of the novel’s lines going into the playscript un-
changed. The novel’s protagonists, George and Lennie, are itinerant farm
workers who travel around together. George is small, wiry, rough, and
smart, while Lennie is a powerful giant with the intellectual and social de-
velopment of a toddler. George takes care of Lennie, Lennie works hard
for the two of them, and together they share a dream that creates a deep
bond, the dream of owning their own farm and no longer being alienated
from the product of their work or from themselves.
The cast of the novel, in addition to the dual protagonists, is simple.
At the top of the ranch hierarchy is “the boss,” who makes only a marginal
appearance. In the novel, this character is referred to only as “the boss,”
with no further explanation, but in the playscript Steinbeck underscores

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the boss’s position by having George ask, “Boss the owner?” to which the
old swamper, Candy, replies, “Naw! Superintendent. Big land company”
(Hadella 65). Next in line is the boss’s bad son, Curley, who suffers from a
clichéd little-man’s complex and wants to beat up big guys. Also living in
the ranch’s big house is Curley’s wife, who yearns pathetically for mean-
ingful recognition as a human being and therefore drives Curley mad with
fear he will lose his most valued possession. The ranch foreman, Slim, is
an omnipotent and omniscient sort of Nietzschean superman, who, as
Steinbeck writes,

. . . moved with a majesty only achieved by royalty and master crafts-

men. He was a jerkline skinner, the prince of the ranch. . . . There was a
gravity in his manner and a quiet so profound that all talk stopped when
he spoke. His authority was so great that his word was taken on any
subject, be it politics or love . . . His hatchet face was ageless. He might
have been thirty-five or fifty. His ear heard more than was said to him,
and his slow speech had overtones not of thought, but of understanding
beyond thought. His hands, large and lean, were as delicate in their ac-
tion as those of a temple dancer. (33–34)

At one point, George looks at Slim and sees “the calm, Godlike
eyes fastened on him” (40). Slim, as Steinbeck writes him, calls to mind
Nietzche’s description of ubermensch Goethe, a man who has “disciplined
himself into wholeness, [who] created himself” and became “the man of
tolerance, not from weakness but from strength . . . a spirit who has become
free” (Kaufman2). Throughout the novel, Slim is depicted in near priestly
terms. He appears to represent infinite justice and wisdom and is an as-
cetic, beyond sex, beyond temptation by Curley’s wife, Curley’s violence,
or the ordinary weaknesses of life. Unlike all of the other characters, he
seems unaffected by loneliness or the transcendent homesickness that
haunts the novel. Slim is also the familiar American cowboy hero: solitary,
stoic, above common needs and desires, serving out justice from his god-
like, intuitive sense of right and wrong.
Next in the apparent hierarchy of the ranch is Carlson, a powerfully
built and surly subordinate to Slim. Then comes Candy, an aging and
crippled farmhand on the verge of being utterly useless, and Crooks, the
Black stable hand with a twisted back and properly bitter perspective on
the white world surrounding him. On this California farm George and

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Lennie’s dream takes a cropper when Lennie kills Curley’s wife and in a
final, intensely lachrymose scene, George shoots his best friend while in-
toning the words of their shared dream. We all cry. It’s a heart-breaking,
sentimental story.
In this reading of Of Mice and Men, George and Lennie share an
impossible dream, on the one hand a version of the Jeffersonian agrarian
dream of a piece of land—the American Dream—but more significantly
a dream of brotherhood in a fallen world where we are all the children
of Cain marked for our sins and set against one another in this last place
to the east of the lost Eden. In a fallen Garden where men and women
drift past one another alone and infinitely lonely, George and Lennie at
least have each other, and together they symbolize humanity’s inescapable
need to be connected, to touch another human being profoundly in some
inarticulate way. George and Lennie have what Curley’s wife, Candy,
and Crooks all long for: meaningful human contact, something like love.
When George shoots Lennie, George is not only killing his dream, but
more importantly he is acting as his brother’s keeper, making the ultimate,
and ultimately heroic, gesture of sacrifice and responsibility. As I wrote
in my 1985 book, John Steinbeck’s Re-Vision of America, “Cain’s question is
the question again at the heart of this novel: ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’
And the answer . . . is an unmistakable confirmation” (101). Slim, the
God-like foreman of the ranch, validates George’s heroic action when
he sits down close to George and says, “You hadda, George, I swear you
hadda” (107).
In this reading of the novel, Lennie may be read as something like a
primal innocent, as Slim suggests when he tells George, “He’s jes’ like a
kid, ain’t he,” and George answers, “Sure he’s jes’ like a kid. There ain’t no
more harm in him than a kid neither, except he’s so strong” (43). Curley’s
wife tells Lennie, “You’re nuts. . . . But you’re a kinda nice fella. Jus’ like
a big baby” (90), and half a page later we read, “And then she was still,
for Lennie had broken her neck” (91). Candy sums it up when they find
her body: “He’s such a nice fella. I didn’t think he’d do nothing like this”
(95). Lennie dies because he can’t function in society. All he seeks is the
same thing everyone seeks: human connection, warmth. This is what
drives every character in the book, including poor Curley’s wife. Pathos
results from the novella’s illumination of our human inability to transcend
aloneness and loneliness.

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In this reading, George is the modernist hero, the little man who
makes the only gesture of control possible by sacrificing what he will lose
anyway. . . . Readers love a good heart-rending in fiction. Thus read, this
novel might well strike many of us as what Alfred Kazin called “calcu-
lated sentimentality” designed to leave its readers emotionally moved but
certainly not intellectually or morally challenged (309). If this were the
only story here, we would be forced to surrender Steinbeck to the anti-
sentimental mob storming the literary castle. But there are other more
interesting novels to be found in Of Mice and Men.
A non-teleological reading of Of Mice and Men can evoke a quite dif-
ferent kind of story, not a sentimental one at all. In The Log from the Sea
of Cortez (published originally in 1941 as Sea of Cortez), Steinbeck and
his friend Edward F. Ricketts define what they called non-teleological
thinking as a non-causal and non-blaming viewpoint (110). Steinbeck had
begun to investigate this kind of viewpoint as early as his second novel, To
a God Unknown (1933), and he had developed it further in The Pastures
of Heaven (1932) and In Dubious Battle (1936). His method of incorpo-
rating non-teleological thinking into his fiction in the first two of these
works was to construct surface plots that lead the reader to draw erroneous
teleological conclusions: in To a God Unknown, Joseph Wayne sacrifices
himself and brings rain to a parched land; in Pastures, there is a curse that
destroys lives in an Eden-like valley.
Steinbeck’s working title for Of Mice and Men was “Something
That Happened.” Reading the novel through this title, in a non-
blaming or non-causal way, Lennie’s murder of Curley’s wife and his
death at George’s hands are part of something that just happens. No one
is to blame. The brutal facts are that Lennie Small was born too small
in mental and emotional range and too large in physical dimension and
that he is dangerous. It is not Lennie’s fault that he kills mice, puppies,
and vulnerable young women. He is incapable of the kind of control that
would prevent such awful things from happening because he was born
that way. He is indeed a “baby” or a “kid,” and he ain’t mean. But he’s
dangerous. In this reading, Lennie is an accident of nature, born with
something missing. No one is to blame for the fact that Lennie kills
things, and no one is to blame for Lennie’s inability to survive within
society. Society is not to blame when it rids itself of that which endan-
gers it. It’s a simple thing, not a tragedy. There’s nothing more terrifying

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to contemplate than a giant toddler set loose upon the world. If they’d
gotten the dream farm, Lennie would have killed the rabbits. He would
have killed the neighbors.
The opening and closing scenes of Of Mice and Men are nearly identi-
cal. Each scene takes place beside a pool in the Salinas River, as evening
is coming on. In the opening scene, two men—George and Lennie—walk
down a trail to the pool. In the final scene, two men—George and
Slim—walk up the same trail away from the pool. In both scenes, a little
snake with a periscope head swims across the still pool. There seems to be
perfect balance between beginning and end; nothing has really changed.
However, in the novel’s final scene, a heron stands motionless in the pool,
and “A silent head and beak lanced down and plucked the water snake out
by the head, and the beak swallowed the little snake while its tail waved
frantically” (99). We cannot read tragedy into the little snake’s frantic
death, just as we should not read tragedy into Lennie’s death. That’s just
the way life is. A paragraph after the demise of the water snake, we find
that “Another little water snake swam up the pool, turning its periscope
head from side to side” (100). Just as one little snake replaces another,
Slim has replaced Lennie as George’s friend, and surely Slim will be a
more practical friend than the lumbering, deadly Lennie. Nothing has
really changed. Something happened, that’s all. Steinbeck has carefully
neutralized the lachrymose sentimental-ism of the previous reading.
Critics have offered other readings of this novel, including quite per-
suasive Jungian analyses. Steinbeck was acquainted with Joseph Camp-
bell, who had hung out at Ricketts’s laboratory on Cannery Row and even
read and commented upon a draft of To a God Unknown—undoubtedly
affecting revision of that wasteland novel—and Steinbeck read Jung and
even wrote a cleverly Jungian story called “The Snake.” It is not difficult at
all to read Lennie as George’s “shadow-self” and Curley’s wife his “anima”
in Jungian terms, as critics have done (Hadella 52–55). At the same time,
it is hard to avoid a socio-political reading of this novel that falls between
Steinbeck’s exploration of Communist Party organized labor strife in
In Dubious Battle and the great call for social change that would be The
Grapes of Wrath. In such a reading, the ranch is a microcosm of capitalist
America. The boss is not the owner but a superintendent. The novel’s
characters are nothing more than capital used to generate profit. Slim is a
version of Owen Wister’s famous Virginian, a factotum who implements

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the will of the corporate owners. The ranch hands are used up, and when
they are no longer useful, like Candy’s dog, they are disposed of.
Crooks, the Black “stable buck” as he’s called, is an animated re-
minder of America’s slave-holding economy, his twisted back evidence
of the human cost of that economy. The fact that Crooks’s family once
possessed a farm identical to the dream-farm George and Lennie yearn
for underscores his commonality with these men who are fodder for the
machine, but the volume of the California civil code for 1905 that sits
on Crooks’s shelf testifies to his awareness of difference. Just as Candy
expects to be fired soon because of his age and lost hand—a significant
liability for someone who is a “hired hand”—Crooks will soon be disposed
of because of his age and damaged back. Crooks links his fate to that of
Candy’s dog when he says, “They say I stink. Well, I tell you, you all of
you stink to me” (68), and he does the same for Lennie when he tells him
that if George doesn’t come back, “They’ll tie ya up with a collar, like a
dog” (72). Should we miss this message of bondage, Steinbeck fills the
novel with the rattling of halter chains from offstage.
Curley’s nameless wife, with her “sausage” curls and red “mules,” (31)
is defined as property, nameless except as property. “Well, ain’t she a
looloo?” (51) one of the ranch hands says, and we should not be surprised
to find that the foreman’s puppy-producing dog is called Lulu. Curley’s
wife is equated with the other chattel of the ranch, including the most
powerless of the workers. It is Curley’s wife who unconsciously clarifies
Lennie’s value in this world when she calls him a “Machine.” Lennie is a
profit-making machine, valuable until it malfunctions, when it must be
gotten rid of. In this reading, George “uses” Lennie, and there is a hierar-
chy of those who use and are used.
Thus far, we can legitimately find not only the sentimental novel crit-
ics have decried, but also a Jungian novel critics have delighted in probing,
and a very political novel befitting Steinbeck’s reputation as social critic
or author of what has been erroneously called social realism. There is,
however, yet a still more interesting reading of this little novel, a reading
that begins to open up when we consider the various deaths that punctu-
ate the story.
The first victims we became aware of are the puppies that Slim
drowns. In Slim’s first scene, we learn that his bitch, Lulu has “slung” nine
pups the night before, as he puts it. “I drowned four of ’em, right off,” he

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tells George. “She couldn’t feed that many. . . . I kept the biggest” (OMM
35). Immediately, Carlson begins agitating for Slim to give Candy one of
the pups so that they can shoot Candy’s old dog. “That dog of Candy’s is
so God damn old,” Carlson says, “he can’t hardly walk. Stinks like hell,
too” (36). It becomes quickly apparent that Candy’s dog’s major sin is
stinking. “I can smell that dog a mile away” (36), Carlson complains, add-
ing later, “He don’t have no fun. . . . And he stinks to beat hell” (45). To
give his argument the kind of humanitarian bent euthanasia proponents
prefer, he says, “Well, you ain’t bein’ kind to him keepin’ him alive” (45).
Despite Carlson’s argument, there is no evidence that the old dog is un-
happy or suffering terribly as he lies faithfully by Candy’s bed. The truth
is he’s simply an annoyance—he stinks—and he’s too old to be useful,
though we’re told that he was a great sheep dog in his prime.
Carlson turns to the God-like Slim for the final judgment, and Stein-
beck writes, “The skinner had been studying the old dog with his calm
eyes. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘You can have a pup if you want to. . . . Carl’s right,
Candy. That dog ain’t no good to himself. I wisht somebody’d shoot me
if I got old an’ a cripple’” (45). It isn’t difficult to imagine how Candy,
who is old and crippled himself, might be wondering if Slim will shoot
him next. To make sure the reader places ultimate responsibility for the
dog’s fate with Slim, Steinbeck adds, “Candy looked helplessly at him, for
Slim’s opinions were law” (45). Then again, just before the dog is led away
for execution, Steinbeck writes, “Candy looked a long time at Slim to try
to find some reversal. And Slim gave him none” (47).
We don’t have to accept Slim’s rationale for drowning four puppies.
Of course, the mother could have fed all nine, since dogs have been doing
such things for millennia. However, had Slim allowed nine to live, the
biggest and most valuable of the litter might not have become even bigger
and more valuable. Slim was simply practicing a kind of Social Darwin-
ism, assisting natural selection. And, of course, we don’t have to accept
either Carlson’s or Slim’s rationale for the execution of Candy’s dog. The
old dog was simply unproductive and unpleasant, an impediment to the
smooth functioning of the bunkhouse and ranch society. There are other
unproductive and therefore relatively valueless inhabitants of the ranch, of
course, as Curley’s wife suggests when she enters Crooks’s room after Cur-
ley and George and the others have gone to town. Looking at Lennie and
Candy and Crooks, she says, “They left all the weak ones here” (77). The

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fact that she, too, has been left behind and is drawn to the light of Crooks’s
room implicates her profoundly in this company of the doomed.
No one who reads Of Mice and Men can possibly miss the parallels
between the shooting of Candy’s dog and Lennie’s execution by George.
Steinbeck first makes sure that Carlson describes exactly how he will
shoot the old dog and then shows George shooting Lennie in exactly
the same way with the same gun. The unmistakable message is that dog
and man are both annoyances and impediments to the smooth working
of the ranch. One stinks and one kills too many things. But why shoot
Lennie, with precisely the same weapon in precisely the same way? One
reading would have us believe that Lennie’s death is inevitable or that
George is saving Lennie from a fate worse than death. When the body of
Curley’s wife is discovered, Slim tells George, “I guess we gotta get ’im”
(97). George pleads with body language against what is implicit in Slim’s
words. Steinbeck writes, “George stepped close. ‘Couldn’ we maybe bring
him in an’ they’ll lock him up?’” (97). But just as he would give Candy’s
dog no reprieve, Slim denies George this hope, replying, “An’ s’pose they
lock him up an’ strap him down and put him in a cage. That ain’t no good,
George” (97). Clearly, Slim is telling George that Lennie has to die. He
is making the decision that Lennie is better off dead, just as he did with
Candy’s dog. Siim is playing God.
Of Mice and Men is an extraordinarily efficient and carefully crafted
little book in which every word, every sound, every nuance matters from the
off-stated clanging of horseshoes to the slant of light across the bunkhouse
doorway. However, one glaring bit of questionable writing stands out.
Why, one wonders, does Steinbeck feel it necessary to repeat the name of
Carlson’s gun so many times? When Carlson offers to shoot the old dog,
Candy says hopefully, “You ain’t got no gun.” Carlson replies, “The hell I
ain’t. Got a Luger” (47). Later, after they find Curley’s wife’s body, Carlson
says, “I’ll get my Luger.” Then on the same page, Steinbeck writes, “Carlson
came running in. ‘The bastard’s stole my Luger,’ he shouted” (97). Fourteen
lines later, Curley says, “He got Carlson’s Luger” (98). Six pages later, when
George shoots Lennie, we read, “He reached in his side pocket and brought
out Carlson’s Luger . . .” (105). Why repeat the name of the gun five times
in such rapid succession that the repetition stands out glaringly?
To refresh my memory about the dangers and uses of repetition, I
consulted James A. Hefferman and John E. Lincoln’s Writing: A College

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Handbook, a text I used in a classroom at UC Davis in 1982 and for some

unfathomable reason still have on my shelves. Looking up “repetition” in
the index, I found this:

How do you emphasize your main point? . . . the two most important
ways of emphasizing a point are repetition and arrangement. . . . You
may have been told that you should never repeat a word or phrase when
you write, that you should scour your brain or your thesaurus for syn-
onyms to avoid using a word or phrase again. This is nonsense. If rep-
etition gets out of control, it will soon become monotonous and boring.
But selective repetition can be highly useful. . . . This selective repetition
keeps the eye of the reader on the writer’s main point. (108–9)

Why would Steinbeck want to keep the reader’s eye on not just a gun
but specifically a Luger pistol? The Luger has an interesting history. As a
gun-collector’s note puts it, “Without a doubt, the Luger semiautomatic
pistol is one of the most famous firearms of the twentieth century.” And,
of course, it is famous for its association with the German military in
both World War I and World War II. The Luger pistol was named for
its designer, George Luger, in Karlsruhe, Germany, at the end of the
nineteenth century. Following modification, the 1904 Luger became
the weapon of choice for the German Navy and Army; and after 1904
“German military sales accounted for the vast majority of Lugers ever
produced” (“History” n.p.). “The Luger was the standard German side
arm throughout World War I. Luger production continued sporadically
during the post-war period, in part due to restrictions on German arms
manufacture imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. The allies permitted
official production to begin [again] in 1925 at Simson and Company.
Simson, however, was owned by Jews, and the company was liquidated
when the Nazis came into power. The Luger manufacturing machinery
was purchased by Krieghoff. Mauser purchased . . . Luger manufacturing
machinery in 1929, and produced Lugers until the later part of World
War II” (Chapman n.p.).
Here is a professional description of this famous gun:

The Luger is a fairly complicated pistol, requiring quite a bit of precision

hand-fitting to manufacture, and tight tolerances between parts. These
things contribute to its accuracy, but detract from reliability. Even for its

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time, the Luger was considered complex, expensive, large, and powerful.
The factors limited civilian sales’ especially given the ubiquity of small,
cheap Browning-style pistols. Ultimately, even for military applications,
more reliable and cheaper pistols replaced it. Even a little dirt on the
exposed parts of the firing mechanism on the left side can cause failure
to function. (Chapman n.p.)

Why would a ranch hand own such a delicate and expensive gun
and keep it under his bunk? It would very likely have been a trophy from
World War I, though there’s nothing to indicate that Carlson is a vet-
eran, and the novel contains no allusions to that war. It seems likely that
Steinbeck wanted to associate Carlson and the gun that kills both dog and
man with Germany. If we pursue that line of thought, it is interesting to
note that the name “Carl” not only echoes the name of the town in which
the Luger was created, Karlsruhe, but also derives from the Old High
German word “karal,” a peasant or bondman ranking below a thane who
carries out the will of “the boss” and Carlson the bondman, the churlish
muscle of the ranch. Steinbeck, a student of old and middle English and
translator of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur to American English, and, as his
biographer Jack Benson called him, a polymath, would very likely have
known this. Steinbeck loved this kind of play in his fiction, as can be seen
even in such a light book as the 1954 novella, The Short Reign of Pippin IV,
where he places his protagonist in a house on Avenue de Marigny to sub-
tly remind those of us who may happen to know the history of the name
of Enguerrand de Marigny, the royal chamberlain and principal minister
of finance to Phillip IV of France, the destruction of the Templars, all of
which history plays a significant role in the deep structure of that novel
(Owens “Deep Dissembler” 252). Steinbeck was a voracious reader, stu-
dent of history, and sharp political observer.
It’s probably obvious by now that I’m attempting to lead you toward
the theme of eugenics and its association with fascism in this novel, a
reading that may admittedly seem to stretch the fabric of the text a bit.
But consider these questions and the pattern they suggest: Did Slim really
have to drown those puppies? Did they really have to shoot Candy’s dog?
Did George really have to shoot Lennie? Slim’s dog could have raised
nine puppies, though they might have all been less impressive specimens.
Candy’s dog could have been given a bath and allowed to sleep in the

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bunkhouse, or Candy could have kept the old dog in the barn where only
poor Crooks would have smelled him. Finally, as George suggests, there
is no reason at all that Lennie could not have been locked up where he
wouldn’t be able to accidentally kill things. None of these deaths had the
inevitability the novel pretends to imply.
In 1936, when Steinbeck was writing his experimental novella, most
Americans did not know much about circumstances in Germany, even
though the concentration camp at Dachau had opened as early as 1933,
followed a few months later by Buchenwald. In July of 1933 the Nazis
had passed a law allowing for the forced sterilization of those found by a
Heredity Court to have genetic defects. In November of that same year,
they passed a “Law against Habitual and Dangerous Criminals” allow-
ing beggars, homeless, alcoholics, and the chronically unemployed to
be interned in concentration camps. In June of 1935, laws were passed
allowing for forced abortions to prevent hereditary diseases from being
passed on. Meanwhile, outside of Germany, the Euthanasia Legalization
Society, later to be called the Euthanasia Society, was founded in England
in 1935, and the Euthanasia Society of America in 1938. Eugenics was
very much in the air on both sides of the Atlantic at this time. According
to Steinbeck biographer Jackson J. Benson, Steinbeck’s fascination with
the idea of what he called the “phalanx,” or group-man, came partly “out
of discussions with Ed [Ricketts] about the theories of W.C. Allee, the
University of Chicago biologist” and that Steinbeck was also reading John
Elof Boodin at the same time in the early thirties (267).3 In the summer
of 1933, Steinbeck showed a short essay entitled “Argument of Phalanx”
to his friend Dick Albee, an essay articulating Steinbeck’s concept of what
he called “group-man.” In his biography, Benson writes:

In recalling the background for “Argument of Phalanx,” Albee noted

the importance of the fact that the early thirties was a time when mass
movements were much discussed. . . . Many watched and discussed the
progress of the Soviet Union and thought of it as a possible model, and
at the same time, of course, Hitler was leading another mass socialist
movement in Germany. There, strikes, veterans’ marches, protest rallies,
and other mass demonstrations were commonplace news. That Stein-
beck was now keenly aware of all of this activity, at home and abroad, is
clear from his many references to such movements in his letters of the

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period. The transformation of Germany was perhaps one of the most

dramatic contemporary examples available to Steinbeck, and he wrote
Dook [Sheffield in 1933]: “Think of the impulse which has suddenly
made Germany overlook the natures of its individuals and become what
is has. Hitler didn’t do it. He merely speaks about it.” (269–70)

Nine days later, on June 30, 1933, Steinbeck would write to Sheffield
to say,

The investigations have so far been gratifying. I find that in Anthro-

pology, Doctor Ellsworth Huntington, in History and cultural aspects,
Spengler and Ouspenski, in folk lore and in unconscious psychology,
Jung, in economic phases of anthropology, Briffault, in biology, Allee,
and in physics, Shondringer, Planck, Bohr, Einstein, Heisenberg have
all started heading in the same direction. None has gone far, and none
apparently is aware of the work of the others, but each one is headed in
the same direction and the direction is toward my thesis. (Benson 270)

Obviously drawn to the subject by his growing obsession with his

“phalanx” theory, Steinbeck was paying close attention to events in Eu-
rope in the early thirties, at a time when most Americans weren’t aware of
the darkest realities of Nazi Germany. We also know that Steinbeck had
been reading not merely Darwin exhaustively but such writers as Boodin,
W. C. Allee, Mark Braubard, William Emerson Ritter, and Ellsworth
Huntington, all of whom deal with eugenics in their writings, even if
only to repudiate it. Ritter, in his 1919 book The Unity of the Organism,
goes so far as to blame German social Darwinists for World War I, while
Huntington, in Civilization and Climate (1924), makes claims for racial
superiority and, according to one critic, “issues a call to eugenic action”
(Hearle 251). One critic, Kevin Hearle, finds the direct influence of the
“racialized discourse” of these authors in Steinbeck’s writings on the dis-
placed migrants in California in the thirties, particularly in his 1938 essays
collected as Their Blood Is Strong, which would lay the groundwork for The
Grapes of Wrath.
Based on the reading we know he did, Steinbeck was clearly aware
of the widespread eugenics movement, which as early as 1873 had seen a
call in England for the “gifted class” to consider those of “inferior moral,
intellectual, and physical qualities” as “enemies of the state” if these in-

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ferior classes continue to breed (Galton 89). And based on his awkward
repetition of the word “Luger,” in Of Mice and Men, it would seem that he
wanted his reader to associate the supposed “mercy killings” of the novel
with the rise of Fascism in Germany.
In the end, this reading takes us far afield from the sentimentalism of
our first reading. This version of the novel is neither heart-breaking nor a
coldly objective rendering of non-teleological reality, nor is it a call for so-
cial action to better the lives of American workers. Rather, in this version
of the novel, Steinbeck is laying out a cautionary tale deeply engaged with
the profound human crisis of his times. In Of Mice and Men’s final scene,
George sits despondently beside his friend’s body, and Steinbeck writes,
“Slim came directly to George and sat down beside him, sat very close to
him. ‘Never you mind,’ said Slim. ‘A guy got to sometimes’” (104). Slim
is clearly displacing Lennie who in the novel’s opening scene sat “close to
George.” But more interestingly here, in Slim’s words, Steinbeck removes
the killing of Lennie from the status of an isolated event and places it in
a pattern of behavior, something that a guy has to do sometimes, like the
drowning of puppies or shooting of old dogs. After Slim once again vali-
dates George’s action by saying, “You hadda, George. I swear you hadda,”
Slim adds, “Come on with me” (107), and the two walk up the same trail
that George and Lennie had walked down in the novel’s first scene.
I believe that when he says, “Come on with me,” Slim is inviting
George into a new belief system, an altered way of viewing the world.
Aiming up the trail toward the highway, symbolically George and Slim
are moving out into the world, a kind of prophet and apostle of a new or-
der, as if George has come into Slim’s world to be purged of what Lennie
represents, changed, and sent forth to do God’s work, as Slim defines it.
There’s not much sentimental about that particular story.

Notes
1. Louis Owens read this essay at UC Davis in the fall of 2001 and was sched-
uled to read it at the Steinbeck Centennial Conference at Hofstra University but
poor health prevented him from attending. This essay was to be part of a larger
work, a revision of his 1985 book on John Steinbeck. Before his death, he agreed
to have this essay published in Steinbeck Studies. Western American Literature is
publishing the essay jointly with Steinbeck Studies.

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LOUIS OWENS

2. Louis Owens did not complete his notes before his death. We have been
unable to locate the source of the Walter Kaufman references because he wrote
numerous books about and translations of Nietzsche.
3. Benson points out that Steinbeck read reprints of Boodin lectures on such
subjects as “The Existence of Social Minds” and “Functional Realism,” as well as
Boodin’s books, A Realistic Universe and Cosmic Evolution and others later (268).
Steinbeck would later ask Boodin for permission “to use some of his philosophy
in his own work” (269). [Owens note]

Works Cited
Benson, Jackson J. The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer. New York:
Viking, 1984.
Chapman, Richard. “Firearm by Type.” www.recguns.com/Sources/IIIC2ka.1
.html
Galton, Francis. Frazer’s Magazine 7 (1873); quoted in Peter Medawar and Jean
Medawar. Aristotle to Zoos: A Philosophical Dictionary of Biology. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1983.
Hadella, Charlotte Cook. Of Mice and Men: A Kinship of Powerlessness. New York:
Twayne, 1995.
Hearle, Kevin. “There Are American People: The Spectre of Eugenics in Their
Blond Is Strong and The Grapes of Wrath.” In Beyond Boundaries: Rereading
John Steinbeck, ed. Susan Shillinglaw and Kevin Hearle, 243–54. Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press, 2002.
Hefferman, James A., and John E. Lincoln. Writing: A College Handbook. New
York: Norton, 1982.
“The History of the Pistole Parabellum.” Luger Forum. Founded by John Chap-
man. 1988. www.lugerforum.com/history.html.
Kazin, Alfred. On Native Grounds. 1942. New York: Doubleday Anchor Books,
1956.
Owens, Louis. John Steinbeck’s Re-Vision of America. Athens: University of Geor-
gia Press, 1985.
———. “Steinbeck’s ‘Deep Dissembler’: The Short Reign of Pippin IV.” In The
Short Novels of John Steinbeck, ed. Jackson J. Benson, 249–57. Durham: Duke
University Press, 1990.
Sale, Roger. “Stubborn Steinbeck.” New York Times Book Review 20 (March
1980): 10.
Steinbeck, Elaine and Robert Wallsten, eds. Steinbeck: A Life in Letters. New
York: Viking, 1975.

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Steinbeck, John. The Log from the Sea of Cortez. 1951. New York: Penguin,
1995.
———. Of Mice and Men. 1937. New York: Penguin, 1993.
Wilson, Edmund. Classics and Commercials. New York: Farrar, Straus & Com-
pany, 1950.

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 CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
READING THE CHARACTER OF
CROOKS IN OF MICE AND MEN:
A BLACK WRITER’S PERSPECTIVE
Charles Johnson

Got one face

For white folks to see,
Got another one
That’s really me.
—Old Black American Folk Verse

T
hree generations of readers world-wide have recognized John
Steinbeck to be a powerful storyteller, and I believe it can be ar-
gued that his short, haunting novel, Of Mice and Men, contributed
to shaping our twentieth-century definitions for a modern, literary classic.
During the Great Depression, it also presented a strong and influential
indictment of racial segregation, for which Steinbeck is still praised today,
and rightly so. I first encountered this story when I was a young, African-
American reader, someone who was not armed in his teens with aesthetic
theories or various critical methodologies for dissecting and interpreting
fiction; and, at that time, I was not yet, of course, a novelist or a teacher
of the craft of literary fiction for three decades. For the most part, the
characters in Of Mice and Men are white males, with two very important
exceptions: Curley’s wife, who is central to the story’s conflict, and a mar-

“Reading the Character of Crooks in Of Mice and Men: A Black Writer’s Perspective”
by Charles Johnson. Copyright © 2007 by Charles Johnson. Originally appeared in John
Steinbeck and His Contemporaries (Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2007). Reprinted by permission
of George Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author.

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 READING THE CHARACTER OF CROOKS IN OF MICE AND MEN

ginalized “stable buck” (OMM 20) who is referred to only as Crooks. It is

this latter character I wish to reflect upon today, deeply and in detail.
I want to examine him in ways I was not equipped to do forty years ago,
because his presence in this novel adds a great deal to its thematic power
(Chapter Four is entirely framed around Crooks), yet his portrait presents
something of a challenge for African-American readers, especially for young
ones. This is not just a literary question. Rather, it is one of the most im-
portant cultural problems facing any multi-racial society. We recently saw
just how vexing a problem it can be when Muslims world-wide reacted so
violently to twelve cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad first in the
Danish press, then in newspapers throughout Europe and America. The
issue is this: How do we—as artists and thinkers—portray the racial and
cultural Other? Black Americans have by necessity always been acutely
sensitive to the fictional portraits of themselves created by white Americans
in the early twentieth century, even when those portraits are as historically
important and sympathetically drawn as the one Steinbeck offers us in Of
Mice and Men. Let me see if I can clarify what I mean by that statement.
All black Americans, and all people belonging to a racial and ethnic
minority in a predominantly white society, must learn at a very early age to
“read” all manner of phenomenon from the nuanced and polyvalent stand-
point of a bi-fold consciousness. Lately, I have been calling this an “Aleph
consciousness.” I borrowed this term from Jorge Luis Borges’ short story
“The Aleph,” where he describes the aleph as “the place where . . . all the
places of the world, seen from every angle, coexist.”1 It is the first letter of
the Hebrew alphabet, and of its shape Borges says that it “is that of a man
pointing to the sky and the earth, to indicate that the lower world is the map
and mirror of the higher.”2 From its vantage point, Borges says, one can see
“simultaneous night and day.”3 Historically, black Americans, Asians, and
Hispanics had to develop this epistemic skill, and doing so required a lot of
work, because it was incumbent upon them to know the white curriculum
and its assumptions as well—and as thoroughly—as the white students sit-
ting beside them, approaching with openness and humility (and sometimes
clenched teeth) all those works composed by whites for whites with people
of color never really part of the author-audience equation. They learned mo-
mentarily to identify with (though not necessarily internalize) the themes,
figures, and tropes of the racial Other, to absorb the products of the Greek
and the Judaic, the Roman, French, and British, to emotionally empathize

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and project themselves behind the eyes of whites as diverse as Homer and the
Beowulf poet, Goethe and Dostoyevsky, Virginia Wolfe and Sylvia Plath.
For children of color, this has always been a matter of survival. They had to
know how to “read” American society in at least two ways. First, in terms of
what they knew about the enormous contributions African Americans have
made to this country since the time of the seventeenth-century colonies, a
knowledge received from other black people and from unrecorded stories
transmitted by family members and friends, which until only recently were
marginalized in our history books and in “mainstream” media. Secondly,
they had to understand, as any social (or racial) outsider must, the cultural
formations of a WASP society, because such intimate knowledge of the
white Other was necessary for navigating successfully through America’s
institutions—schools, jobs, social situations, etc.
So forty years ago when I first read Of Mice and Men, I found endear-
ing the relationship between the story’s two main characters, George Mil-
ton and Lennie Small. I found myself identifying with and caring about
them when George and Lennie imagine the American dream of owning
their own farm, a place where they will be safe and happy, and no longer
lost like other itinerant American workers during the Great Depression.
“Guys like us, that work on ranches,” George tells Lennie,

are the loneliest guys in the world. They got no family. They don’t be-
long no place. They come to a ranch an’ work up a stake and then they
go inta town and blow their stake, and the first thing you know they’re
poundin’ their tail on some other ranch. They ain’t got nothing to look
ahead to. (OMM 13–14)

That statement by George, delivered so early in the novel, and echoed

by other characters, is the existential premise or conflict—one of home-
lessness and loneliness—that shapes and directs the speech and actions of
every character and situation that Steinbeck presents. As a conflict, this
premise is universal and timeless, deriving its power from the fundamental
human desire to escape the aloneness and apparent separateness we ex-
perience throughout life, replacing it with an idealized place or Promised
Land one calls “home,” where there is peace, love, and community. It was
that premise that enchanted me so when I was a teenager, just as it does
now, but because I identified with George and Lennie—as the author

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encouraged me to do—I did not forty years ago reflect deeply on how this
universal theme of loneliness and homelessness appears differently, and
reveals its most radical dimensions, when it is incarnated in the life of a
black fictional character like Crooks.
Now, scores of writers have written about the themes of loneliness
and homelessness. But what distinguishes Steinbeck, and is a sign of his
genius, is that at the center of this story about the desire to find a home,
he places the most famous and iconic portrait we have in American litera-
ture of a friendship between two men, who could not be more opposite,
physically and mentally. As a teacher, I tell my apprentice writing students
to take a close look at George and Lennie as perfect examples of the dra-
matic principle that states how “character is the engine of plot.” However,
as a philosopher, looking at the book four decades after I first experienced
it, I would add that Steinbeck’s rendition of the friendship between these
two men dramatizes nicely Aristotle’s description of philia in Books 8 and
9 of Nicomachean Ethics.
For Aristotle, “man is a political creature and one whose nature is to
live with others.”4 Thus, the Greek term philia specifically refers not just
to friendship but also to loyalty to family, the polis (one’s political com-
munity), and one’s discipline. When speaking of friendship between two
people, Aristotle distinguishes three forms that this bond might take. The
first is based on utility, in which case people “do not love each other for
themselves but in virtue of some good which they get from each other.”5
The second form of friendship is based on pleasure and, like utility, Aris-
totle says, “it is not for their character that men love ready-witted people,
but because they find them pleasant. Therefore those who love for the
sake of pleasure do so for the sake of what is pleasant to themselves.”6 It
is only the third form of friendship that is truest for Aristotle, and this is
based on the good, on two people recognizing the virtue and character of
each other. It is a partnership founded on equality, says Aristotle, and it
is fulfilled when two friends live together.
Based on all we learn about George and Lennie, their friendship is
clearly not founded on utility or pleasure, certainly not for George Milton,
who in a moment of frustration, rages at Lennie:

God a’mighty, if I was alone I could live so easy. I could go get a job an’
work, an’ no trouble. No mess at all, and when the end of the month

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come I could take my fifty bucks and go into town and get whatever I
want. Why, I could stay in a cat house all night. I could eat any place
I want, hotel or any place, and order any damn thing I could think of.
An’ I could do all that every damn month. Get a gallon of whiskey, or
set in a pool room and play cards or shoot pool. . . . An’ whatta I got? I
got you! You can’t keep a job and you lose me ever’ job I get. Just keep
me shovin’ all over the country all the time. An’ that ain’t the worst. You
get in trouble. You do bad things and I got to get you out. . . . You crazy
son-of-a-bitch. You keep me in hot water all the time. (OMM 11)

Rather than pleasure or utility, George’s friendship with Lennie has

brought him only suffering and self-sacrifice. Then why, one asks, does
he travel with Lennie if his friend is that much trouble? The friendship
between these two men is so curious and atypical for the time and place
in which they live that two other characters in the story feel the need to
address it, perhaps because they feel there may be a little bit of eros—or
homosexual attraction—intermingled with philia. The boss on the ranch
where they find employment says, “Well, I never seen one guy take so
much trouble for another guy” (OMM 22). And a short time later, a jerk-
line skinner named Slim remarks that,

Funny how you an’ him string along together. . . . Hardly none of the
guys ever travel together. I hardly never seen two guys travel together.
You know how the hands are, they just come in and get their bunk and
work a month, and then they quit and go out alone. Never seem to give
a damn about nobody. It jus’ seems kinda funny a cuckoo like him and
a smart little guy like you travelin’ together. (OMM 39)

But throughout Of Mice and Men, we are given evidence that the bond
between George and Lennie is based entirely on character and virtue. For
example, George will not allow Slim to call Lennie a “cuckoo”: “‘He ain’t
no cuckoo,’” said George. “‘He’s dumb as hell, but he ain’t crazy. An’ I
ain’t so bright neither, or I wouldn’t be buckin’ barley for my fifty and
found’” (OMM 39). Slim agrees that Lennie is a “nice fellah” (OMM 40),
and that he isn’t “mean” (OMM 41). Earlier in the story, George pleads
Lennie’s case with the boss, insisting his friend is strong and a good
worker. In other words, he is constantly vouching for Lennie’s character.
Yet a reader will find it difficult to believe this is a friendship between

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two equals. Rather, it more resembles the unequal friendship Aristotle

describes when he speaks of the relationship between a father and a son,
or an elder to someone younger, for in this case, “Each party, then, neither
gets the same from the other, nor ought to seek it.”7 Steinbeck’s narrative
lets us know that there is a sense of unselfish duty involved in George’s
devotion to Lennie, primarily because he knew Lennie’s Aunt Clara, who
raised him, and, after Clara’s death, he gradually took her place as Len-
nie’s protector.
Steinbeck brings his odd couple to work at a ranch where social life
is destabilized by two somewhat thinly drawn characters, the boss’s son
Curley, about whom we only are told that he likes to pick fights with men
bigger than himself (like Lennie), and Curley’s unhappy, flirtatious wife.
This is a place best described by Slim when he says, “Maybe ever’body in
the whole damn world is scared of each other” (OMM 35). His observa-
tion is reiterated later by Curley’s wife, who says, “You’re all scared of each
other, that’s what. Ever’ one of you’s scared the rest is goin’ to get some-
thing on you” (OMM 77). At this ranch, everyone seems to live in fear
of Others, and that makes friendships—and especially inter-racial ones—
impossible. As characters, they lack ethnic definition or background; they
are simply “white,” not White Anglo Saxon Protestant or Italian or Irish
or Polish or Jewish or Welsh or Slav—they are just generically “white,”
which is a decision by the author that obliterates the historical and reli-
gious antagonisms among different kinds of “white” people. Among them
we see relationships only of utility. And the character most segregated
from relationships with others is the curious man named Crooks.
If you look even glancingly at the literal plot in Of Mice and Men,
you realize that Crooks is in no way instrumental to the causal sequence
of events and actions that lead to George’s tragic killing of Lennie at
the novel’s end. In fact, as far as storytelling is concerned, Crooks—as a
performer—can be eliminated. But if Crooks is not essential to the story’s
plot, he is crucial for elaborating the story’s theme. Given the details
Steinbeck provides for Crooks throughout the novel, and especially in
Chapter Four, it would seem that the stable buck would be the perfect
candidate for an Aristotelian friendship with others based on his charac-
ter, more ideal for such a partnership than even Slim, whom Steinbeck
calls a majestic “prince of the ranch” (OMM 33) in the longest and most
fantastic character sketch the novel contains.

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I say this because one of the first things we learn about Crooks is that
even though he has a crooked back (as his name implies) due to his hav-
ing been kicked by a horse, he is a good fighter, and defeated a skinner
named Smitty. He can throw horseshoes better than anyone else at the
ranch, where he has the longest tenure, which Steinbeck says is due to
his disability. When we first see him stick his head into the bunkhouse,
where he is not permitted to sleep with the others, but where even dogs
are allowed, his “lean Negro head” is “lined with pain,” but in his eyes
there is “patience” (OMM 50). Since he cannot go into town to visit Susy’s
cathouse, praised highly by the character Whit, we assume that Crooks
is celibate, which is also a sign of his emasculation, or at least of a de-
sexualization common among “positive” black characters created by white
authors in the early twentieth century. (Think of the asexual roles played
by Sidney Poitier in films of the 1950s and early ’60s. In other words, a
de-sexualized black male is no longer a threat.) Like Slim and Candy, he
can read. In the harness room, where his bunk is located, he “had books
. . . a tattered dictionary and a mauled copy of the California civil code
for 1905” (OMM 67), but significantly there is no Bible, the one text we
might expect to find in the home of a black person in the 1930s. The ab-
sence of a Bible in Crooks’ room suddenly makes this reader aware of the
absence in the novel of details that might point to a religious or spiritual
life for any of the characters portrayed; and that reminds us, of course,
that Of Mice and Men truly is a work of the modernist period in American
literature, a period when many authors either downplayed, dismissed or
omitted entirely the significance of religious faith in the lives of characters
portrayed in fiction.
Only the ranch’s boss and Slim, “the prince,” have visited his lodgings
until Chapter Four when he hesitantly invites Lennie and Candy inside
to talk, which suggests that Slim, whose primary characteristic in the
novel is kindness and empathy, is above the system of segregation on the
ranch and perhaps recognizes something of value in Crooks. Naturally,
we wonder, what did they talk about? Steinbeck does not tell us that. He
describes Crooks as “a proud, aloof man” (OMM 67). As a boy, he played
with white children on his father’s ten-acre ranch, and he found “some of
them was pretty nice” (OMM 70). On that California farm, says Crooks,
there was no other black family for miles around, a situation similar to his
life in Soledad, where he tells Lennie there is only one black family in the

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area. He says that “now there ain’t a colored man on this ranch” (OMM
70), implying perhaps that during his long employment there were others
in the past.
But those African Americans are gone, and Crooks generally has no
one to talk to, black or white. More than all the other characters in Of
Mice and Men, Crooks has thought philosophically about the epistemo-
logical meaning of loneliness, and about how inter-subjectivity is crucial
for confirming the truth of our perceptions. In what I feel is one of the
most important passages in the novel, Crooks says,

A guy sets alone out here at night, maybe readin’ books or thinkin’ or
stuff like that. Sometimes he gets thinkin’, an’ he got nothin’ to tell him
what’s so an’ what ain’t so. Maybe if he sees somethin’, he don’t know
whether it’s right or not. He can’t turn to some other guy and ast him if
he sees it too. He can’t tell. He got nothing to measure by. I seen things
out here. I wasn’t drunk. I don’t know if I was asleep. If some guy was
with me, he could tell me I was asleep, an’ then it would be all right. But
I jus’ don’t know. (OMM 73)

Now, compare this speech by Crooks to one made by phenomenolo-

gist Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his book, Adventures of the Dialectic:

My own field of thought and action is made up of imperfect meanings,

badly defined and interrupted. They are completed over there, in the
others who hold the key to them because they see sides of things that
I do not see, as well as, one might say, my social back. Likewise, I am
the only one capable of tallying the balance sheets of their lives, for their
meanings are also incomplete and are openings onto something that I
alone am able to see. I do not have to search very far for the others; I
find them in my experience, lodged in the hollows that show what they
see and what I fail to see. Our experiences thus have lateral relationships
of truth: all together, each possessing clearly what is secret to the other,
in our combined functionings we form a totality which moves toward
enlightenment and completion. . . . We are never locked in ourselves.8

Sadly, and because of racial segregation, Crooks is locked inside him-

self. Experientially, the Other is our mirror, our means for checking the
validity of our perspective. This is true in social relations as well as in the
method of science, which always begins with a first-person seeing of some

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phenomenon that must be confirmed by the perception of others. If lone-

liness and homelessness are the central themes in Of Mice and Men, then
Crooks, despite the minor role Steinbeck gives him in the novel, epito-
mizes these experiences more completely than all the other characters,
for as the descendent of slaves kidnapped in Africa, then brought against
their will to America, his original home lies across the Atlantic ocean,
and, in America during the 1930s, he is a second-class citizen denied a
true home among whites.
Yet when Crooks mentions fondly his two brothers (OMM 73), a
reader wonders why he apparently has no contact with them now. Or
with his parents, if they are still alive. If he can read, one assumes he can
write. Does he not correspond with his brothers, using them—as any black
person would—as mirrors to check his perceptions of the dangerous racial
world of the Great Depression? And what of the other black family in
Soledad? Where do they socialize and worship? If they have such places
for community, why can’t Crooks find fraternity there? By remaining on
this ranch, where he is treated so badly, Crooks chooses his own racial vic-
timization each and every day.
The novel makes one intriguing reference to a Jap cook, who feeds the
ranch hands and, we suppose, also provides meals for Crooks. Although
this cook is never on stage in Of Mice and Men, a reader wonders if he,
too, experiences the same loneliness and racial segregation as the stable
buck. In two of the film adaptations, he does appear for a second or two
and is like a prop in the background of dinner conversations between the
white workers, serving them and then quickly disappearing. A reader
naturally wonders if Crooks feels some comradeship with this unnamed
Asian cook, who does not sleep in the bunkhouse or visit Susy’s cathouse
either. On payday, when the ranch hands go into town, is it possible that
the Japanese cook and Crooks—both racial Outsiders left behind—might
play cards, share a bottle, or get to known each other? The author pro-
vides no evidence for that possibility, and perhaps is unable to imagine a
friendship between two people of color. Like many novels published be-
tween World War I and the 1960s, the text simply presupposes that white
people are the most important thing in the lives of black Americans.
The great American philosopher W. E. B. Du Bois, a contemporary
of Crooks, also understood this loneliness. We are told that Crooks reads
a great deal, but Steinbeck tells us very little about what he reads or even

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where he acquires these books. I cannot help but wonder if sometimes

Crooks is reading books by black Americans of his time during the Great
Depression—works by such Harlem Renaissance writers as Langston
Hughes, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, and Zora Neal Hurston, books
by Richard Wright, and Du Bois, who graduated from Harvard and says
in a taped interview that during his college days not one of his white class-
mates spoke to him.9 Sadly, his years at America’s most esteemed college
were even more segregated than the life of Crooks. In Of Mice and Men,
Steinbeck has Crooks “whine”—that is the word he uses, “whine”—about
his voracious book reading (OMM 72). He says to Lennie,

S’pose you didn’t have nobody. S’pose you couldn’t go back into the
bunk house and play rummy ’cause you was black. How’d you like that?
S’pose you had to sit out here an’ read books. Sure you could play horse-
shoes till it got dark, but then you got to read books. Books ain’t no
good. A guy needs somebody—to be near him. (OMM 72)

However, if Crooks has anywhere among his books a copy of Du Bois’

The Souls of Black Folks, published in 1903, he would see a black man de-
scribing a very different experience with books. “I sit with Shakespeare,”
writes Du Bois,

and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac
and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded
halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-
limbed earth and the tracery of stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius
and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor
condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil.10

Clearly, Du Bois possessed what I call an Aleph consciousness. He

can read white philosophers and novelists for the gems of color-blind truth
their works contain, and leave any bigotry they might have off to one side.
Through books, he can also find the human mirrors he needs to qualify
and correct his own perceptions. This skill of being bi-focal is possessed
by anyone who is a minority in a predominantly white society—by people
who are Jews in a gentile culture, by Muslims in America and Europe to-
day, and by women in a patriarchal society. But this is a timeless survival
skill that Crooks does not possess, nor does he seem to have the basic

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understanding of the racial world learned in childhood by people of color.

The historic black American solution to racially imposed loneliness and
homelessness was to embrace family. We can accept the novel’s statement
that the white characters are without families, for whatever reason. But
black Americans were compelled to come together as a people despised by
others, to shelter and protect family members and kin even to the point of
creating “extended families,” much as George assumes a protective role for
Lennie, and then extends his dream for his own farm to include Candy,
who is willing to put up most of the money for it. (Significantly, Crooks is
not invited to join them, although he does broach that idea.) Every racial
and ethnic minority in America in the 1930s—whether we are talking
about Asians, the Irish, Italians, Poles, Hispanics, or Jews—understood
the imperative of this strategy for survival, as African and Caribbean im-
migrants do today, because otherwise they would not have survived.
One other person comes to the place where Crooks is forced to
live. That person is Curley’s wife, and when she sees who is inside—
Crooks, Lennie and Candy—she says, “They left all the weak ones here.
. . . [OMM 77] Ever’body out doin’ som’pin. Ever’body! An’ what am I
doing? Standin’ here talking to a bunch of bindlestiffs—a nigger an’ a
dum-dum and a lousy ol’ sheep” (OMM 78). Candy is an old man who
is missing one hand. Lennie is mentally challenged. And Crooks? Well,
Curley’s wife describes him as being among the “weak” because he is
crippled and a Negro, two conditions which Steinbeck conflates into be-
ing synonymous in the novel.
Among the three “weak” characters in Of Mice and Men, Steinbeck
creates Crooks as what I would call a victim-savant. He is an insight-
ful thinker who clarifies the meaning of loneliness for us, but he is an
“outsider,” someone for whom the reader feels more pity than respect.
Contrast this with Steinbeck’s astonishingly divine portrait of Slim, a
white character he urges us to respect and admire based on such details
as his being “tall,” “ageless,” with “God-like eyes,” “gravity in his man-
ner and a quiet so profound that all talk stopped when he spoke,” and
he also possesses an “understanding beyond thought” (OMM 33–34).
(Does this description of Slim sound familiar? It should, because it occurs
as a cliché throughout novels about the West, and was immortalized by
John Wayne’s portraits of cowboys who are soft-spoken, tall, strong, and
deferred to by others.) Often in fiction published during the modernist

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period, the racial Outsider is given the role of being a vehicle for truth, a
truth that “insiders” and people who are privileged or conform to society
cannot know. White writers of novels and screenplays in the twentieth
century have often assigned the problematic position of victim-savant to
the American Negro—as they also did with native Americans. This is not
the most pleasant vehicle for the imagination of a person of color to in-
habit during the reading experience. And it was for this reason that when
I read Steinbeck’s classic in my teens, I was simply unable to identify or
sympathize very much with the way he presented Crooks, whose charac-
ter raises more questions than it answers. We can say he functions in the
novel as a “symbol.” But that is just another way of saying he is more of
an idea—Steinbeck’s idea of blacks—than he is a well-rounded, realistic
character.
Earlier, I said that Crooks seems to have virtues of character that
would make him a candidate for friendship. But while Steinbeck details
those virtues, he also includes serious defects in the personality of the
stable buck. Crooks is an extremely bitter man, who at first does not
want Lennie, and then Candy and Curley’s wife to enter his segregated
space, despite his intense hunger for friendship. Of the white men in the
bunkhouse, he says, “They play cards in there, but I can’t play because
I’m black. They say I stink. Well, I tell you, you all of you stink to me”
(OMM 68). That statement seems to contradict his being “patient,” which
we were told earlier. In Chapter Four, when Crooks asks Curley’s abrasive
wife to leave his room, she emasculates him when she replies, “Listen,
Nigger. . . . You know what I can do to you if you open your trap? . . .
[OMM 80] Well, you keep your place, Nigger. I could get you strung up
on a tree so easy it ain’t even funny” (OMM 81). Three film and television
adaptations of the novel made in the ’30s, ’80s, and ’90s omit this bris-
tling speech that Curley’s wife delivers to Crooks, as does the 1937 stage
adaptation (the actor’s edition) written by Steinbeck. The most recent
film version, starring Gary Sinise and John Malkovich, and adapted by
Horton Foote, removes Curley’s wife entirely from the scene in Crooks’
place in Chapter Four. Why Steinbeck, and such screenwriters as Eugene
Solow, E. Nick Anderson, and Horton Foote, took out this speech, I do
not know, because the fact that she does say this in the novel has great
implications for the portrayal of Crooks. Steinbeck says Crooks’ response
to this threat is “to grow smaller, and he pressed himself against the wall.

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. . . [OMM 80] [He] reduced himself to nothing. There was no personal-

ity, no ego—nothing to arouse either like or dislike” (OMM 81). He sits
“perfectly still, his eyes averted, everything that might be hurt drawn in”
(OMM 81) as he retreats into what Steinbeck calls “the terrible protective
dignity of the Negro” (OMM 79).
What shall we make of this passage repeatedly and deliberately deleted
from the film and theater versions? As critic Jim McWilliams recently
pointed out to me after reviewing a draft of this paper, what Curley’s wife
does with this threat is re-sexualize Crooks in order to bring about his sec-
ond emasculation in the novel. Furthermore, this putting of Crooks back
“in his place” is probably the psychological motive for his taking back his
earlier desire to join Lennie and Candy on the farm they hope to buy. On
the surface, the author is saying that the threat of death—the danger of a
lie told by a flirtatious white woman during the era of Jim Crow—makes
Crooks cowardly, and that this is the condition of the Negro who hopes
to survive in 1930s America. The truth of this situation is undeniable,
and for it there is enough documentation in the historical record for it to
assume the status of a cliché. But I would venture to say that for a young
(or old) black reader, and certainly for a black writer, something here rings
false. Crooks’ reaction and childlike repeating of the phrase, “Yes, ma’am”
as if he were an eighteenth-century slave, is hardly “dignified.” I don’t
believe Steinbeck would have directed a character like Slim to behave as
Crooks does. One wonders if Crooks—or Steinbeck—is acquainted with
stories about twentieth-century black heroes like pugilist Jack Johnson or
Paul Robeson, or the black folk hero Stagolee; and I wonder if he consid-
ered that for blacks during and after the era of slavery, identification with
Christianity’s sense of an eternal soul that could not be violated was the
most common source of maintaining one’s dignity and ego in the face of
threats presented by people like Curley’s wife.
In addition to being cowardly, Crooks’ character is further discredited
because he is depicted as being mean-spirited (as Lennie is not), and he
torments the simple, bear-like Lennie with the possibility that George
might one day abandon him, or become unable to protect him. Steinbeck
says he takes pleasure in this tormenting of Lennie. He explains that
without George around, “They’ll take ya to the booby hatch. They’ll tie
ya up with a collar, like a dog” (OMM 72). This sadistic delight in causing

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fear and suffering in someone who is not his mental equal is yet another
reason Crooks can never become a “prince of the ranch,” and why I felt
distanced from and uncomfortable with him when I was a young man in-
sofar as he is the only black character in the story, a figure through whom
we are asked to understand something about the lived-experience of black
America.
But in Crooks that lived-experience is truncated. He is a culturally
and spiritually impoverished man. Perhaps this explains why Crooks is
the only black character Steinbeck attempts to create in his body of work,
for it is extremely difficult to free ourselves from the racial and cultural
presuppositions we have been conditioned to accept uncritically, and to
achieve accurate and compelling portraits of racial, gender and cultural
Others. Yet the attempt to do so is socially and artistically necessary if
an American writer hopes to present a fictional world that reflects the
diversity and complexity of America in the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries. The fact that Steinbeck was one of the pioneers in such a risky
but essential project is yet another reason why we honor his contribution
to our literature.

Notes
1. Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, ed. Andrew Hurley (New York: Vi-
king, 1998), 281.
2. Borges, Collected Fictions, 285.
3. Borges, Collected Fictions, 283.
4. Alan Soble, Eros, Agape and Philia: Readings in the Philosophy of Love (New
York: Paragon House, 1989), 68.
5. Soble, Eros, Agape and Philia, 59.
6. Soble, Eros, Agape and Philia, 59.
7. Soble, Eros, Agape and Philia, 64.
8. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. Joseph Bien
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 138–39.
9. Harvard Black Studies scholar Werner Sollors played a copy of this tape
for me.
10. James Weldon Johnson, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Dubois
Three Negro Classics: “Up from Slavery,” “The Souls of Black Folks,” “The Autobiogra-
phy of an Ex-Colored Man” (New York: Avon Books, 1965), 284.

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Works Cited
Borges, Jorge Luis. Collected Fictions. Ed. Andrew Hurley. New York: Viking,
1998.
Johnson, James Weldon, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Dubois. Three
Negro Classics: “Up from Slavery,” “The Souls of Black Folks,” “The Autobiography
of an Ex-Colored Man.” New York: Avon Books, 1965.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Adventures of the Dialectic. Trans. Joseph Bien. Evan-
ston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. [Originally published in
French under the title Les Aventures de Dialectique. Paris: Editiones Gal-
limard, 1955.]
Soble. Alan. Eros, Agape and Philia: Readings in the Philosophy of Love. New York:
Paragon House, 1989.
Steinbeck, John. Of Mice and Men. 1937. New York: Penguin Modern Classics,
1993.

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 Part Seven
NEW ESSAYS

T
he new critical studies included in this volume approach Of Mice
and Men from a number of unique angles. Daniel Griesbach’s
assessment of the changes Steinbeck made in adapting his novel
into a Broadway play suggests that several of the more controversial epi-
sodes have been excised or radically changed and that some of the origi-
nal characters have been modified, perhaps in an attempt to temper the
harshness of the play’s message, and as a result, to attract theater-goers
who might prefer to see sympathetic heroes on stage rather than to be
accosted by blunt social critique. More importantly, perhaps, this chapter
suggests that the major disadvantage of Steinbeck’s theater revision is that
the character of Crooks loses significance, a pattern that continues in the
film versions; as a consequence of this, Steinbeck’s commentary on race
in America is diminished. Michael J. Meyer speculates that Steinbeck’s
interest in loneliness was well grounded in his own experiences with isola-
tion/solitude and that, in typical Steinbeck ambiguity, several characters
demonstrate that being alone has its pluses and minuses. His essay also
argues that Steinbeck’s assessment of his own life experiences as recorded
in his correspondence indicates that he was aware of this paradox and
wished to record the combative status between the two views of this hu-
man emotion in Of Mice and Men.
Barbara A. Heavilin’s essay considers all the literary labels that
have been applied to the novella and queries whether either Realism or
Naturalism is a correct category for Of Mice and Men. Is the novel’s em-
phasis really on mechanistic determinism and fate or might readers more

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fruitfully concentrate on its Romantic elements, including compassion,

the multiple voices of the dispossessed, and empathy for the lower class.
Finally, Chris Goering, the creator of the LitTunes website on the
Internet, suggests that any present-day attempt to teach a classic novel
such as this should be accompanied by yoking the text to the language
of music, a media so valued by today’s twitch-speed kids. Using input
from five of his students, who are potential high school teachers, Goer-
ing links Of Mice and Men to a number of musical performances and to
several widely divergent artists and artistic styles.
In each new analysis, readers will find creative ideas for approaching
a novel that is over seventy years old and yet still holds appeal to a wide
group of readers and is studied in classrooms across the world for its mas-
terly style and it non-teleological presentation of events.
The following essays were developed exclusively for this volume and
appear here for the first time.

Griesbach, Daniel. “Reduced to Nothing: Race, Lynching, and Erasure in the

Theater Revision of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.”
Heavilin, Barbara. “Emotion Recollected in Tranquility”: A Context for Roman-
ticism in Of Mice and Men.”
Meyer, Michael J. “‘One Is the Loneliest Number’: Steinbeck’s Paradoxical At-
traction and Repulsion To Isolation / Solitude.”
Goering, Christian Z. et al. “Musical Intertextuality in Action: A Directed Read-
ing of Of Mice and Men.”

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 CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
REDUCED TO NOTHING: RACE, LYNCHING,
AND ERASURE IN THE THEATER REVISION
OF STEINBECK’S OF MICE AND MEN
Daniel Griesbach

The theater is the political art par excellence; only there is the political
sphere of human life transposed to art. By the same token, it is the only
art whose sole subject is man in his relationship to others.—Hannah
Arendt, The Human Condition

I am interested in having a vehicle exactly adequate to the theme.—John

Steinbeck, on the “new set of techniques” used in writing Of Mice and
Men

R
eturning from his travels in northern Europe and the Soviet
Union, John Steinbeck arrived in New York in August of 1937
to find unfinished work obligations waiting for him.1 Annie
Laurie Williams, a literary agent who was facilitating a Broadway stage
production of Steinbeck’s most recent novel, Of Mice and Men, encour-
aged him immediately to finish converting the short novel into a script,
since the play was to begin rehearsals within a matter of weeks. The stage
production was in the hands of George S. Kaufman, the accomplished
Broadway playwright, director, and producer. Even before Steinbeck’s
European trip, Kaufman had written with suggestions for the dramatic
adaptation. Williams convinced Steinbeck on his return to spend time at
her country house in Connecticut to complete the script. Then, when they
were finished, Kaufman invited Steinbeck to his Pennsylvania farm for
what biographer Jackson Benson describes as “a week of intensive work”
in which Steinbeck “molded the final script under Kaufman’s guidance.”2

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The resulting collaboration produced the script for a play that would open
at the Music Box Theatre in New York in November 1937, and would
run for 207 performances.
Why did these people have to apply so much pressure to persuade the
author to convert his story into a play? Likely because in Steinbeck’s mind
it was already a play. Of Mice and Men was his first of three attempts at
a hybrid “play-novelette” form, which he described as “a play that can be
read or a novel that can be played.”3 In fact, the first theatrical production
of Of Mice and Men, by a workers’ theater group called the San Francisco
Theatre Union, undertook the challenge of “playing” the novel in the way
Steinbeck intended. In May through July of 1937, the Theatre Union
staged sixteen performances working directly from the novel, which had
been published in March. Both parties had been enthusiastic at the start:
Steinbeck personally read his manuscript aloud to the Theatre Union
and the group chose Of Mice and Men as the opening production in their
new location at the Green Street Theatre in San Francisco’s North Beach
district.4 But something was amiss: one reviewer noticed that because
“Steinbeck was writing primarily for readers” the Theatre Union’s produc-
tion was “a play that seems slightly ill at ease in the theatre.”5 Although he
would go on to use his play-novelette form in The Moon Is Down (1942)
and Burning Bright (1950), Steinbeck himself had doubts about this first
attempt at fusing a novel and play, telling a New York Times reviewer that
“the experiment flopped” and that when he “came up against a practical
man of the theatre like Kaufman,” he felt compelled to “do a lot of exten-
sive rewriting.”6 In contrast to the Theatre Union’s attempt to put Of Mice
and Men on stage, Kaufman’s Broadway play was a clear success, receiving
praise from reviewers and eventually winning the New York Drama Critics
Circle award for the best American play of that year. It seems, therefore,
that the conventional play script succeeded where the experimental play-
novelette failed, that the Broadway production eventually triumphed over
the Theatre Union’s effort to make good on Steinbeck’s vision of a novel
that could be played. Nevertheless, those interested in the story should
imagine what the Theatre Union’s performance might have looked like.
This performance was truer to Steinbeck’s original artistic vision, lacking
the emendations encouraged by the major Broadway producer.
This chapter explores the changes that occurred to Steinbeck’s novel
as it was transformed into Kaufman’s play. Most critics comparing the

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two versions have noted that the theater version gives an expanded role of
the unnamed character of Curley’s wife, a lonely woman trapped by her
marriage to the ranch boss’s tyrannical son.7 However, there are reasons
to believe that the most significant transformation involves Crooks, the
black “stable buck” (as he is referred to) who lives in his own room sepa-
rated from the other workers on the ranch. The most evident changes are
those made to the scene in Crooks’s room (the fourth chapter in the novel
and act 2, scene 2 of the play), where one can find striking divergences
in Of Mice and Men’s novel and stage versions. While Curley’s wife’s role
is expanded, the character of Crooks is reduced, possessing considerably
fewer lines than he is given in the short novel. Furthermore, the play re-
moves the conflict between Curley’s wife and Crooks, which culminates
in a dramatic scene in which Curley’s wife threatens to have Crooks
lynched. My argument makes two main points. First, while some have
noted the removal of the lynch scene as one of the revisions,8 commentary
has mostly focused on the expanded role of Curley’s wife. I contend that
the removal of Crooks’s conflict with Curley’s wife is an equally important
change in the story. The two revisions are connected in the restructuring
of characters that enhances the portrait of Curley’s wife and diminishes
that of Crooks. Second, the perspective offered in this chapter insists on
the centrality of Crooks’s story to the novel’s plot, both in the optimistic
moment of his willingness to join George, Lennie, and Candy in their
hopes to gain their own farm and in the devastating refusal to join the
men that follows from the threat of racial lynching. Far from being a
secondary “subplot,” Crooks’s story plays an important part in one of this
literary work’s main topics: whether it is possible for the dispossessed
characters to gain a better life through the overcoming of pessimism and
isolation. Crooks’s shattered hopes are consistent with the novel’s premise
that our best plans, according to the Burns poem from which the novel
takes its title, often go awry.
As Steinbeck revised his work on Kaufman’s ranch, he no doubt con-
sidered many aspects of how it would appear on the Broadway stage. He
also had the benefit of having seen the Theatre Union play that relied solely
on the novel. But while the Drama Critics award would suggest that the
Broadway changes were an improvement to the work, I believe that what
comes out is less complex and less powerful. The Broadway version weak-
ens the story’s response to the racial segregation and antiblack violence of

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Steinbeck’s America. Of Mice and Men was written in an era when many
writers and artists responded to the legacy of lynching.9 According to
Jacqueline Goldsby, writers were particularly alert to how lynching, while
still present, also seemed to be transforming into other forms of regular-
ized violence.10 Such transformations are perhaps typified by what many
saw as a “legal lynching” in the highly publicized Scottsboro case during
the 1930s, in which a group of nine black teenagers accused of raping two
white women received death sentences from all-white juries despite numer-
ous problems with the evidence and the trials.
The Kaufman version has proved an enduring piece of American
drama, influencing the movie versions from directors Lewis Milestone
(1939), Reza Badiyi (1981), and Gary Sinise (1992) as well as adaptations
for musical theater and opera. Since these different adaptations often fol-
low the play, the changes Steinbeck made at Kaufman’s behest, especially
in the story’s climactic middle section, can greatly affect how readers un-
derstand the story—hence the importance of comparing and contrasting
the different versions. In the novel, the scene in Crooks’s room can be un-
derstood as the first of two tragic endings and consequently as an integral
part of the plot. The men’s hope for their own farm starts tumbling with
the ruinous energies unleashed during the lynch threat scene and finally
collapses with Lennie’s killing of Curley’s wife. One might even think of
two kinds of tragedy in Of Mice and Men: one is written in the stars, the
other written in script of American history.

Childhoods Added and Subtracted

The revision of the story starts with an alteration of the characters, a
process of enhancing the portrait of Curley’s wife while simultaneously
erasing aspects of Crooks. According to the correspondence between
Kaufman and Steinbeck, Kaufman suggested a need for “fresh invention”
in the second act, specifically that Steinbeck should enlarge the part of
Curley’s wife, stating that “the girl . . . should be drawn more fully: she
is the motivating force of the whole thing and should loom larger.”11 In
the play version, significantly, we see Curley’s wife protest being called a
“tart” by the farmhands, drawing out the tension in her character between
how she is represented by others and how she represents herself.12 The
additions to her role place more emphasis on the question of her sexual

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“purity” and marital fidelity, a topic that is present in the novel but less
pronounced.13 She states, for example, that Curley is “sure” that “no-
body never got to me before I was married”; she insists that her husband
“wouldn’t stay with me if he wasn’t sure” (Play 47). This obsession with
sexual purity is a reflection of the characterization of Curley’s wife Stein-
beck would later reinforce in his letter to Claire Luce, the actress in the
Music Box Theatre cast who played Curley’s wife. He informs Luce that
Curley’s wife was “told over and over that she must remain a virgin. . . .
This was harped on so often that it became a fixation.”14
Details of Curley’s wife’s childhood and parents are also added. Even
though she claims earlier in the play that she was raised in “a nice home”
and that she “was brung up by nice people,” we soon learn that this as-
sertion is merely a defense against being called a tart by George (Play
45). Other statements reveal that “nice people” is just a façade for her
family and that her mother’s pretenses to decency are only hypocritical.
“My ol’ man was a drunk. They put him away,” Curley’s wife confides
to Lennie in her final scene (Play 61). It is clear that Curley’s wife finds
relief in speaking honestly about her family, as she adds, “There! I told”
(Play 61). She gains our sympathy when she tells Lennie about the way
her father would often “get drunk an’ paint crazy pitchers an’ waste paint”
and how her mother and father were “always fightin’” (Play 61). In the
compact forms of the play and play-novelette, these revelations convey
how Curley’s wife has known mostly unhappiness. At the same time, her
ability to speak freely to Lennie breaks the code of silence with which the
characters conduct themselves: suspicious of each other, none of the ranch
workers except Candy share their personal pasts or hopes for the future
in this way.
In this expanded role, Curley’s wife shares a strange story of how her
father once took her away in the night, perhaps stealing the child from her
mother, promising “No arguin’ and fightin’ . . . because you’re my little
daughter” (Play 61). As the father promises to escape conflict and live
peacefully together “because you’re my own little girl, an’ not no stranger,”
the story of Curley’s wife and her father seems to mirror the theme of
companionship in George and Lennie’s story. The father’s words, as
Curley’s wife relates them, even take on some of the dreamy patterns of
George and Lennie’s dialogue: “Why, you’ll bake little cakes for me, an’
I’ll paint pretty pitchers all over the wall” (Play 61). All this dreaming is

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DANIEL GRIESBACH

brought down to reality, however, when she states bluntly, “In the morn-
ing they caught us . . . an’ they put him away. (Pause.) I wish we’d ‘a’ went”
(Play 62, ellipses in original). Curley’s wife’s last words on this subject
would suggest she approved of her father’s actions. Perhaps she prefers
him only as an alternative to her mother, who Curley’s wife thinks stifles
her wish to pursue a career in the movies. But despite the rosy picture
Curley’s wife paints of leaving with her father, the reader is left to doubt
whether Curley’s wife as a young girl is even safe with an alcoholic father
who has a proclivity to fighting. Furthermore, the father’s wish for her to
“bake little cakes for me” oddly seems to fit his daughter into the role of
woman-as-domestic-servant, or in other words the unfortunate role Cur-
ley’s wife’s mother previously occupied. Rather inexplicably, Curley’s wife
criticizes her mother while pardoning her father for his obvious mistakes.
This pattern recurs in her relationship with Curley, where she has clearly
withstood his destructive behavior for too long. While she will criticize
Curley’s actions and eventually decide to leave him, this attitude has been
extremely difficult to achieve. Her words imply that she is not the best
judge of her own past and that possibly some of the main reasons for her
feelings and actions are not transparent to her. They also function to sug-
gest that Curley’s wife’s words and behavior, far from being the natural
behaviors of a tart and troublemaker that the ranch hands label them, are
the outcomes of specific patterns of human relationships Curley’s wife has
been exposed to.
The connection between a character’s childhood experience and
their current predicaments is equally evident in Crooks. In contrast to
the extension of Curley’s wife, however, the stage version and movie
adaptations reduce Crooks’s childhood biography. In both the novel and
the play, Crooks remembers spending nights with his brothers in the
idyllic setting of his father’s chicken ranch. The details he remembers in
this passage—alfalfa, chickens, and strawberries—are significant in their
resemblance to the alfalfa, rabbits, and garden George and Lennie dream
of. But above all, Crooks remembers the constant companionship of his
brothers, how “they was always near me, always there.”15 This, of course,
is the kind of companionship George and Lennie share, wish to maintain,
and even expand.
A key omission from the play, however, is the other half of Crooks’s
childhood history. In the novel, this passage comes as soon as Crooks

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claims that Lennie “don’t know what the hell it’s all about” when someone
talks to him (OMM 70). Confiding in Lennie, Crooks locates his experi-
ence regionally, declaring he “ain’t a southern negro . . . I was born right
here in California” (OMM 70). He proceeds to tell of his experiences
playing with the white children who lived nearby. “My ol’ man didn’t like
that,” says Crooks, “I never knew till long later why he didn’t like that.
But I know now” (OMM 70). As a child, Crooks’s desire to connect with
the other children is hampered by the society’s code of racial segregation.
That code is manifested in Crooks’s father’s suspicion of the white chil-
dren and his (not unsubstantiated) fears about the negative reactions the
racial mixing among the children might incite. Crooks “know[s] now” the
social codes he could not have fully understood as a child. Crooks recounts
how “there wasn’t another colored family for miles around,” so he did not
have the option of playing with the other children free of adult-world
troubles. Finally, Crooks reveals how “now there ain’t a colored man on
this ranch an’ there’s jus’ one family in Soledad,” meaning that his isola-
tion as an adult is a repetition of his childhood experience (OMM 70).
As is the case with Curley’s wife, formative experiences bear down on—
compound and complicate—Crooks’s adult experience.
The omission of this portion of Crooks’s history from the play not
only lessens the amount an audience will know about Crooks, but also
changes how one understands his claim that Lennie “don’t know what the
hell it’s all about.” In the novel, the recognition of Lennie’s lack of com-
prehension means that Crooks feels he can speak freely and openly about
his past. In the play, by contrast, Crooks immediately transitions from
the idea that Lennie will not “go blabbin’” to what the stage directions
call “his torture” and words uttered “cruelly” (Play 51). Crooks torments
Lennie with the suggestion that “s’pose George went into town tonight
and you never heard from him no more”—a thought that enrages Lennie
(Play 50–51). But the intervening information the novel provides—the
passage in which Crooks reveals he was separated from his childhood
companions—makes a difference. In the novel, Crooks’s experiment to
get Lennie to imagine or acknowledge his experience of loneliness follows
the telling of the stable buck’s own childhood loneliness.
The play alters the novel’s careful sequence in Crooks’s monologue.
Instead of Crooks’s cruel experiment with Lennie being interwoven with
his eagerness to recall his experience of racial segregation as a child, the

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cruel or malicious side of Crooks emerges spontaneously, seemingly natu-

rally. Eventually, the play resolves Crooks’s “torture” of Lennie into “very
gently” delivered lines in which Crooks explains to Lennie, “Maybe you
can see now. . . . A guy needs somebody” (Play 51). Even in this passage,
the play removes some of the more philosophical implications Crooks
draws in the novel, specifically the idea that one needs the presence of
others to “measure” perceptions of the exterior world. The result is a less
developed character and a much less sympathetic one.
The changes in Crooks’s role that make him appear committed to ver-
bally torturing Lennie stand in direct opposition to Steinbeck’s other revi-
sions, which generally seek to soften the relationships between characters
by adding friendlier dialogue. These changes are most perceptible at the
ends of scenes, as in the end of act 1, scene 1, when George and Lennie
are going to sleep along the river bank. This scene ends with George being
directed to “amiably” say, “Aw, shut up” in response to Lennie’s threat that
he can “jus’ as well go away . . . and live in a cave” (Play 16). Lennie closes
the scene with an endearing line in which he bothers George one last time
to remind him, “I’m shutting up, George” (Play 16).16 Contrast this ending
with the novel chapter, which ends on George’s rather abrasive response,
“You can jus’ as well go to hell. . . . Shut up now” (OMM 16). In keeping
with this softening of characters’ relationships, even the Boss, who behaves
as a rigid authoritarian in the novel, is directed to “relax” and “allow a little
warmth into his manner” (Play 21). After interrogating George and Lennie
about arriving late, traveling as companions, and their reasons for leaving
Weed, the Boss tries to joke with them about nightclubs in San Francisco.
The Boss’s brief change of manner in the play leads George and Lennie to
question whether a “boss” can also be a “nice guy”—a thought they do not
seriously entertain in the novel (Play 21).
The revisions amount to a general expanding and softening of char-
acters, and yet Crooks’s role is smaller and harder by comparison. As if
there were a zero-sum of character development, the more Curley’s wife
“looms,” the less Crooks’s presence and substance is allowed to shine
through. If the idea that to build up one character means to dismantle an-
other sounds improbable, consider how the different versions have played
out. While Crooks’s character has been portrayed vividly and dynamically
in the movies by some excellent actors (Leigh Whipper in 1939, Whitman
Mayo in 1981, and Joe Morton in 1992), his lines in the film versions have

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been reduced even beyond those of the play version. In Carlisle Floyd’s
opera version, the character of Crooks is removed entirely. Admittedly,
this is only one of many changes Floyd makes to transform the story into
an operatic work in three acts, and he was likely using a different decision
making process than either that which Steinbeck and Kaufman used in
their collaboration or that the movie directors have used. But the trend
has been persistent in diminishing Crooks’s role in the writing and rewrit-
ing for different venues (drama, film, and musical drama). While the seeds
of this trend can be seen in the absence of some of Crooks’s significant
biographical details, its roots gain hold when the conflict in Crooks’s
room is shifted from one that takes place between Crooks and Curley’s
wife to one that occurs between Curley’s wife and George.
In contrast to Kaufman’s perception that Curley’s wife is “the motivat-
ing force,” I would contend that forces in the story arise from the charac-
ters’ intense social relationships. Even though the story is about loneliness,
Steinbeck’s characters are mutually defining: one finds George’s identity
revealed in his interaction with Lennie and vice-versa. It would be a mis-
take to see George and Lennie as the main characters and Crooks, Candy,
and Curley’s wife the “secondary” characters whom the protagonists en-
counter. Such a simple division would obscure the interaction among the
characters, which is primary. Kaufman’s designation of Curley’s wife as a
“motivating force” could be extended to Candy, who contributes his sav-
ings to join Lennie and George. In some respects, the way Candy unites
with the protagonists is reminiscent of the Wilsons joining the Joads in
Steinbeck’s next novel, The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Looked at this way,
Crooks’s momentary willingness to join the expanding group of pro-
tagonists reveals his role to be significant and integral to the story, just as
Candy’s is. In the details of Crooks’s room that Steinbeck was motivated to
alter, one finds the dramatic contrast between the energy building around
the characters’ dream of gaining their own farm and the counteracting,
destructive force that can lead to the threat of death by the cruelest of
interracial hostilities.

Effacing Crooks
In his rich and detailed analysis of Crooks, Charles Johnson notes that the
repeated removal of Curley’s wife’s threat in the stage and film versions

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has “great implications for the portrayal of Crooks.”17 Johnson sees these
changes more or less in concert with Steinbeck’s overall problematic char-
acterization of Crooks as conforming to the stereotype of the emasculated
black male character. In addition to this point, I would like to add that
by comparing these different versions we can see even more clearly how
the novel emphasizes the importance of Crooks’s character and the scene
that takes place in his room: the threat of racial lynching is the point at
which the bindlestiffs’ dream is revealed as an impossibility. This aspect
of the novel could not survive Steinbeck and Kaufman’s changes to make
the story a Broadway play. In the novel, the central, climactic conflict of
the fourth chapter takes place between Crooks and Curley’s wife, where
Crooks joins the other men in their effort to expel Curley’s wife from
their presence, an action that leads her to threaten to have him lynched.
In revising the novel for the stage, this conflict is shifted to one between
George and Curley’s wife, where George almost assaults her for interact-
ing with Lennie. To get a sense of this contrast, one can look carefully at
the sequence of events portrayed in the novel and then in the Broadway
script.
At the apex of the novel’s version of this scene, Curley’s wife has in-
terrupted Crooks, Lennie, and Candy, as the three were discussing future
plans for a farm. The men, harboring misogynist suspicions of Curley’s
wife and fearing trouble from Curley, implore her to leave. Crooks says,
“Maybe you better go along to your own house now. We don’t want no
trouble” (OMM 77). Following Crooks’s example, Candy says, “You got
a husban’. You got no call foolin’ aroun’ with other guys, causin’ trouble”
(OMM 77). Curley’s wife, however, sees through their fear. She notes
frankly that “you’re all scared of each other” and challenges their en-
trenched assumptions about a “woman’s place” by asking, “Think I like to
stick in that house alla time?” (OMM 77).
All these tensions reach their breaking point when Crooks tells
Curley’s wife, “You got no rights comin’ in a colored man’s room. You got
no rights messing around in here at all. Now you jus’ get out, an’ get out
quick. If you don’t, I’m gonna ast the boss not to ever let you come in the
barn no more” (OMM 80). One should immediately hear the repetition
of “rights” in Crooks’s statement, which first occurred at the beginning
of the scene when he warns that Lennie had no “right” to enter his room.
Curley’s wife responds with the assumption that Crooks has no rights,

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stating, “Listen, Nigger, . . . You know what I can do to you if you open
your trap?” (OMM 80). The implication is that a mere accusation that a
black man has tried to violate her, a white woman, is enough to raise a
lynch mob against the accused. In this social context, such an accusation
has a destructive potential that can neither be matched nor adequately
defended against. The power dynamic is represented spatially: working
in the opposite direction of Crooks’s attempt to remove Curley’s wife’s
presence from his room, this threat opens up Crooks’s personal space to
Curley’s wife’s total domination. We are told that Curley’s wife “closed
on him” as she repeats, “You know what I could do?” (OMM 80). This
“closing on” has the effect of erasing Crooks’s presence, as he “drew into
himself . . . seemed to grow smaller” (OMM 80).
Curley’s wife’s threat is a concentrated expression of white society’s
pathological myth of the black rapist, which, according to Anne P. Rice,
“allowed white men to violently police a status quo aimed at the social and
economic subjugation of both black men and white women.”18 In a society
under the spell of this myth, the accusation carries a force that Crooks can
hardly counter. In this racist narrative, white women were constructed
as taboo to black men. Lynching was justified as the protection of white
women’s “purity” from what were imagined to be the monstrous sexual
advances of the black man. Trudier Harris describes this imagination in
the following passage, which can be thought of as the background as-
sumptions behind Curley’s wife’s words:

She is beauty; he is beast. She is to be protected; he is what she needs

protection from. Her existence must be continued; he is expendable. She
is the bearer of the best of her race’s traditions; he bears nothing worthy
of respect. She inspires confidence; he inspires fear. She is pedestalized;
he is trampled beneath the feet of those who have created her pedestal.
She can control his life by mere whim. He has little control over his life
as far as she is concerned. She is innocence; he is guilt.19

Upon hearing his own subjectivity being written into this script, Crooks
“reduced himself to nothing. There was no personality, no ego—nothing
to arouse either like or dislike. He said, ‘Yes, ma’am,’ and his voice was
toneless” (OMM 80). Presented at once with the possibility of personal
harm and the reminder that racially motivated mob violence always lurks
in the background to enforce his own second-class status, Crooks is quite

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literally effaced by Curley’s wife, even after having “stood up from his bunk
and faced her” (OMM 80), my emphasis). We are reminded of the face
he has built up in the scene, the face that expresses his profound sense of
loneliness both in his cruel pestering of Lennie (“Crooks’ face lighted with
pleasure in his torture”) and in his elaboration of how one can be isolated
to the point that he or she has “got nothing to measure by” (OMM 73).
Through a careful juxtaposition of characters, furthermore, Steinbeck
implies how powerful this myth is. None of the men on the ranch trust
Curley’s wife and all see her as a threatening “tart.” By contrast, even
though Crooks is treated poorly, no one on the ranch expresses any mis-
trust of his sincerity or motives. And yet Curley’s wife is confident that the
mere allegation a black man has violated her will be convincing enough
to drive these same white men to murder. Furthermore, Steinbeck’s novel
suggests the travelling power the myth possesses: whatever the meanings
of Crooks’s statement “I ain’t a Southern negro,” it is clear his regional
identity offers little protection from the racial paradigms that extend
throughout the United States.
Steinbeck’s repeated use of the word nigger in this section is a trou-
bling part of the novel, as the word carries the history of being used pre-
cisely in the way Curley’s wife uses it: as a threat and as a tool to enforce
racial hierarchy and terror. One thing to notice is that characters using the
word use it frequently, as when Candy says it five times in the ten or so
sentences relating the story of the Christmas whisky and fighting (OMM
20). One of his last published works, Travels with Charley (1962),20
provides some of Steinbeck’s ideas about this racial epithet. In Travels
with Charley, Steinbeck notes that while traveling through Texas and
Louisiana he heard “many repetitions” of the word; “at least twenty times”
strangers approached him to call his dog Charley a “nigger” (Travels 249).
Steinbeck, in a tone of sarcasm, notes that “it was an unusual joke—always
fresh and never Negro or even Nigra, always Nigger or rather Niggah”
(Travels 249). He concludes with a thought about whites’ use of the word
through which one might understand its appearance in Of Mice and Men:
“That word seemed terribly important, a kind of safety word to cling to
less some structure collapse” (Travels 249). The compulsive repetition
of the word, Steinbeck suggests, signifies the shaky foundations it rests
on. When used to dehumanize other humans, its use is always a misuse.
Since the word cannot adequately refer to Crooks any more than he can

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embody it, Curley’s wife and, at an earlier point in the story, Candy are
forced to repeat it compulsively. This repetition, in Curley’s wife’s mouth
and in the mouths of the whites Steinbeck met traveling through the
United States, is a symptom of the problematic nature of the word and
the ideology behind it.
The threat of Crooks’s lynching calls up the related issue of the mob-
violence that constitutes a significant undercurrent in Of Mice and Men.
All three films begin with chase scenes of mobs following George and
Lennie after Lennie has frightened a woman in Weed by grabbing her
dress, scenes that recreate the background story that George relates to
Slim in the third chapter in the novel. The story ends with George killing
his best friend as the mob raised by Curley is in pursuit. On a simple level,
Crooks is vulnerable to the same mob violence that threatens Lennie. But
as a black man, he is specifically vulnerable to antiblack lynching that in-
undated American culture after the Civil War and on into the twentieth
century. In the context of the story, the threat of lynching produces palpa-
ble damage in the characters’ interpersonal relationships. While Lennie’s
death at George’s hands at the end the story represents the final collapse
of the characters’ hopes, the lynch threat that forces Crooks to give up a
hope of joining his three fellow workers in their pursuit of a different and
better life signifies the beginning of the end. And this sudden change is
more than a mere “foreshadowing” of the threat and failure to come. If the
failure of one’s dreams gives the story its tragic quality, as if the characters’
misfortune were an inescapable law of the universe, the story of Crooks
provides a sociological counterpoint, where the failure is a result of social
practices and institutions as well as individual decisions and agency.
This last point becomes especially evident when we contrast the lynch
theme in Of Mice and Men with Steinbeck’s other portrayals of lynching
and mob violence. The most obvious point of comparison is the story
“The Vigilante” (1936) in which Steinbeck writes of a racial lynching
and the hours after, focusing on the banality and nihilistic attitudes of a
white man who participates. Expanding further, Steinbeck was interested
in mob violence as an expression of his “group man” or “phalanx” ideas
for human behavior, ideas that can be seen taking shape in Steinbeck’s
letters, short stories, and novels of the 1930s. Of Mice and Men, in which
George and Lennie have been pursued by a mob in Weed and will be
pursued by Curley’s mob at the end, fits squarely within these stories. But

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what separates Of Mice and Men, however, is its sympathy with, and focus
on, the victims of mob violence. Our sympathies are fully with George
and Lennie as they are pursued by the group. The outbursts of collec-
tive violence are portrayed as posing a serious moral or ethical dilemma.
Similarly, Crooks can be seen as the human face of the potential victim of
racial lynching, a face that is hauntingly obscured in “The Vigilante.” If Of
Mice and Men relates thematically to Steinbeck’s interest in the workings
of mobs, vigilantism, and lynching, it also importantly links this interest
to a consciousness of the history of lynching in America. In Of Mice and
Men, Steinbeck is treating mob violence not just as a dimension of hu-
man behavior to be explored intellectually, but as an authentic tragedy
of his society, a sure sign of social failure to be felt, acknowledged, and
comprehended.
The deep sense of this failure emerges in the contrast between the
lines Crooks delivers when he decides he wants to join the farm and those
in which he retracts his proposal before the scene’s end. His skepticism
is first displayed in his response to Lennie’s idea that he and George will
get their own farm. “You’re nuts,” says Crooks, “I seen hundreds of men
come by on the road an’ on the ranches, with their bindles on their back
an’ that same damn thing in their heads. Hundreds of them” (OMM 74).
When Candy arrives and conveys the same wish, Crooks’s response is the
same: “you guys is just kiddin’ yourself” (OMM 75). Crooks’s initial at-
titude conveys a stark difference between the ideal and the real when he
states that, “I seen too many guys with land in their head. They never get
none under their hand” (OMM 76). It also reflects a deep pessimism, a
spiritual pessimism, as he declares with finality that “nobody never gets to
heaven, and nobody gets no land” (OMM 74).
But eventually Crooks’s ideas take a different direction. In a surprising
change of heart, he hesitantly states, “. . . If you . . . guys would want a
hand to work for nothing—just his keep, why I’d come an’ lend a hand”
(OMM 76, ellipses in original). In a matter of a few lines, upon gaining
the information that Candy, George, and Lennie have a “stake,” Crooks
realizes there is something new, some substance, in Lennie’s and Candy’s
words. These are not just more empty dreams, but the intentions of a
group of people really committed to their plan. It is definitely significant
that Crooks’s attitude changes from pessimistic to optimistic. Crooks’s
about-face reflects a major theme in this novel, which is the power to

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overcome pessimism and cultivate a hopeful outlook through ideas and

ideals shared with others, not to let uncertainty become paralyzing despite
the fact that one’s plans often go astray. Of course, this theme is most
evident in George and Lennie’s story. At times, even their dream can
be seen as a myth that merely exists to keep Lennie at ease, something
George patronizingly repeats to him so that the two can get along. Such
a view will be reinforced when George retroactively judges that there was
no hope for a farm, that he “knowed from the very first . . . we’d never do
her” (OMM 94). But it is also important to note that George’s skepticism
falls away when Candy offers his savings so that he might join George
and Lennie. Noting that Candy’s contribution would enable the three to
place a down payment within a month, George is filled with hope. With
his “eyes . . . full of wonder,” he says, “Jesus Christ! I bet we could swing
her. . . . I bet we could swing her” (OMM 60). As is the case with Crooks,
George becomes optimistic when he realizes they can put their money
where their mouths are. But besides this purely material basis, Steinbeck
is suggesting that some energy is created with the simple fact of the group
growing. That Candy would sign on adds legitimacy, potential, and, to
borrow Crooks’s words, “something to measure by” (OMM 73). In the
best aspect of the group-man theory, people attain new abilities through
their cooperation. The joining of intentions toward the same end makes
people feel they “could swing her” (OMM 60) in almost any context.
But the verbal threat Curley’s wife launches against Crooks deflates
all hope for Crooks to join the men in swinging their dream farm. In the
novel, the scene ends with Crooks telling Candy, “’Member what I said
about hoein’ and doin’ odd jobs? . . . Well, jus’ forget it. . . . I didn’ mean
it. Jus’ foolin’. I wouldn’ want to go no place like that” (OMM 83). The
lynch threat reintroduces in place of the dream farm the mutual suspicion
and divisiveness between people who remain subject to the traditional
system of racism and patriarchy. The momentary hope that Crooks, who
has lived his life being segregated from the others on the ranch, will “lend
a hand” to the others on the farm is a hope for integration. One must
imagine that Crooks’s brief enthusiasm is for a social arrangement dif-
ferent from that which he experiences, that the farm the men imagine is
one where the color line is not an ever-present division. On the one hand,
the group can seemingly accommodate all those marginalized because of
mental or physical disability, in the cases of Lennie and Candy; because

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of skin color, in the case of Crooks. The group functions as an antidote to

the ranch’s reproduction of social division and inequalities. On the other
hand, this spirit of inclusion stops at Curley’s wife. Would they or could
they ever overcome the misogyny that compels them to exclude Curley’s
wife? This would be the next logical step. But we never find out: in a
complex story, Steinbeck allows the dream farm (and the politics it stands
for) to dissolve when it is exposed to the social inequalities constructed
around gender and race.
The cluster of American social problems erupting in Crooks’s room
is almost completely missing in the version Steinbeck and Kaufman
created for the Broadway stage. In this version and in the movie ver-
sions that follow, George returns from town and enters Crooks’s room
before Curley’s wife arrives. This changes the scene entirely. Now, the
main conflict takes place between George and Curley’s wife, rather than
Crooks and Curley’s wife. George, instead of Crooks, demands that
Curley’s wife “get out of here” and repeats again, “Get the hell out of
here” (Play 56). Curley’s wife refuses and demands, “I got a right to talk
to anybody I want to” (notice how it is Curley’s wife who now takes up
the language of “rights,” which originally was Crooks’s). George loses
his temper and, according to the stage directions, “furious, steps close,”
saying only, “Why, you–” (Play 56).
In place of Curley’s wife’s physical imposition on Crooks (“She turned
on him in scorn. . . . She closed on him”), Steinbeck’s revision gives stage
directions for George to “leap” at Curley’s wife (Play 57). George is di-
rected to “ferociously” grasp her shoulder, whirl her around (away from
Lennie, whose shoulder she is directed to be “stroking”), and then finally
“step close” with his “hand . . . raised to strike her” (Play 57). Reacting to
George’s raised hand, Curley’s wife, now taking on the gestures Crooks
had in the novel, “cowers a little” (Play 57). George “stiffens, seeing
BOSS, frozen in position” (Play 56–57). In place of the piercing words
that accompany these movements—“Listen, Nigger,” “You know what
I could do?” and “You keep your place then, Nigger”—Steinbeck first
inserts George’s threatening “Listen . . . you! I tried to give you a break.
Don’t walk into nothing!” (Play 56, ellipsis in original), then Curley’s
wife’s response “I got a right to talk to anybody I want to,” and, finally,
George’s truncated, “Why, you–” (Play 56). The language and gestures
clearly demonstrate what has happened in the revision: the roles of ag-

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gressor and victimized have switched. Where Curley’s wife and Crooks
were victims in the novel, Curley’s wife absorbs all the victimization in
the play.
The different film versions vary in their treatment of this interchange
between George and Curley’s wife. Milestone’s movie shows George lift-
ing his hand, while the Badiyi has George grab her arms in an attempt
to shove her outside. The Sinise version avoids the conflict altogether,
opting instead to have Curley’s wife’s interaction with the men completely
nonconfrontational: she approaches George and Lennie outside, telling
them that “Curley got mad at me after supper, broke all my records.”
When Curley’s wife says, “I know how you got them bruises on your face,
how Curley got his hand busted,” all traces of hostility or contention are
gone. She merely seeks truth and sincere dialogue. Sensing that Lennie
and George are sticking to their story, she merely says, “Alright, if you say
so.” She is crying as she runs back to the house, telling of how someday
she will go to town, not to be seen again by the men she lives among so
unhappily. Sinise’s version, therefore, continues the process of making
Curley’s wife a more sympathetic character, placing a larger emphasis on
a real person under duress while also removing more traces of her previ-
ous role as a femme fatale. In doing so, however, Sinise’s interpretation
goes furthest in dissociating what in the original story are dramatically
integrated parts. He decides to isolate Lennie and Crooks’s interaction
from Curley’s wife’s appearance and to depict Candy as completely absent,
therefore eliminating Candy’s “figuring” for the farm as a factor in this
scene. These revisions eliminate the group dynamic that is a mainstay in
earlier versions of the scene.
The other movie versions continue to downplay Crooks’s role as the
story unfolds. They start well: in Milestone’s and Badiyi’s films, Crooks
appears to have fully joined the enthusiasm built up around the dream
farm. Milestone heightens this feeling by beginning the scene focused on
Crooks’s arms raised in the air and his voice intoning, “There’s a meeting
here tonight,” the chorus lines from the African American spiritual by
that title. But in both of these films, Crooks visibly fades, first into his
seat when George enters the room and then into the background when
Curley’s wife arrives. He is only drawn out of that background momen-
tarily when George suggests that Curley’s wife “ask Crooks what she
come to ask an’ then get the hell home.” By fading into the background

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seemingly naturally (without a specific cause), Crooks is again “reduced

. . . to nothing.” But now he is reduced not by Curley’s wife’s words, but
by the film script itself.
In Sinise’s version, Candy never enters Crooks’s room, and there-
fore Crooks never entertains the thought of joining the other men. The
dialogue about the farm stops at Crooks telling Lennie, “You’re nuts.”
George does not turn Crooks down, but simply says “goodnight” after
reprimanding Lennie for wandering into Crooks’s room. By removing
from Crooks’s room the optimism brought by Candy and the pessimism
brought by Curley’s wife, Sinise’s version avoids the question of Crooks’s
fate, as well as his connection to whatever the other men will make of their
immediate situation and their future.
In the novel, Crooks’s words “Jus’ forget it. . . . Jus’ foolin’” (OMM 83)
follow directly on the heels of his encounter with Curley’s wife, indicating
the threat of lynching changes Crooks’s mind about joining the dream
farm. In the movie scripts, by contrast, Crooks’s ability to join the farm is
foreclosed before Curley’s wife even arrives. Milestone’s and Badiyi’s films
have George grow angry that Candy and Lennie have broken the vow of
secrecy and have told their plans to Crooks. When George, in a patron-
izing manner, tells Crooks that it “’taint nothin’ against you,” it is unclear
whether the broken secrecy or whether Crooks’s race (that is, the same
reason he is segregated from the bunkhouse) is ultimately why George
denies Crooks’s inclusion. But Crooks seems to accept his exclusion as a
fait accompli, responding with, “I know. Them guys comin’ in an’ settin’
made me forget.”
We have to look once again at the textual history to see what has
really happened here. Crooks’s line “You guys comin’ in an’ settin’ made
me forget” comes from the concluding lines in the fourth chapter of
the novel, but it gains a different meaning in the films, as its context
is changed (OMM 82). In the movie script (Milestone’s and Badiyi’s),
George returns from town and enters Crooks’s room before Curley’s wife
appears there (and hence can be the one to fight with Curley’s wife). In
the novel, George enters the scene after Curley’s wife has threatened
Crooks and left the barn. These words were not originally delivered to
George as a response to George rejecting the idea that Crooks can join in
their plans for a farm, but rather to Candy. In the novel, Crooks’s admis-
sion that the men sitting in his bedroom made him “forget” is a response

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to Candy’s complaint that “that bitch didn’t ought to of said that to you,”
an assertion that Crooks does not deserve the cruelty Curley’s wife has
shown in threatening to raise a lynch mob against him. That is, Crooks’s
“forgetting” was at first a forgetting that his skin color always marks him
as different, subject to different rules and a lack of guaranteed rights. To
hear these lines when they are delivered to George in Milestone’s and
Badiyi’s films is to hear an echo of the novel’s original criticism of socially
instituted racism, but now fashioned in a weaker, veiled form.
And yet this is one area where the movies are closer to the novel than
the play. In the Broadway script, Crooks’s lines about “forgetting” do
not appear. When George says to Crooks, “It ain’t nothing against you,
Crooks. We just wasn’t gonna tell nobody,” the stage directions note that
Candy “tries to change the subject,” asking, “Didn’t you have no fun in
town?” (Play 54). In the play, therefore, Crooks’s inclusion in the dream
farm is less obviously denied than in the movie versions (Milestone’s and
Badiyi’s, the films in which Crooks’s inclusion remains a question). As the
play’s scene ends with the Boss entering the room just as George’s hand
is menacingly raised above Curley’s wife, the topic of Crooks joining the
farm is simply not brought up for the rest of the scene. On the one hand,
this version holds out the possibility of Crooks joining the dream farm
(with the implication of racial integration). On the other hand, since the
lynch threat is removed, the scene also diminishes the importance of the
very question by removing the commentary on race, and in particular in-
terracial violence, in America.
It has often been noted that a fatalist worldview resides at the core of
Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. This worldview is reflected in its original
title, “Something That Happened,” and is apparent in the inexplicable
force that makes Lennie lose control over his strength when he pets
soft things, or in George’s naiveté in judging that Lennie could make
it through another bout of working without getting them in trouble. In
contrast to this level of tragic meaning is the scene in Crooks’s room,
which is the key moment of what one might call the social tragedy in
Of Mice and Men. This part of the tragedy reflects how the structure of
this society blocks the realization of people’s individual and collective
dreams and ideals. Richard Hart has explored the depth with which Of
Mice and Men, through its characters of Curley’s wife and Crooks, treats
sexism and racism as moral questions, concluding that “by portraying

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the lived realities of racism and sexism—in dramatically ugly but honest
terms—Steinbeck wants us to go inside the skins of all those affected
by the shaping conditions of social existence and to feel their bitter
loneliness and desperation.”21 What I would hope to add is just how
this goal is integrated into the work of art itself and how, since this is
so, even small changes to the story greatly affect its meaning. The stage
and film adaptations have their virtues. But the most evident changes
made in revising the story for Broadway and the big screen unfortunately
lose something of the force with which Steinbeck, by addressing the
social and psychological effects of the all-too-prevalent racial violence,
was writing against the racism and sexism that were entrenched in his
society—an aim that necessitated a particular balance of characters and
the inclusion of a complex and troubling scene.

Notes
1. For biographical accounts, see Jackson Benson, The True Adventures of John
Steinbeck, Writer: A Biography (New York: Viking, 1984), 351–58, and Jay Parini,
John Steinbeck: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 185–92.
2. Benson, True Adventures, 358. Also see Don Swaim, “Steinbeck and Kaufman
at Cherchez La Farm,” Steinbeck Studies 13, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 8–14.
3. Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten, eds., Steinbeck: A Life in Letters
(New York: Viking, 1975), 138.
4. For information on the Theatre Union’s production of Of Mice and Men,
see especially Warren French, “The First Theatrical Production of Steinbeck’s
Of Mice and Men,” American Literature 36 (January 1965): 525–27; Robert
Morsberger, “Steinbeck and the Stage,” in The Short Novels of John Steinbeck, ed.
Jackson J. Benson. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), 272–73, and
Margaret Shedd, “Of Mice and Men,” Theatre Arts Monthly 21 (October 1937):
774–80.
5. Qtd. in French, “First Theatrical Production,” 526.
6. “Mice, Men and Mr. Steinbeck.” New York Times, 5 December 1937, sec.
12: 7.
7. Morsberger, “Steinbeck and the Stage,” 273–75; Mimi R. Gladstein, “Of
Mice and Men: Creating and Re-creating Curley’s Wife,” in Beyond Boundaries:
Rereading John Steinbeck, ed. Susan Shillinglaw and Kevin Hearle (Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press, 2002), 205.
8. Morsberger, “Steinbeck and the Stage,” 275; Charles Johnson, “Reading
the Character of Crooks in Of Mice and Men: A Black Writer’s Perspective,” in

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John Steinbeck and His Contemporaries, ed. Stephen K. George and Barbara A.
Heavilin (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2007), 119–20.
9. See, for example, Marlene Park, “Lynching and Anti-Lynching: Art and
Politics in the 1930s,” in The Social and the Real: Political Art of the 1930s in the
Western Hemisphere, ed. Alejandro Anreus, Diana L. Linden, and Jonathan Wein-
berg, 155–77 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006).
10. Jacqueline Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and
Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), ch. 6.
11. Steinbeck and Wallsten, Life in Letters, 136.
12. John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men: Play in Three Acts, acting edition, 1937
(New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1964), 45. Subsequent quotations are cited
parenthetically in the text as Play followed by the page number.
13. For an examination of Curley’s wife as she is portrayed in the film adap-
tations, see Gladstein’s “Of Mice and Men: Creating and Re-creating Curley’s
Wife.”
14. Steinbeck and Wallsten, Life in Letters, 154.
15. John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men (New York: Penguin Classics, 1993),
73. Subsequent quotations are cited parenthetically in the text as OMM followed
by the page number.
16. Kaufman also counseled Steinbeck to “include a little more humor . . .
both for its lightening effect and the heightening of the subsequent tragedy by
comparison” (Steinbeck and Wallsten 136).
17. Johnson, “Reading the Character of Crooks,” 115. Johnson also makes the
point that “if Crooks is not essential to the story’s plot, he is crucial for elabo-
rating the story’s theme,” which Johnson identifies as the theme of friendship.
Crooks qualifies for the Aristotelian friendship at the heart of the story, but his
character is denied its fullest implications because Steinbeck ultimately makes
him conform to stereotypes of the romanticized racial outsider, what Johnson
also calls the “victim savant,” and the emasculated black male. I am indebted to
Johnson’s essay, which clearly establishes the need to pay attention to this char-
acter and how much one can find in the details of the story. (Essay also included
in this volume.)
18. Anne P. Rice, “Introduction,” in Witnessing Lynching: American Writers
Respond, ed. Anne P. Rice (New Brunswick, NJ: University of Rutgers Press,
2003), 12.
19. Trudier Harris, Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and
Burning Rituals (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 26.
20. John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley in Search of America. 1962. New
York: Penguin, 1980. Subsequent quotations are cited parenthetically in the text
as Travels followed by the page number.

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21. Richard Hart, “Moral Experience in Of Mice and Men: Challenges and
Reflection.” In The Moral Philosophy of John Steinbeck, ed. Stephen K. George
(Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2005), 70.

Works Cited
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1958.
Benson, Jackson J. The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer: A Biography.
New York: Viking, 1984.
French, Warren G. “The First Theatrical Production of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and
Men.” American Literature 36 (January 1965): 525–27.
Floyd, Carlisle. Of Mice and Men: A Musical Drama in Three Acts Based on the
Novel and Play by John Steinbeck, Libretto. New York: Belwin-Mills, 1971.
Gladstein, Mimi R. “Of Mice and Men: Creating and Re-creating Curley’s Wife.”
In Beyond Boundaries: Rereading John Steinbeck, ed. Susan Shillinglaw and
Kevin Hearle, 205–20. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002.
Goldsby, Jacqueline. A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Harris, Trudier. Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning
Rituals. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.
Hart, Richard E. “Moral Experience in Of Mice and Men: Challenges and Re-
flection.” In The Moral Philosophy of John Steinbeck, ed. Stephen K. George,
61–71. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2005.
Johnson, Charles. “Reading the Character of Crooks in Of Mice and Men: A
Black Writer’s Perspective.” In John Steinbeck and His Contemporaries, ed.
Stephen K. George and Barbara A. Heavilin, 111–21. Lanham, MD: Scare-
crow, 2007.
“Mice, Men and Mr. Steinbeck.” New York Times, 5 December 1937, sec. 12: 7.
ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times (1851–2004). ProQuest,
University of Washington Libraries, Seattle, WA. www.proquest.com
.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/ (accessed 8 July 2008).
Morsberger, Robert. “Steinbeck and the Stage.” In The Short Novels of John Stein-
beck, ed. Jackson J. Benson, 271–93. Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1990.
Parini, Jay. John Steinbeck: A Biography. New York: Henry Holt, 1995.
Park, Marlene. “Lynching and Anti-Lynching: Art and Politics in the 1930s.”
In The Social and the Real: Political Art of the 1930s in the Western Hemisphere,
ed. Alejandro Anreus, Diana L. Linden, and Jonathan Weinberg, 155–77.
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006.

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Rice, Anne P. “Introduction.” In Witnessing Lynching: American Writers Respond,

ed. Anne P. Rice, 1–24. New Brunswick, NJ: University of Rutgers Press,
2003.
Shedd, Margaret. “Of Mice and Men.” Theatre Arts Monthly 21 (October 1937):
774–80.
Steinbeck, John. Of Mice and Men. 1937. New York: Penguin Modern Classics,
1993.
———. Of Mice and Men: Play in Three Acts. Acting edition. New York: Drama-
tists Play Service, 1937.
———. Travels with Charley in Search of America. 1962. New York: Penguin,
1980.
———. “The Vigilante.” In The Long Valley, 93–100. 1986. New York: Penguin,
1995.
Steinbeck, Elaine and Robert Wallsten, eds. Steinbeck: A Life in Letters. New
York: Viking, 1975.
Swaim, Don. “Steinbeck and Kaufman at Cherchez La Farm.” Steinbeck Studies
13, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 8–14.

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 CHAPTER NINETEEN
EMOTION RECOLLECTED IN TRANQUILITY:
A CONTEXT FOR ROMANTICISM IN
OF MICE AND MEN
Barbara A. Heavilin

To the administration they were an eyesore and a humiliation, and its

determination to exorcise them reflected a general hardening through-
out the land of the attitude of the well-fed toward the ill-fed.—William
Manchester, The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America

I
n The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932–1972,
William Manchester describes the summer of 1932, five years before
the publication of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, when thousands of
destitute World War I veterans and their families camped out in Wash-
ington, D.C., seeking “relief from the Great Depression”:

The men drilled, sang war songs, and once, led by a Medal of Honor
winner and watched by a hundred thousand Washingtonians, they
marched up Pennsylvania Avenue bearing American flags of faded cot-
ton. Most of the time, however, they waited and brooded. . . . They
wanted immediate payment of the soldiers’ “bonus” authorized by the
Adjusted Compensation Act of 1924 but not due until 1945. If they
could get cash now, the men would receive about $500 each. Headline
writers had christened them “the Bonus Army,” “the bonus marchers.”
They called themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force.1

Parts of this essay were previously published in John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men”: A
Reference Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 19. It is used by permission.

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In response, President Herbert Hoover barricaded himself in the

White House, isolating himself and setting up guards so that no one could
pass. When some veterans resisted attempts to evacuate them from the
city, the White House accused them of being Communist agitators. Al-
though they were unarmed, a short time later General Douglas McArthur
drew out all of his forces against men, women, and children:

Troopers of the 3rd Cavalry, led by Major Patton, pranced along

brandishing naked sabers. Behind the horses marched a machine gun
detachment and men from the 12th Infantry, the 13th Engineers, and
the 34th Infantry, the sun glinting on their bayonets. Behind these units
rolled the six tanks, the caterpillar treads methodically chewing up the
soft asphalt.2

The veterans could not believe that the government they had served
would send out the armed forces against them. Nor could they believe that
those whom they viewed as fellow soldiers would attack them. They were
wrong. Routed out and herded out of the state, they found no welcome
anywhere: “One railroad,” Manchester writes, “put together a special train
to carry those bound for the plains states; Kansas City civic leaders raised
$1,500 to keep it from stopping there, and the boxcars hurtled onward.
. . . By autumn, most of the BEF had merged into the enormous transient
population which roamed the land in 1932.”3
As well-fed Americans closed their hearts against these ill-fed and
homeless veterans in their midst, so they closed their minds and hearts
to the ominous signs of the beginning Holocaust in Nazi Germany and
the plight of the Jews there—with the State Department’s issuing a news
release that Jews were no longer being mistreated, a report based on cables
received from Berlin. To belie these claims, by 1935 some 80,000 German
Jews had fled to the United States for refuge.
Such was the general tenor of the times worldwide—human suffer-
ing, horror, and a general indifference or denial. Such is the national and
worldwide backdrop when John Steinbeck was writing Of Mice and Men.
In this novel, sympathy for a world that often goes sorrowfully wrong—as
in Robert Burns’s “To a Mouse” that is reflected in the novel’s final title—
is submerged beneath a seemingly existential depiction of “something that
happened,” as Steinbeck first titled the book. Even though this title may

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suggest an empirical, coolly objective recording of an event, Steinbeck

has much in common with Burns’s empathy for the mouse upturned by
his plow and with St. Francis of Assisi’s mystic insight into the nature of
things that calls for us to walk softly upon the earth, for the rocks are also
our brothers. Clearly, Steinbeck does not share the fatalistic outlook of
the existentialists and naturalists of his time. In the beauty of the novel’s
opening and closing scenes, the delicacy of character delineation (includ-
ing a faithful old dog), the authenticity of voices, and the poetic quality
of the language there is pathos in the truest sense, a speaking to the heart
and the human condition that is indicative of all great literature.
Steinbeck saw around him firsthand a world of suffering and indiffer-
ence; and his personal experiences inform his writing of Of Mice and Men
and later of The Grapes of Wrath. Jackson J. Benson’s The True Adventures
of John Steinbeck, Writer finds the genesis of character and setting in Of
Mice and Men in Steinbeck’s observations of bindlestiffs and hobos while
he was working on the Spreckels sugar ranches during harvest. There he
met bindlestiffs and hobos who started at the southernmost ranch and
worked their way north until harvest was ended. The novel’s characters
Lennie and George are like these bindlestiffs, who go from place to place
in search of work, carrying their few belongings on their back. Benson
pinpoints the location of the novel as “Spreckels ranch number 2, just
south of Soledad on the west side of the Salinas River.”4 Japanese, Mexi-
cans, and Filipinos likewise worked on these ranches; and there is a brief,
if peripheral, reference to the Japanese presence in Of Mice and Men in
George’s complaint about having to move around the country, being fed
“by a Jap cook.”5
Claudia Durst Johnson’s 1997 Understanding “Of Mice and Men,”
“The Red Pony,” and “The Pearl”: A Student Casebook of Issues, Sources, and
Historical Documents records the life of “the vagrant farm worker,” and
classifies Lennie and George as “non-Depression . . . migratory laborers”
who, nonetheless, endure a hand-to-mouth existence. While their life at
the ranch is relatively decent—with shelter, adequate if unpalatable food,
a place to sleep and store a few possessions—it reveals “the inevitable psy-
chological effects of homelessness and hopelessness.”6 She documents the
life of such men by selections from diaries, documentaries such as Carey
McWilliams’s Factories in the Fields, and histories of the times. In one en-
try, Johnson cites Josiah Royce’s early history of California that was as well

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“a study of the American character.”7 Specifically, Johnson points out the

similarities between Royce’s description of the 1849 pioneers who became
irresponsible and miserable as a result of their “homelessness, vagrancy,
and lack of family life” and the social structure in Of Mice and Men

that contributes not only to the riotous drinking and whoring of the
men, but to their failure to grow beyond boyhood, and because they have
no lasting connections with one another, to a cold and mean streak. This
is especially true in their treatment of Candy, whose beloved old dog is
shot and who knows that he will soon be thrown out with no means of
supporting himself. It can also be seen in their treatment of Crooks, who
is ostracized and used as a whipping boy and who, in turn, has developed
a bitter, suspicious attitude toward the rest of the men.8

Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, then, not only reflects its own times, but
it is a universally applicable portrait of the psychological impact of dispos-
session, homelessness, and loneliness.
Critics have variously viewed Of Mice and Men, and attempts have
been made to categorize it variously as Realism, Naturalism, or Roman-
ticism. The details of Steinbeck’s description of setting, character, and
circumstance in Of Mice and Men are certainly realistic—as he intended
them to be—having set out to write about “something that happened,” a
seemingly nonjudgmental story focused around a central incident. And
this novel does have much in common with realism, which The Harper
Handbook to Literature defines as literature that is a “faithful representa-
tion of life.”9 Holding to the “materialistic belief that truth is a commodity
accessible on the surface of things, perceptible to the senses,” the realists’
aim was to take Nature rather than art as a model, choosing subject matter
from “ordinary life closest to the experience of the writer.”10
Unlike the eighteenth-century British satirists, whose purpose is to
hold the mirror so that society may see itself as it is and set things right,
the realists’ nonjudgmental purpose is merely to reflect things as they are,
or how the writer perceives them to be. Harper delineates the techniques
by which realists seek to achieve this aim of “rigid selectivity,” with the
mirror positioned to capture representative scenes that place emphasis
on the ordinary. In setting, character, and plot, there is verisimilitude in
abundant and accurate detail that describes everything from houses and
furniture, to clothes, seasons, patterns of speech, and societal behavior.

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The language tends toward a “plain style” that places emphasis on plot
rather than on the narrator, whose carefully chosen perspective presents
a “window on truth.” Although the story is often told in third person,
this perspective strives to avoid subjectivity and omniscience in order to
enhance a sense of reality. In realistic novels, events often seem inevitable
because the reader cannot envision any other result of the characters’
choices.11
This depiction of realism is almost a formula for Of Mice and Men.
Steinbeck’s subject matter is from close, personal experience. Events are
selective and representative, details abound—from the slant of sunlight
that marks the passing of time, to the ranch hands’ personal items stored
in apple boxes above their bunks, to the sharpness of George’s features
and the vagueness of Lennie’s. The story’s objectivity also conceals the
narrator, and the plot has a seemingly inevitable outcome (given these
particular characters in their circumstances).
But Steinbeck, unlike the realists, does not depict truth as “a com-
modity accessible on the surface of things, perceptible to the senses.”
There is another, higher definition of truth, one not dependent upon
empirical verification and surfaces. Aristotle, for example, finds poetry to
be a higher thing than history because the first deals with what is true to
the human condition whereas the latter deals with facts. And Webster’s
Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary’s third definition of “truth” as “a tran-
scendent fundamental or spiritual reality” goes beyond the factual and
the superficial, revealing a higher level of reality than that available on
“the surface of things.”12 In the character of the feebleminded Lennie, for
example, Steinbeck has created a person who is more than the sum of his
parts. Slow-witted, childlike, and innocently dangerous to himself and
others, Lennie depends on George for survival in a world he cannot fully
comprehend. But after the reader has found the measure of Lennie’s intel-
ligence quotient, his height, his weight, his girth, his extreme limitations,
his childish manipulation of George, his inability to function on his own,
and his innocent and unwitting propensity to hurt small animals, there is
more to him than that, something that defies measurement.
Lennie emerges as a fully realized human being—one who is capable
of dreams, aspirations, love, abiding friendship, commitment. He is a
highly sympathetic character, in other words, one with whom the insight-
ful reader can identify and empathize. The reader has been made to care

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when Lennie’s dream dies along with him. Read in this light, Of Mice
and Men has more in common with the Romantics’ idealization of the
ordinary and the commonplace than with the realists’ accurate portrayal
of surface things.
Steinbeck critic Warren French’s 1975 revised edition of John Stein-
beck goes a step beyond realism when he classifies Of Mice and Men with
the Naturalists, maintaining that the 1930s works are “the most remark-
able and consistent body of Naturalistic writing in American literature.”
In these novels, French asserts, Steinbeck “presents the pathetic defeats of
naturalistic characters.”13 Yale critic Harold Bloom also places this novel
with the Naturalists, asserting that Steinbeck’s “heavy naturalism is very
close to fatalism” and comparing Of Mice and Men (unfavorably, of course,
considering his general disregard for Steinbeck) with Dreiser’s naturalistic
and fatalistic Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy.14
According to The Harper Handbook to Literature, naturalism is a deriva-
tive of scientific determinism, especially Darwinism, because it perceives
a person’s fate as the product of blind external or biological forces, chiefly
heredity and environment, but in the typical Naturalistic novel chance
played a large part as well, suggesting a formula something like H + E +
C = F (Heredity plus Environment plus Chance equals Fate).15

Viewed in this light, Of Mice and Men might almost be considered

naturalistic—but not quite, although there is certainly a strong sense of
inevitability in the novel. Given Lennie’s peculiar abnormalities, the en-
vironment into which he has been thrust, and the unhappy consequences
of an ill-fated meeting with Curley’s wife in the barn, the novel’s outcome
may seem fated. As in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, however, opportunities for
choice occur throughout the novel. George chooses, for example, to ignore
both his and Lennie’s forebodings about the ranch. He chooses to go into
town, leaving Lennie unsupervised even though he knows that Lennie
is not a responsible adult. Urged on by Slim’s approval of the action, he
finally chooses to pull the trigger that kills his friend even though he is most
hesitant and reluctant to do so.
Steinbeck does, however, share some of the Naturalists’ techniques,
which—as Harper points out—Naturalists share with the realists but ex-
tend and apply differently. Naturalists do not choose a mirror that reflects
life but a lens that focuses where they please. More experimenter and

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scientist than observer, they manipulate both “characters and plot.”16 As

tightly controlled as a poem and sharply focused on the events surround-
ing a single incident—something that happened—Of Mice and Men serves
like the lens of a microscope that zeroes in on the object in question rather
than like the more encompassing and nonselective view of a mirror that
simply reflects everything before it equally.
Steinbeck’s interest in non-teleological thinking in the novel fits
with the lens image of the Naturalists as well, for he closely examines
characters and contains events within narrow confines, without provid-
ing a broader context or explaining how things came to be the way they
are or why they turn out as they do. French finds connections between
a non-teleological point of view and naturalism, leading him to declare
(as noted above) Steinbeck’s 1930s writings to be remarkably and consis-
tently Naturalistic.17 But there is more to Steinbeck’s 1937 Of Mice and
Men (and his other 1930s writings as well) than is evident in his use of
a seemingly non-teleological perspective. The presence of love (in the
sense of caritas, or caring) in George and Lennie’s friendship that con-
trasts with the absence of love in the lives of the ranch hands and even in
the relationship between the newly married Curley and his girl wife takes
the novel beyond a mechanistic, non-teleological world in which things
just happen into a world of what ought to be.

Non-teleological Thinking versus What Ought to Be

Benson discusses the influence of the Darwinian philosophy of evolu-
tion and the survival of the fittest and of non-teleological thinking on
Steinbeck’s writings of the thirties. He defines non-teleological thinking
and Steinbeck’s use of it in his writing:

Non-teleological thinking is mechanistic. One event leads to another,

and what happens is dictated by physical laws. There is no possibility
of free will—all events are determined—and there is no way of know-
ing whether or not there is a divine Providence, an overall design. . . .
Steinbeck presented almost from the beginning of his published work
a world that was mechanistic and independent of the desires of man
and the presence of God. . . . There is a pervasive sense that things just

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happen. People who act by their dreams are defeated; people who try to
change things are unsuccessful.18

Here Benson’s definition almost provides an outline for Of Mice and

Men. The very title, taken from Robert Burns’s poem, seems mechanistic
and fatalistic; the original title, “Something That Happened,” even more
so. Both negative and positive criticism has noted the novel’s Sophoclean
sense of things that happen of necessity, given these particular characters,
in this particular place and circumstances, at this particular time. But “al-
most” is a key word here; there is more to be noted about this novel than
its surface fatalism. For Steinbeck provides another measure for human
beings and their affairs: a strongly implied sense of what ought to be.
Side by side with Of Mice and Men’s seemingly mechanistic, haphaz-
ard universe is another world that is ruled not by a scientific determinism
that looks hard at what is (non-teleological thinking) but is ruled rather by
a strongly implied and inescapable metaphysical and ethical sense of what
ought to be, or a way of measuring life’s events—possibly even of finding
some meaning. The black stable buck, Crooks, confides to Lennie that
the most difficult thing about his life of separateness and aloneness is that
he has “nothing to measure by.”19 “Measure” is a rich word; for Crooks it
means some way of determining what is real and what is not, including
himself and his experiences—a criterion by which he can judge, measure,
appraise, regulate, and govern his life. Reality, or what is, then, needs to
be measured in some way, and, according to Crooks, that measurement is
not to be determined by oneself, but is dependent upon community.
In the world of Of Mice and Men, Slim with his “Godlike eyes” is
the surface measure of all things in the ranch community—from love, to
politics, to the desirability (or not) of killing dogs and men. His decisions
are accepted without question. Hence, when he agrees with Carlson that
Candy’s smelly old sheepdog must be killed and prods George into killing
Lennie, no one questions his assessment. But there is another dimension
alongside in Of Mice and Men that implies a moral universe in which the
strong are not to be praised for their oppression of the weak (as in the
case of Lennie and Candy) or different (as in the case of Crooks). In this
alongside, moral world, there is another measure, a something higher than
a human being, however godlike his eyes and demeanor.

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Such a world goes beyond a tale of the mechanistic and determined—

something that merely happened—into a story that Steinbeck will later, in
East of Eden, declare to be the only story in the world:

I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has
frightened and inspired us, so that we live in a Pearl White serial of
continuing thought and wonder. Humans are caught—in their lives, in
their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cru-
elty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil.
I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of
feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first
consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite any
changes we may impose on field and river and mountain, on economy
and manners. There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off
the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean ques-
tions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?20

This question of good and evil extends beyond the world of sci-
ence into the realm of ethics and theology. It extends beyond the em-
pirical verification of telescopes, microscopes, scales, and weights into a
world of measurement based on a criterion and a standard of behavior
that recognizes that human beings should be their brother’s or sister’s
keeper—a responsibility that George accepts, even if at times grudg-
ingly. Such behavior is a mark of caritas, charity, and love for a fellow
human being.
In East of Eden, such a love is the final criterion by which a dying
Adam is enabled to reach out to his son Cal and leave him with the
enabling assurance that it will be his own choices that determine his
character and his future, not an inherited wickedness from his prostitute
mother. In Of Mice and Men, an acute absence of this love (in the sense
of caritas, or charity)—other than that between the friends George and
Lennie—governs the novel’s tragic outcome. Although on the surface Of
Mice and Men enacts a Darwinian philosophy of evolution and the sur-
vival of the fittest, a strong undercurrent persistently questions, “Am I my
brother’s keeper?” and invites speculation on a higher, more ethical way:
“Who is to take care of the Lennies of this world?” Such questions provide
something “to measure by.”

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Compassion as the Hallmark of Steinbeck’s Art

Unlike those critics who classify Of Mice and Men with the mechanistic
universe of the Naturalists, the early reviewer Lewis Gannett centers on
“compassion” as the hallmark of Steinbeck’s art and the criterion by which
it may be measured:

Compassion, even more than the perfect sense of form, . . . marks off
John Steinbeck, artist, so sharply from all the little verbal photographers
who record tough talk and snarl in books which have power without
pity. The most significant things John Steinbeck has to say about his
characters are never put into words; they are the overtones of which the
reader is never wholly conscious—and that is art.21

These “overtones” that draw readers into the story are not only signifi-
cant in Steinbeck’s art, they are also, unfortunately, why he is wrongfully
accused of sentimentality. As Gannett insightfully observes, Steinbeck is
a most evocative writer who not only explores thematically the age-old
question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” he involves his readers in a par-
ticipatory role in a story of dispossession and isolation that seems to have
no end. Steinbeck, then, seems to have as much or more in common with
St. Francis of Assisi’s “Tread softly, the rocks, too, are thy brothers” as he
does with scientific determinism.
Although Of Mice and Men shares some commonalities with the
Realists and Naturalists of Steinbeck’s time, it nevertheless has much in
common with British Romanticism. While the objectivity of its telling
and the authenticity of its characters lends an aura of realism, in style and
tone this novel shares with the British Romantics a concern with casting
the aura of imagination over the commonplace, with speaking in the real
language of the people, and with reflecting strong emotion recollected in
tranquility. It further has in common with the Romantic poets a poetic
style and tone that speak to the heart—belying the mechanistic universe
envisioned by the Naturalists and Realists.
The major points of Harper’s discussion of Romanticism reveal Stein-
beck’s affinity for the Romantics both in demeanor and practice. Like the
Romantics, Steinbeck experiments and expresses his own individuality both
in subject matter and in writing technique, while celebrating the individual

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by turning to “common humanity as a proper subject for art.”22 Steinbeck’s

experiment, Of Mice and Men, elevates “common humanity”—those on the
lowest rungs of the social ladder—to the status of art. His experiment in
combining elements of novel and drama results in a story told with such
simplicity that the text itself almost serves as a script for a play (as he in-
tended), with lighting, scenes, and entrances and exits of characters.
With the Romantics, Steinbeck shared a faith in the basic goodness of
people and their capacity to transcend their faults, hardships, and difficul-
ties. Like the Romantics, he eschewed the dark Calvinistic and Puritanical
belief that human beings are born in a state of total depravity and sin but
seemed, rather, to share with Wordsworth a belief that they are born in
innocence and may strive toward transcendence. An “imperfect society
would be perfected through individual good released, encouraged, and
made all-encompassing.”23 Despite its seeming fatalism, the friendship
of Of Mice and Men’s George and Lennie in the midst of deprivation and
hardship bears witness to the possibility of the fulfillment of an ideal of
brotherhood. That their example does not extend to their society at large
does not diminish its light.
The Romantics idealized the natural and primitive, such as Jean
Jacques Rousseau’s “noble savage . . . freed from the limiting restraints
of civilization.”24 With a grotesque twist on Rousseau’s “noble savage,”
Steinbeck creates the character of Lennie, who is innocently free of civ-
ilization’s “limiting restraints,” but also free of those inner restraints that
hold violent behavior in check. He is nevertheless a sympathetic character,
totally devoted to George and capable of affection for the small animals he
inadvertently kills. His heart is gentle, although his hands, unfortunately,
are not. Like Wordsworth’s Idiot Boy and Mad Mother, he is portrayed
as a human being who has worth.
Like the Romantics, then, Steinbeck is egalitarian, viewing each per-
son as equal from birth in the eyes of God and, therefore, to be valued
as an individual. Steinbeck’s meticulous treatment of characters—even
the most minor ones—demonstrates this egalitarian bent. Each is treated
with the utmost care: from William Tenner, a former worker on the
ranch whose love of reading is revealed in a published letter to a maga-
zine; to Candy’s faithful old sheepdog; to Whitey, the former occupant of
George’s bunk, who probably had once been faithful in attending church
because he dressed up every Sunday, put on a necktie, and sat in the

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bunkhouse. Other characters are similarly sketched and brought to life as

persons of value and worth as human beings.
In accord with their emphasis on the value and worth of each person,
the Romantics valued literature that speaks to the heart and has empathic
appeal:

Emotional, intuitional, and sensual elements of artistic, religious, and

intellectual expression were counted in some ways more valid than the
products of education and reason. The heart versus the head became
one of the great conflicts of the nineteenth century, with Romanticism
raising the issue and pointing the way.25

Such a Romantic, empathic appeal is one of the hallmarks of the

Steinbeck aesthetic, so that how the reader feels becomes as important as
what the reader thinks. There is never a dichotomy between the head and
the heart: the human capacity to know and understand depend on both.
Like the Romantics, Steinbeck speaks to the heart, with an empathic
understanding as the desired end result.
In the preface to the 1969 edition of Steinbeck and His Critics, E. W.
Tedlock Jr. describes his own empathic experience in reading Steinbeck,
showing how it feels to enter into an “atmosphere of marvelously fresh,
non-conceptual awareness”:

As for the insight, there is at times in Steinbeck an experience that I

think of as purely existential and native or basic to him, beyond cavil. It
can be seen in a note of his on an early morning encounter with some
farm laborers camped by the road. The note is of great objective purity
and is also most humanly attractive.26

Here Tedlock describes a moment of “non-conceptual,” pre-linguistic

awareness: an insight and a feeling—a quintessentially Romantic experi-
ence and way of knowing. Steinbeck purposefully creates just such an
awareness. He originally intended Of Mice and Men to be a children’s
book and wrote in a letter to Ben Abramson that he wanted to capture
the world of a child in which colors are clearer, tastes sharper, and feelings
more intense than they are to adults. He writes that he wanted to capture
the feeling of an afternoon and of evening bird song.27 This intention to
capture what Wordsworth called “emotion recollected in tranquility” is the

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essence of Romantic literature—and the essence of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and

Men as well. Persistently and intentionally, Steinbeck calls for an empathic
response and a heightened awareness from his readers. What these readers
take from the text, however, will depend on whether or not their own inner
resources are deep or hollow, as he stated in a 1939 letter to Pascal Covici
concerning the manuscript of The Grapes of Wrath.28 His stories, then, have
no end. The last word depends on the response of the reader.

Notes
1. William Manchester, The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of
America. 2 vols. [reprinted in paperback in 1984]. (New York: Little Brown,
1974), 1.
2. Manchester, Glory, 13–14.
3. Manchester, Glory, 20.
4. Jackson J. Benson, The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer (New
York: Viking Press, 1984), 39.
5. Benson, True Adventures, 54.
6. Claudia Durst Johnson, Understanding “Of Mice and Men,” “The Red Pony,”
and “The Pearl”: A Student Casebook of Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), 101.
7. Johnson, Understanding “Of Mice and Men,” 118.
8. Johnson, Understanding “Of Mice and Men,” 118.
9. Northrop Frye, Sheridan Baker, and George Perkins. The Harper Hand-
book to Literature (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 389.
10. Frye, Baker, and Perkins, Harper Handbook, 386–87.
11. Frye, Baker, and Perkins, Harper Handbook, 387.
12. Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary (New York: Merrian Webster,
1965).
13. Warren French, John Steinbeck, 2nd ed., rev. (Boston: Twayne, 1975), 87,
173.
14. Harold Bloom, ed. John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men”: Bloom’s Notes
(Broomall, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 1996), 6–7.
15. Frye, Baker, and Perkins, Harper Handbook, 307.
16. Frye, Baker, and Perkins, Harper Handbook, 307.
17. French, John Steinbeck, 87.
18. Benson, True Adventures, 242–43.

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19. John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men (New York: Penguin 1993), 69. Sub-
sequent quotations are cited parenthetically in the text as OMM followed by the
page number.
20. John Steinbeck, East of Eden (New York: Penguin, 1986), 543.
21. Lewis Gannett, “Books and Things,” New York Herald Tribune, 25 Febru-
ary 1937: 17.
22. Frye, Baker, and Perkins, Harper Handbook, 403.
23. Frye, Baker, and Perkins, Harper Handbook, 403–4.
24. Frye, Baker, and Perkins, Harper Handbook, 404.
25. Frye, Baker, and Perkins, Harper Handbook, 404.
26. E. W. Tedlock Jr. and C. V. Wicker, Steinbeck and His Critics: A Record of
Twenty-five Years (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1969), v.
27. Benson, True Adventures, 325–26.
28. Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten, eds. Steinbeck: A Life in Letters
(New York: Viking, 1975), 178.

Works Cited
Benson, Jackson J. The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer. New York: Vi-
king Press, 1984.
Bloom, Harold, ed. John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men”: Bloom’s Notes. Broomall,
PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 1996.
French, William. John Steinbeck. 2nd ed., rev. Boston: Twayne, 1975.
Frye, Northrop, Sheridan Baker, and George Perkins. The Harper Handbook to
Literature. New York: Harper and Row, 1985.
Gannett, Lewis. “Books and Things.” New York Herald Tribune, 25 February
1937: 17.
Johnson, Claudia Durst. Understanding “Of Mice and Men,” “The Red Pony,” and
“The Pearl”: A Student Casebook of Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents.
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997.
Manchester, William. The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America [2
vols.] New York: Little Brown, 1974.
Steinbeck, Elaine and Robert Wallsten, eds. Steinbeck: A Life in Letters. New
York: Viking, 1975.
Steinbeck, John. East of Eden. New York: Penguin, 1986.
———. Of Mice and Men (modern critical edition). New York: Penguin, 1993.
Tedlock, E. W., Jr., and C. V. Wicker. Steinbeck and His Critics: A Record of
Twenty-five Years. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1969.

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 CHAPTER TWENTY
ONE IS THE LONELIEST NUMBER:
STEINBECK’S PARADOXICAL ATTRACTION
AND REPULSION TO ISOLATION/SOLITUDE
Michael J. Meyer

My books endeavor to include characters who resemble me physically

and spiritually in all my gorgeous loneliness and splendid isolation.—
Sherman Alexie in his acceptance speech for the 2007 National Book
Award for Young People’s Literature for The Absolute True Diary of a
Part-Time Indian

It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in

solitude to live after our own, but the great man is he who in the midst
of the crowds keeps with the perfect sweetness of the independence of
solitude.—Henry David Thoreau, Walden

A
ccording to the words of the popular 1970s hit by Three Dog
Night, “One is the loneliest, number one is the loneliest / Num-
ber one is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do.” While listen-
ers might nod in assent at this obvious statement and wonder why anyone
would need to repeat this phrase as if it were a rare insight, a closer look
reveals that the lyric contains a very ambiguous statement, making a com-
ment far beyond the common interpretation about loneliness. Perhaps the
band understood that the varying positions occupied by the word number
in the lyrics when accompanied by a shift in form class from adjective to
noun would create potential variation in meaning for listeners. For in our
success-oriented Western society, being number one is seldom thought
of as isolating and/or negative. Instead, it generally is seen as an indicator
of uniqueness, of popularity, of being on top of the world. Yet ironically,

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as many famous artists have discovered, such popularity and recognition

are often accompanied by “dis-ease”: indeed, attaining success in any field
might not be a comfortable accomplishment, and there are many celebri-
ties who long for a time when life was simpler, when their personal space
was not invaded, and when their actions were not under intense scrutiny.
John Steinbeck also discovered the vagaries that accompanied his
achievement as one of America’s premier literary artists. As Steinbeck
climbed the ladder toward becoming number one in the field of literature,
he discovered that his rise in popularity and critical acclaim was accompa-
nied by a growing sense of isolation and loneliness. As his books became
best sellers, he found himself increasingly set apart from others, as if he
didn’t belong in any group. Whether this was a self-imposed emotional
crisis or whether it was generated from the outside by friends and foes
alike is ultimately immaterial. What is important is that, misunderstood
and underappreciated, he became more and more reclusive, hesitant to
interact with others, beset by intrusive admirers as well as by intractable
critics of his literary production. Not surprisingly, the loneliness that
accompanied his success, and indeed which was present in Steinbeck’s
formative years as a child and as an adolescent, soon began to infiltrate
his fictional output and to find reiteration in many of his most memorable
characters.
However, although the themes of isolation and loneliness have been
accorded critical acknowledgement as a principal Steinbeckian fictional
emphasis, to my knowledge no critic has yet traced the impact of these
elements in his personal correspondence nor suggested that Steinbeck
held an ambiguous paradoxical viewpoint about them in real life, a view-
point that also extended into his fictional output. For Steinbeck, as for
many artists, both literary and musical, the loneliness/isolation that they
encountered as a result of their professions was bane as well as blessing.
It brought a sense of rejection and alienation that resulted in depression
and a disconsolate apprehension about the world around them, but it also
offered positive refuge, a quiet space or down time when they could con-
template their message to the world in a time of silence and could create
new works without interference by others.
Through close analysis of Steinbeck’s nonfictional output, including
letters and essays, and observation of the fictional characters who struggle
with loneliness/isolation (especially those in Of Mice and Men), it will

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become evident that the author clearly recognized the duality of loneli-
ness. Although “one is the loneliest number” in both senses of the phrase’s
meaning, there remains a positive element in “alone” time that the author
found difficult to understand as an inherent character trait in a species that
deliberately seeks out and values companionship and social interaction as
healthy and positive aspects of human life.
Excerpts of correspondence recorded in A Life in Letters give evidence
that, even as a young man, Steinbeck possessed a keen awareness of the
human duality that existed in moments of isolation. He realized that such
moments could be times of cruelty and insensitivity because individuals
were cut off from others; conversely, they could prove regenerative hours
when solitude allows uninterrupted contemplation. Yet as an immature
writer, Steinbeck seems to have experienced more episodes of the former
than the latter and to have gained an appreciation of the positive nature
of isolation only as his age and experience advanced.
As early as 1930, Steinbeck wrote in a letter to Amasa (Ted) Miller
that he felt a “lostness” when he was not engaged in writing, in sharing
a story with others.1 Later, despite his burgeoning success, he mentions
his “sadness” and a “feeling of impending doom” (LIL 44), no doubt as a
result of his fear of rejection or critical disapproval from a reading public
who might misunderstand what he was trying to communicate. His early
concerns about artistic recognition and renown indicate that he may have
felt that his relative obscurity and its accompanying isolation were evi-
dence of failure and defeat as a literary artist. Yet Steinbeck’s need for in-
teraction with others, especially a reading public, is sometimes mitigated
by his realization of the simplicity of his own human necessities. In a 1934
letter to George Albee Jr. for example, he writes: “I don’t want to possess
anything, nor to be anything. I have no ambition because, on inspection,
the aims of ambition achieved seem tiresome” (LIL 93).
Steinbeck also expressed his desire for anonymity and solitude when
Tortilla Flat (1935) became a best seller. Despite his pride in the achieve-
ment and the positive reception his novel received, the author shares his
fear of becoming a “trade mark” in a letter to critic Joseph Henry Jackson.
In it, he expresses the problematic state of being a celebrity and wonders
how he will cope with the loss he will experience as a result of becom-
ing well-known. Expressing how uncomfortable he is with the increased
social interaction that is required of him (LIL 119), Steinbeck seems to

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recognize that some “alone time” is essential to insure quality artistic

expression. Similarly, when writing to his close friend, Dook Sheffield,
Steinbeck shares the ironic result of his popularity: “I get more cut off all
the time because people are like you, afraid of this thing that has been
built up, and I don’t see them often. Knowing I am watched, I don’t go
any place. Knowing I’ll be quoted, I don’t say anything” (LIL 198).
During the early 1940s, the negative qualities of loneliness seem to
have occupied Steinbeck’s personal as well as fictional focus to a greater
degree. Another letter to Sheffield states:
The loneliness and the discouragement are by no means a thing that has
passed. In fact, they seem to crowd in more than ever . . . [even though]
I now possess the things that the great majority of people think are the
death of loneliness and discouragement only they aren’t. (LIL 212)

Later, by the time the war years arrived, Steinbeck seems to have
discovered once more the renewing rather than the destructive powers of
solitude. Writing to his second wife, Gwyn, he mentions meeting several
naval officers in Africa and muses on how they dealt with their “nerve
strain” simply by being there “in that very quiet place and getting rest
that can’t be got anywhere else. They listen to music and sleep and it does
them a great deal of good” (LIL 261).
Returning from the war and establishing a residence in New York
City, Steinbeck similarly tried to establish a restricted working space for
himself—a working cellar—“no window, no ability to look out and see
the postman and the garbage wagon” (LIL 287). Nevertheless, the dark
side of loneliness, rejection, and a lack of self-confidence often returned to
plague him, especially when he tried to write. Just a page later, in a 1946
letter recorded in the Letters, he notes the following: “I have been feeling
lousy in my mind today. It has been a period of blue despair such as I
haven’t had in quite a long time (LIL 288).
Perhaps it was the increasing marital tension between John and Gwyn
and their ultimate separation and divorce that account for Steinbeck’s
return to an emphasis on the negative aspects of loneliness in the late
1940s. Describing the isolated feeling as similar to “little fingers of ice”
that occasionally bring “blind panic” (LIL 330), Steinbeck seems to be
searching for peace and satisfaction that some of his characters find only
in death; in short, Steinbeck craves the forgetfulness and escape that

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isolation/solitude can provide. Yet the downside of being alone (both the
divorce from Gwyn and the death of his close friend Ed Ricketts occurred
in 1948) seems so predominant that he cannot see past it. The negatives
outweigh the positives.
A careful critic senses that comments which suggest control (“I still
get the panic aloneness but I can work [it] out by thinking of what it is”
and “I realized more than any time in my life that there is nothing any-
one can do. It’s something that has to be done alone” [LIL 334–35]) are
merely hollow sounds rather than a reality that Steinbeck believes in. He
desperately needs to believe his dilemma can have an absolute solution
rather than remain an interminable paradox. By late 1949, however, more
of a balance returns as the author, having returned to his former home in
Pacific Grove, California, writes to fellow novelist, John O’Hara: “I have
had seven months of quiet out here to try to reduce the maelstrom to
kettle size. Being alone here has allowed me to think out a lot of things.
There is so much rapping in the world (LIL 359).
Steinbeck continues by stating, “I think I believe in one thing power-
fully—that the only creative thing our species has is the individual lonely
mind” (LIL 359). Yet while celebrating the mind’s ability to foster and
preserve the very best in mankind, Steinbeck now recognizes and stresses
the duality he has observed. Describing his writing as a “cold and lonely
profession,” he identifies his beginning research on East of Eden as “the
coldest and loneliest [of all], because this is all I can do” (LIL 360).
By the 1950s then, the stress produced by critics’ high expectations for
another Grapes or at least a return to creative skills which some felt were
gradually waning, Steinbeck began to describe his existence as a “rest-
less unhappy coma, just short of manic-depressive” (LIL 459). Finding
it more and more difficult to keep in mind the dual nature of all things
which he had delineated in The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951), he was
only occasionally able to break away from seeing his lonely self as an
individual who was forced to endure depressing conditions of rejection
and exclusion; isolation was no longer viewed as a positive opportunity
to relax and to redesign his work nor as a time to seek regenerative self-
confidence or peaceful contemplation. One indication of his infrequent
looks at the positive side of isolation appears in a 1954 letter to Elizabeth
Otis in which he observes: “I think it has been good to be out of touch
with the news. Nothing gives you more of a sense of not being able to

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help than non-hearing” (LIL 478). Here isolation is almost equated with
self-imposed ignorance.
Since Steinbeck felt a nagging need to connect and share his impres-
sions with others, the author seems to have convinced himself that some-
how aloneness was something undesirable for an artist, and his pessimistic
attitude toward it grew rather than diminished. Perhaps his struggle for
an empathetic understanding of the author’s plight over isolation/solitude
is best expressed in a letter to Peter Benchley in 1958. Emphasizing his
own dilemma, Steinbeck writes:

A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star

sending signals. He isn’t telling or teaching or ordering. Rather he seeks
to establish a relationship of meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are
lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome. One
of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say—and
to feel—
“Yes, that’s the way it is, or at least that’s the way I feel it. You’re not
as alone as you thought.” (LIL 523)

Happily, at the end of the decade, Steinbeck, by then well past fifty,
demonstrates that with maturity comes a more complete understanding
of the cyclical nature of loneliness and an individual’s shifting perception
of whether it is a positive or negative in life. As he grows older, a more
introspective Steinbeck seems to establish some methods for coping with
the dark side of loneliness. Although he cannot prevent its recurrence or
the dark moods that descend on him, he does begin to understand how
to deal with it. Advocating a contemplative walk in a cold wood as a
restorative for the depression brought on by loneliness, Steinbeck attests
to the “soothing and quieting” effect it has on his psyche (LIL 544). The
sadness and gloom that once accompanied the dark side of isolation lifts
as the author indulges in a type of animal-like hibernation that restores
and reenergizes him.
A similar renewing sensation occurred during the time Steinbeck
spent on his boat, sometimes when it was anchored in Sag Harbor and
occasionally when it was taken out to sea. Always a writer who designated
rooms or areas for composition and who withdrew for hours to engage
in the writing process, Steinbeck saw the boat—like “Joyous Garde,” his
writing space on Long Island—as an island of solitude where the author

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could retreat. He writes: “I can’t tell you what solace I get from the new
boat. I can move out and anchor and have a little table and a yellow pad
and some pencils. I can put myself in a position where nothing can inter-
vene. Isn’t that wonderful?” (LIL 575).
As he aged, Steinbeck sought this type of solitude more frequently,
and he no longer seemed intent on dreading the dark side of this human
emotion. For example, he describes Sag Harbor as “really heaven out here.
There is only one drawback to it. If there are guests or children, I have
absolutely no place to go to work or to be alone” (LIL 581).
Given this discovery, it is in no way surprising that when Steinbeck
was in the process of a work he considered to be the definitive accom-
plishment of his career, The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights,
he decided to travel to England’s Lake Country and establish residence
at Discove Cottage in Somerset, which not only offered quiet, but also
provided an enclosed atmosphere that absolutely exuded the Arthurian
legend. Finding New York had “too many friends, relations, children,
duties, requests, parties, too much drinking—telephones—play openings.
No chance to establish the slow rhythm and keep it intact” (LIL 605),
Steinbeck chose to ensconce himself in an Arthurian surrounding in an
attempt not only to connect to the past but also, in the process, to recreate
both Arthur and himself in a very restricted and enclosed environs.
As the decade drew to a close, Steinbeck seems to have completely
understood the double nature of loneliness and its place as a vital part of
his craft. In fact, the final letters indicate an increasing recognition, ap-
preciation, and acceptance of its duality. To his editor, Pascal Covici, he
writes:

This is a lonely business. The difficulty comes when you try to think it
isn’t. It’s not a social racket at all. It has nothing to do with conversation
or criticism or even compliments. It is and should be the most alone
thing in the world. I guess that is why writers are hard to live with,
impossible as friends and ridiculous as associates. A writer and his work
is and should be like a surly dog with a bone, suspicious of everyone,
trusting no one, loving no one. It’s hard to justify such a life, but that’s
the way it is if it is done well. (LIL 610)

Steinbeck also mentions that he values the contemplative alone time

afforded by Discove Cottage, telling Elizabeth Otis that the retreat offers

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“a luxury of rest and peace, something I can only describe as in-ness” (LIL
623). In earlier letters to Mr. and Mrs. Graham Watson, to James Pope,
and the Covicis, he further emphasizes the calmness, the relaxation and
the dream-like state of such a retreat (see LIL 615–18). No longer does the
writer seem to find an introspective time spent in solitude as something to
be feared as if he has become a social isolate or rejected individual. Rather,
he treasures the time, having perhaps come to terms with the fact that
mutual inter-communication with readers and total understanding by the
critics are all but impossible. His 1959 letter to director Elia Kazan echoes
that sentiment, as Steinbeck writes of his seclusion: “This is the most
wonderful time. . . . I am alone—the largest aloneness I have ever known,
mystic and wonderful” (LIL 626). Finally, to his third wife, Elaine Scott
Steinbeck, he writes: “And I can stand the loneliness as you can. There
it is. It’s an antidote for a poison that gets into very many men of my age
and makes them emotional and spiritual cripples” (LIL 685).
As Life in Letters draws to a close, the hostile and frustrated young
man evident in the earlier correspondence has grown sedate and perhaps
even reclusive in his acceptance of solitude. Like Frost in “Stopping
by Woods on a Snowy Evening” or Pope in “Solitude,” he has broken
through to an understanding of the paradox. He accepts the fact that the
scary feeling brought about by aloneness does have a mirror image, an
emotional trait that does not frighten but offers a reflective quiet time to
assess the world that surrounds him. Like the silence of Plato’s cave, such
solitude cures mankind’s restless longing for fame and fortune and makes
him aware that such goals are not as indispensable as they appear to be.
Self-introspection and discovery are far more valuable and can be attained
by setting aside a still quiet alone time.
No doubt the Steinbeck work that has received the most attention re-
garding its portrayal of loneliness is Of Mice and Men. In this 1937 novel,
the brotherhood cultivated by Lennie and George makes their relation-
ship both unusual and special. Unfortunately, though numerous essays
have centered on George’s bond with Lennie, only a few have noted that
George often wishes that bond could be broken.
Though he cares for Lennie, George often finds his companion to
be more of a trial than a blessing since his mentally challenged friend
impedes George from the pleasures in life he most desires: eating food,
drinking whiskey, playing cards, shooting pool, and enjoying the sexual

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company of women. Such impositions anger George, and he is constantly

contemplating how comfortable he would be if he did not have to worry
about Lennie:

I could get along so easy and so nice if I didn’t have you on my tail. . . .
If I was alone, I could live so easy. I could go and get a job an’ work, an’
no trouble. No mess at all, and when the end of the month came I could
take my fifty bucks and go into town and get whatever I want. Why I
could stay in a cat house all night. I could eat any place I want, hotl or
any place, and order any damn thing I could think of. An’ I could do all
that every damn month. Get a gallon of whisley, or set in a pool room
and play cards or shoot pool.2

Later he assaults Lennie verbally, stating: “I got you. You can’t keep
a job and you lose me ever’ job I get. Jes’ keep me shovin’ all over the
country all of the time. An’ that ain’t the worst. You get in trouble. You
do bad things and I got to get you out. . . You crazy son-of-a-bitch. You
keep me in hot water all the time” (OMM 11).
Here George realizes that having a relationship with another indi-
vidual is frustrating and demanding as well as productive and pleasurable.
While companionship can sometimes be rewarding and satisfying, it also
has its drawbacks. Thus, being alone can often be seen as a more desirable
option since then an individual is only responsible for his personal actions
and is not obligated to defend or tolerate the whims of others. “When I
think of the swell time I could have without you,’ George tells Lennie. “I
go nuts, never get no peace” (OMM 12).
Despite this antagonistic reaction, George is torn between desiring
solitude and fearing isolation, frequently expressing two emotions he ob-
serves in being alone, valuing and condemning the emotional state almost
simultaneously. For example, only a few pages later he says: “I seen the
guys that go around on ranches alone. That ain’t no good. They don’t
have no fun. After a long time, they get mean. They get wantin’ to fight
all the time” (OMM 47). Elsewhere George reiterates the ambiguity of
loneliness, reassuring Lennie, “No look, I was jus’ foolin’, Lennie. ’Cause I
want you to stay with me” (OMM 13). Barely a paragraph later, he repeats
the idea and indicates that their camaraderie serves as a protective device
that mitigates Lennie’s limited intelligence and helps to keep him out of
trouble. “Stay with me,” he implores. “Jesus Christ, somebody’d shoot you

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for a coyote if you was by yourself. No, stay with me. Your Aunt Clara
wouldn’t like you running off by yourself, even if she is dead” (OMM 13).
Clearly their camaraderie is depicted as beneficial for both individuals.
Yet most critics have persisted in emphasizing only the latter character
trait, preferring to see the bond as what distinguishes the two men from
the crowd. Given this penchant for a positive look at the brotherhood,
the pair seems to celebrate their status as lifelong friends and companions.
Surely the most quoted lines from the novel are George’s comment, “We
got someone to talk to that gives a damn about us. We don’t have to sit in
a bar room blowin’ in our jack jus’ because we got no place else to go. If
them other guys get in jail they can rot for all anybody gives a damn but
not us.” and Lennie’s reply, “But not us. Because . . . because I got you to
look after me and you got me to look after you” (OMM 14). The conclu-
sion seems to be that even though the bonds of friendship are demanding,
the advantages of being a part of a community far outweigh the disad-
vantages. Since the two have grown accustomed to being isolated from
others who treat them in a negative manner, they cling to each other as
anchors that allow each man to weather the seas of lonely wandering and
homelessness, all the while having a safe harbor of love and acceptance
available in their alter egos.
Yet Steinbeck is not content with displaying this dualized pull only in
George. Using parallel plots, he examines the feelings of other isolates on
the ranch: Candy, the old swamper; Crooks, the black stable buck; and
Curley’s wife, the sole woman in the novel. While two of the remaining
major characters seem to see no major difference between solitude and
loneliness, it is clear that Steinbeck creates an echo of George’s ambigu-
ous reaction to this controversial human condition in at least one other
individual.
Specifically, Crooks’s speeches reveal a similar ambiguity about isola-
tion. When Lennie appears in the harness room at the beginning of chap-
ter 3, Crooks’s physical appearance is described by Steinbeck as “raising his
eye, stiffen[ing] and [allowing] a scowl [to] come on his face” (OMM 68).
“You got no right to come into my room. This here’s my room. No one’s
got a right in here but me,” he says (OMM 68). His hostility at the thought
of companionship reveals how comfortable he has become with isolation
and how resigned he is to the lack of acceptance he experiences from his
fellow farmhands. The barn has become a safe and secure environment,

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and he fears that the intrusion of others will cause more problems than
it will solve. “You go on—get out of my room,” he tells Lennie. “I ain’t
wanted in the bunk house, and you ain’t wanted in my room” (OMM 68).
Stressing the inappropriateness of Lennie’s visit, Crooks make it clear that
he values his own territory and is willing to protect his space from those
who would encroach on its boundaries.
Nonetheless, Lennie persists, staying where he is unwelcome and
eventually causing Crooks to modify his rejection of fellowship. “Long as
you won’t get out and leave me alone,” he tells Lennie, “You might as well
set down” (OMM 69). As they talk, Crooks becomes more comfortable
with social interaction and even shares his past with this stranger, reveal-
ing how his existence has been immersed in isolation and rejection. His
treatment of Lennie is based on his own lack of trust in others, an attitude
that has developed as he discovers that most bonds of “friendship” are fake
or “put on” and are mostly self-serving rather than considerate or kind.
“George knows what he’s about. Jus’ talkin’ and you don’t understand
anything—I seen it over and over—a guy talkin’ to another guy and it
don’t make no difference if he don’t hear or understand. It’s just the talk-
ing. It’s just being with another guy” (OMM 71).
Since Crooks feels that most human interaction is a sham, he begins
to develop other ways of escaping loneliness, ways which may be attained
without trusting the sincerity or honesty of other people. Specifically, he
has found that books provide companionship that will enable him to ease
his tensions about the lack of real relationships in his life. Initially, books
seem to make up for his inability to play cards or throw horseshoes with
the other ranch hands, but later Crooks senses this substitution has its
flaws: “Books ain’t no good,” he says. “A guy needs somebody [emphasis
mine] to be near him. A guy goes nuts if he ain’t got nobody. Don’t make
a difference who the guy is, long’s he’s with you. I tell ya—I tell ya a guy
gets too lonely an’ he gets sick” (OMM 72–73).
The major reason Crooks gives for seeking some personal human
contact is his need to acquire affirmation for his decision making.

Sometimes he gets thinkin’, and he’s got nothing to tell him what so
an’ and what ain’t so. Maybe if he sees somethin’ and he don’t know
whether it’s right or not. He can’t tell. He got nothing to measure by.

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If some guy was with me, he could tell me—an’ then it would be all
right—but I just don’t know. (OMM 73)

Yet clearly this need for real human attachment has proved unattain-
able and impractical as far as Crooks is concerned. Therefore when Candy
enters his space as well, Crooks expresses a similar ambiguity about inter-
action as that with which he greeted Lennie. As he invites the swamper
in, his emotions are a mixture of pleasure and anger: “Come on in. If
ever’body’s comin’ in, you might as just as well” (OMM 75).
Ironically, Candy’s own comments as he enters the harness room also
reveal Steinbeck’s careful perception about the duality of loneliness. It is
almost as if he is jealous of what Crooks has. “You got a nice cozy place
here,” he says. “Must be nice to have a room to yourself this way” (OMM
75). Crooks’s reply to this is a sarcastic and bitter comment that denies the
values of aloneness. “Sure—” he retorts. “And a manure pile underneath
the window. Sure, it’s swell” (OMM 75). The ambiguity of solitude is
obvious in this passage, but Crooks also seems intent on puncturing the
universal dream that it is possible for human relationships to offer happi-
ness and contentment instead of contention and sadness.
When Curley’s wife enters the scene, she too comments on how
easy it is to deal with individuals when one is alone but how difficult it
becomes to interact with others when she finds human beings in groups.
“You’re all scared of each other—that’s what,” she says. “Ever’ one of you
is scared that the rest is goin’ to get somethin’ on you” (OMM 77).
Several pages later Crooks thinks better of his previous wish for hu-
man companions, recognizing that more problems than solutions may
result from interacting with white people. This realization has been mo-
tivated by the threat of Curley’s wife as she reacts to Crooks’s assertion
that he has a right to be alone, to refuse to associate with individuals
who might cause him to come to harm. “I had enough,” he [Crooks]
said coldly. “You got no right comin’ in on a colored man’s room. You
got no rights messing around in here at all. Now you jus’ get out, an’
get out quick” (OMM 78). Perhaps he comprehends that the “white”
status of the woman and the power behind that status makes isolation
preferable to community, no matter how hurtful that “aloneness” might
appear to be.

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Curley’s wife’s response is fraught with racial tension, suggesting that

she will cause more trouble if Crooks continues to reprove her. Readers
can sense why Crooks feels that he will be better off alone; it is basically
a perception based on his observation that human interaction is actually
more trouble than it is worth. The threat of retribution is graphic and
violent: “You just keep your trap shut, nigger. I could get you strung up
on a tree so easy it ain’t even funny” (OMM 81). After hearing this threat,
readers may be justified in concluding that a lonely existence is preferable
to a human interaction that is accompanied by a threat of death. Crooks
is so taken aback by this potential violence that Steinbeck describes him as
reduced “to nothing. There was no personality, no ego—nothing to arouse
either like or dislike” (OMM 81). As he acquiesces to the demands of
Curley’s wife, Crooks sits “perfectly still, his eyes averted, everything that
might be hurt drawn in” (OMM 81). Despite this negative description
of his isolation, Crooks realizes that he is better off when he is separated
from others. Yet it remains a paradox that confuses and irritates him.
Only a few moments later then, he breaks his silence and ends his ro-
botic actions, acknowledging the presence of Candy and Lennie but urg-
ing them to leave and rejecting a potential alliance with a mutual dream of
freedom and acceptance. “You guys better go,” he says. “I ain’t quite sure
I want you in here no more. A colored man got to have some rights even
if he don’t like ’em” (OMM 82). While isolation does not always seem
subject to the harassment of others or the imposition they might place on
his life, Crooks decides he is better off without being in a community.
In conclusion, Of Mice and Men, rather than merely being a treatise on
the values of community and acceptance, may be far more complex than
readers have previously thought. Crooks ends the penultimate chapter by
being resigned to a solitary existence.
As his uninvited guests leave, he momentarily glances toward the
door (perhaps in regret) but then proceeds to concentrate on his physical
ailments rather than his emotional ones, applying a soothing lineament to
his sore back and resolving not to take the risk of interaction again. He
has experienced the trauma that comes with community, a trauma that
is perhaps indicative of the negatives an individual can encounter when
opening one’s life, establishing ties with others, and moving away from
self-consideration to embrace a demanding whole.

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As with George and Lennie, Steinbeck suggests that feelings of isola-

tion or loneliness are often based on perceived differences and centers his
portraits of the other “lonely” and isolated people in his novel primarily on
an individual’s physical or mental deformities, emphasizing how prejudices
based on race and gender are mistakenly magnified until brotherhood is
superseded by “Otherhood.” These “minor” characters in Of Mice and Men
suffer largely as a result of their nonacceptance, since that nonacceptance
reinforces their singularity rather than suggesting that a unity can be ob-
tained in the bond they form with others. Many times in the novel, one
is truly the loneliest number as the characters strive in different ways to
escape their isolation: for example, Candy uses his dog as a valued animal
companion, Crooks relies on books to find respite from his rejection by
the ranch hands, and Curley’s wife seeks acceptance by hanging around the
bunkhouse trying to find only a decent conversation, rather than looking
for sex as some of the men assume. She also fantasizes about a Hollywood
career where she will be the center of attention and have many fans.
While Candy and Curley’s wife serve as depictions of the norm (desir-
ing interaction and closeness with others be they human or otherwise), a
brief look at Crooks confirms Steinbeck’s intent to show both sides of the
predicament and to emphasize the duality of perception the stable buck
has about his situation. We can sense the struggle Crooks faces as he at-
tempts to transform his relegation to the harness room from a negative
to a positive. For example, when Lennie enters to talk, Crooks’s immedi-
ate reaction is that his space has been invaded: “You got no right in my
room,” he says. “This here’s my room. Nobody got any right in here but
me” (OMM 68). By rationalizing in this manner, Crooks transforms the
forced separation he has experienced due to his racial “Otherness” to an
asset of not being bothered by others and having his own space. Yet later
in the novel, Crooks admits that his isolation has caused him problems:

A guy needs somebody—to be near him. A guy goes nuts if he ain’t got
nobody [he tells Lennie] . . . Don’t make no difference who the guy is
as long’s he’s with you. . . . I tell ya a guy gets too lonely an’ he gets sick.
. . . A guy sets alone out here at night, maybe readin’ books or thinkin’
or stuff like that. Sometimes he gets thinkin’, an’ he got nothing to tell
him what’s so and what ain’t so. . . . He can’t turn to some other guy

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and ast him if he sees it too. He can’t tell. If some guy was with me . . .
then it would be all right (OMM 72–73).

At one point, Curley’s wife also expresses her frustration with loneli-
ness to Lennie: “Why can’t I talk to you. I never get to talk to nobody. I
get awful lonely . . . I get lonely, . . . but I can’t talk to nobody but Curley.
Else he gets mad. How’d you like not to talk to anybody” (OMM 86).
In her attempt to overcome the isolation she find herself trapped in, she
chooses a different solution than Crooks. Instead of becoming reclusive,
she instead becomes assertive, an attribute that others interpret as sexual
aggressivity. As a result, her loneliness is hidden beneath a façade of flirt-
ing, and she is mistaken for a tramp or floozy who leads men on without
the intention of sexually satisfying them. In reality, of course, she is merely
a woman who yearns for compassion and comradeship as well as for full
acceptance of her gender.
In a 1961 letter to John Murphy, Steinbeck writes:

Once the words go down, you are alone and committed. It’s as final as
a plea in court from which there is no retracting. That’s the lonely time.
Nine tenths of a writer’s life do not admit of any companionship nor
friend nor associate. And until one makes peace with loneliness and ac-
cepts it as part of the profession, as celibacy is a part of the priesthood,
until then there are times of dreadful dread. (LIL 859)

By refusing to admit that there are widely divergent truths about

singularity, that one is not always the loneliest number, the community
members fail to break through to an understanding that only “through
a long consideration of the parts [can one] emerge with a sense of the
whole.”3 It is this type of understanding, this “feeling of fullness, of warm
wholeness,” which Steinbeck sought on the journey of the Western Flyer
to Baja California in 1940, that George seems to find in his decision to
sever the bond with Lennie in order to rescue him from a painful retribu-
tion and death at Curley’s hands. Readers ultimately conclude that the
sacrifice of the relationship is in his partner’s best interest. The collecting
trip was a voyage on which Steinbeck discovered that somehow the Na-
tive Mexican people were much more likely to have “a wholeness of sense
and emotion—the good and bad, beautiful, ugly and cruel all welded into
one thing” (Log 124). Obviously, it is just such a balanced view of the

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world that makes reclusive characters so admirable and so respected by

the author.
Although Steinbeck had previously considered duality as a human
trait, his ultimate breakthrough and complete understanding did not occur
until he began to accept its paradoxical nature, that both sides were true at
the same time. In a letter written to Pascal Covici in 1941, he states: “It
seems fairly obvious that two sides of a mirror are necessary before one has
a mirror, that two forces are necessary in a man before he is a man” (LIL
221). As Steinbeck became increasingly conscious of this philosophical
tenet, it is not surprising that his fictional work such as Of Mice and Men
often demonstrates the ambiguity he saw in human attitudes, emotions,
and attributes and that he expressed in his correspondence. In his dual-
faceted fictional pictures, he asserts that while one may indeed be the lone-
liest number, there are times when that may not be all bad; it all depends
on one’s perspective and the balance the observer is able to maintain.
By “breaking through” and acknowledging man’s role as a two-legged
paradox (Log 98), Steinbeck discovered that although “everyone searches for
absolutisms . . . and imagines continually that he finds them,” it is more just
to see everything “as a mere glimpse—a challenge to consider also the rest of
the relations as they are available—to envision the whole picture as well as
can be done with given abilities and data” (Log 145). Thus Steinbeck real-
ized that it is only when one accepts duality, when one moves beyond the
mysteries of existence, that one can attain a balanced view wherein loneli-
ness, isolation, and alienation, on the one hand, and solitude, uniqueness,
and singularity, on the other, are equal parts of the whole picture, rather
than separate and opposite entities. Advocated by Eastern sages like Lao
Tze in the Tao Teh Ching, it is a philosophy that is difficult for Western
intelligence to comprehend, but it is also a belief system whose tenets fasci-
nated Steinbeck in both his real life and his fictional constructs.

Empty your mind of all thought.

Let your heart be at peace
...
Returning to the source is serenity.
Immersed in the wonder of the Tao
You can deal with whatever life brings you
And when death comes, you are ready.4

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MICHAEL J. MEYER

To his editor, Pascal Covici, Steinbeck wrote: “Paradoxes as verities?

I think the best way is to set it (a story) down just as it happened and
let the sense of paradox grow out of the material just as it has out of my
seeing” (LIL 444). Clearly, his life and his work mirrored the dichotomy
he observed; moreover, it affirms the fact that one of the most basic fears
of mankind (being lonely) is not an absolute. As the novel’s original title
suggests, it is simply “something that happens,” and it has the potential to
be either positive or negative depending on the circumstances.

Notes
1. Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten, eds., Steinbeck: A Life in Letters
(New York: Viking, 1975), 25. Subsequent quotations are cited parenthetically
in the text as LIL followed by the page number.
2. John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men (New York: Penguin Classics, 1993).
Subsequent quotations are cited parenthetically in the text as OMM followed by
the page number.
3. John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez, 1951 (New York: Penguin
Books, 1976), 63. Subsequent quotations are cited parenthetically in the text as
Log followed by the page number.
4. Lao Tze, Tao Teh Ching. Trans. Stephen Mitchell. (New York: Harper
Perennial, 1991), stanza 16.

Works Cited
Steinbeck, Elaine and Robert Wallsten, eds. Steinbeck: A Life in Letters. New
York: Viking, 1975.
Steinbeck, John. The Log from the Sea of Cortez. 1951. New York: Penguin Books,
1976.
Steinbeck, John. Of Mice and Men. New York: Penguin Books, 1993.
Tze, Lao. Tao Teh Ching. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991.

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 CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
MUSICAL INTERTEXTUALITY IN ACTION:
A DIRECTED READING OF OF MICE AND MEN
Christian Goering, Katherine Collier, Scott Koenig,
J. Olive O’Berski, Stephanie Pierce, and Kelly Riley

W
hile much work exists on the musical influences on Stein-
beck’s work, a method of examining his (and any author’s)
relevance and relationship in the world today depends on
the individual reader and her very personal response to his text. While
the intent of any author is critical to understanding the purpose behind
the writing of a text, the reader provides an essential part of any literary
endeavor since, as Louise Rosenblatt related some seventy years ago, a
reader’s background and experiences establish a work’s ultimate mean-
ing and contribute to the depth of the reading event. Since the meaning
of text relies so heavily on the individual, it, by definition, could not be
exactly the same for every individual. Thus, for every individual reader
who picks up Steinbeck’s words, his living text will create different mean-
ings for each. Rather, two readers will arrive at different understandings
as they grapple with images, words, structure, and conflict. In much the
same manner, no two individuals have the same knowledge of music, and
when people listen to a song, they interpret it with a multitude of unique
background knowledge and experience.
So I began to wonder what would happen when the two worlds com-
bined and people were asked to make connections to songs after reading
a piece of literature. These very connections, a musical intertextuality, or,
by definition, connecting from the written page to the lyrics and/or music
of a song, is fundamental to LitTunes, the name of my learning-centered
literacy project established in November of 2007. LitTunes is a relatively
new website that links popular music to canonical literature in ways

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designed to inspire and cause twitch-speed kids to pause just long enough
to consider the value of classic fiction to their individual and personal
lives. In this case, I asked five future secondary English teachers (included
here as authors) to read Of Mice and Men with a distinct purpose: to
find and connect popular tunes from their musical library—their musical
canon—that elucidate the characters, plot, tone, setting, and themes they
discovered in a directed reading of that novella.
Without a moment’s hesitation, the five students began reading
Steinbeck’s most widely taught work with an ear to the California ground
for connections to the music they knew. Their efforts netted ninety-eight
unique connections to songs in the categories of themes, plot structures,
characters, setting, and tone. Artists ranged from James Taylor to Rick
James and from the Squirrel Nut Zippers to Rage against the Machine.
Song titles ranged from “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues” to “Somewhere
over the Rainbow” and from “Pinball Wizard” to “Superfreak.” As each
student brought his or her unique musical background to the new reading
of Of Mice and Men, the diversity of their knowledge, experiences, and
tastes bubbled to the surface in this project. These teachers in training
not only created a new perspective on the novella but also developed a
methodology that will impact their future students and will help readers
to approach any piece of literature, not just Of Mice and Men.

Background
As an educator and advocate of literacy at any legitimate cost, I was ec-
static when this volume editor involved me to join the chase for fresh and
compelling ways to win anew readers for Of Mice and Men. Though the
novella is short in length and accessible in terms of readability and lan-
guage, it is also true that nowadays students increasingly fight any reading
experience longer than a text message. The focal point of this essay is how
to strengthen the appeal of book-length literature and how to situate its
increasingly tenuous place in the curriculum. Novels and even novellas at
times confound the present generation of young readers, students com-
ing into maturity fully wired to digital sound and digital text. Since they
are twitch-speed kids who respond to quick-cut flashing images and who
speak a coded language accessible in a seeming instant, it is no wonder
that they are also the ones who ask, between the byted lines, “Why are we

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reading this? It’s over seventy years old and has no relevance to the here
and now.”
In agreement with many theorists and critics writing in the ill-defined
time beyond postmodernism, I believe that literacy is created through an
inexhaustible flow of connections between personal experience and those
ideas learned through fiction, poetry, film, journalism, song, and any
other type of plastic narrative: If this is true, then why not lead a student
to Steinbeck through their own tunes?

The LitTunes Approach

My website, LitTunes, sets aside unfettered space on the World Wide
Web to help educators incorporate music into their classrooms. Specifi-
cally, the site aims to provide a collaborative online community to assist
teachers who are motivated to reach disenfranchised students through
their favored language—music. Geared as an open-access educational out-
reach, LitTunes features essays, research, and lesson plans in addition to
a database with over six hundred song-to-literature connections. The Lit
in LitTunes refers to both literature and literacy. Through artists such as
Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, and the Bastard Sons of Johnny Cash, and
through authors such as Steinbeck, Harper Lee, George Orwell, William
Shakespeare, and Kate Chopin, website visitors are provided the opportu-
nity to enrich and enliven their classrooms and motivate students, and they
are also encouraged to contribute additional connections and lesson plans,
as well as relating their own classroom successes with this approach.
Specifically, LitTunes features connections to works of literature
frequently taught in schools around the country. These connections can
be classified in six different categories. The first type of connection relies
on the scholarly work of Deborah Pardes, who created the Artists for
Literacy website, featuring over three hundred songs inspired by literature
(SIBL). A SIBL is an instance when an artist has, through liner notes or
an interview, disclosed that her or his song was inspired by the reading
of a work of literature. The LitTunes database reflects some of the songs
featured on Artists for Literacy, and we credit Pardes for helping to light
the way toward creation of LitTunes. The central difference is that we
focus primarily on literature taught in the schools, while the SIBL site
has a broader focus.

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A second type of connection is a thematic link. For example, the song

“Teenager” by 1990s rockers Better than Ezra demonstrates a thematic
link to William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The angst-ridden teens
depicted in the Better than Ezra song connect closely to that of the main
characters of Shakespeare’s tragedy. Similarly, “Man in Black” by Johnny
Cash provides an example of a character link to Harper Lee’s To Kill a
Mockingbird, and more specifically, to the character of Atticus Finch.
While Cash was writing about the country as a whole, his lyrics undeni-
ably connect to Atticus in Lee’s novel. Another example of a character
connection is Neil Young’s “Like a Hurricane” and its connection to Zora
Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Specifically, the line from
Young’s song “I saw your brown eyes turning once to fire” connect to Janie
and depict how the emotions she experiences and embodies throughout
the novel are reflected in her physical experience. Songs can also connect
in terms of setting, tone, and plot structure, which provide teachers with
other modes of intertextuality.
However, the most powerful use of the LitTunes concept is when
students are provided opportunities to make literature-to-song connec-
tions on their own; indeed, such potential as demonstrated in this chapter.
When students read a text and attempt to make connections to songs,
movies, websites, poems, short stories, novels, or plays, they reinforce a
central skill needed in order to become expert readers.
When I examine an artist’s heritage and legacy, I immediately think
back to how teachers either create or destroy the same elements depend-
ing on the creativity of their presentation of a work. How will today’s
teachers present Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and stress its relevance to
students across America, a country much different from the era when
George and Lennie lived? How will they approach the kids with twitch-
speed values and those without when they ask them to read the Steinbeck
classics? You’ve seen this scene before. The teacher trots out the stacks of
books, blows off the dust, records the numbers, and passes them down the
rows of desks in classrooms from Oklahoma to California, from Florida
to Maine. How many of these students, given this less-than-inspirational
approach, will choose the saga from the stack? How many fewer will read
it all the way to the end? While this is more of a concern with longer
works, it remains one with all literature. Eventually, I came to the conclu-

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sion as a teacher that if I wanted every student to read a work, I would

need to read it aloud.
As a literary form, the novel has become a suspect approach to reach-
ing readers. Even as he was finishing The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck
wrote to his close friend, Carlton “Dook” Sheffield:

The point of this all is that I must make a new start. I’ve worked the
novel—[as] I know it as far as I can take it. I never did think much of
it—a clumsy vehicle at best. And I don’t know the form of the new but
I know there is a new which will be adequate and shaped by the new
thinking.1

Have teachers over the past seventy years slain the novel once and for
all by their refusal to espouse the new, and, as a consequence, have they
also killed the great work that inspired this chapter?
Perhaps we have reached a point in American secondary education
some have termed “the adolescent literacy crisis.”2 Not only are students
not reading, but often students cannot read book-length literature when
it is passed back to them in the language arts classroom, perhaps primar-
ily because they don’t have the reading stamina or attention spans of the
students of the past. Yes, yes, I know, the students of today aren’t the
students of yesterday. But where does that kind of cynical analysis get
the profession? Why do teachers insist upon teaching the senior class of
2009 with the methodology of yesteryear? It didn’t work so well in 1969.
It didn’t even inspire student readers in 1989. Why should it be expected
to work today?
As Teri Lesesne believes,

Today’s adolescents are connected beyond the walls of their bedrooms

and their classrooms through e-mail, instant messaging, social network-
ing, blogs, and personal web pages. They connect with other adolescents
around the world via e-mail. They download music from other countries.
. . . Adolescence is all about speed and convenience and immediacy.3

However, I refuse to believe that these differences mean that today’s

students are bad, wrong, incompetent, indifferent, or downright hopeless.
In fact, the opposite is true. If they appear to be less than excited about

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delving into Of Mice and Men, then let’s accept it and find alternative ways
to excite them.
Enter LitTunes and the potential for social justice that is inherent in
the development of individual literacy or even more audaciously, in the
development of individual literary literacy. Enter Springsteen, Guthrie,
Dylan, Waits. My plea is this: let’s use the artists to help model an in-
tertextual, reader response approach to the novella. High school students
can be motivated and inspired to read John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men
and the other great works that populate the incredibly rich and vital liter-
ary canon. Come, teachers, and find the level shore of common ground
on which all students may dance. Let the lyrics of pop tunes provide the
enticement and the melody; then allow the works of the literary canon
to provide the footing and the foundation. In this shared space devoted
to literacy, the joy of reading can be rediscovered, and students can learn
about the wonders of allusion, metaphor, and original imagery. In short,
they can learn to read again.
Such approaches as the one detailed here may motivate today’s stu-
dents to try Steinbeck’s novella and to discover the depth of narrative and
character, the sustained richness of imagery and tone, and the profound
insights into life and life only that a pop tune can never provide. It is with
these goals in mind that I decided to ask my own college students to par-
ticipate in this educational outreach and ultimately search out the songs
on their iPods that they felt offered connections to Steinbeck’s novella.
The theoretical underpinnings of this work are entrenched with intertex-
tuality and reader response.

Theoretical Background
The idea of connecting lyrics to works of literature in a classroom set-
ting rests in part on the theory of intertextuality—the proposition that
readers are constantly connecting past texts to current texts during the
act of reading. Intertexto, the Latin word meaning “to intermingle while
weaving,” symbolizes the theoretical analysis of Julia Kristeva, a French
semiotician who, in the 1960s, declared that “any text is constructed of
a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of
another.”4 In such a landscape, where no text is an island, I believe that,
during the sustained act of its creation, Steinbeck’s novella fell under sway

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of the prevailing textual influences of the 1930s—all that came before

him. Likewise, a significant (though indeterminate) number of literary
works crafted in the seventy years following publication of Of Mice and
Men—all the artistic endeavors that came after him—bear the influence
of Steinbeck’s characters, themes, style, and word choice. Clearly, once a
work enters the canon, it has influence on other texts, an influence that
plays out in myriad and unique ways.
Similarly, tunes play on a similar intertextual landscape of original
performance. Listeners respond to lyrics in ways connected to their own
personal experience. Sometimes this experience converges with that of
other listeners and results in a pop hit, the proverbial gold record. Other
times the individual’s reaction in the multiple strands of subculture raise
unique but stratified voices.
Yet do we remember text, and how do we relate that which we re-
member to that which we are experiencing, moment by moment, in the
now? When do your words become mine? When do Steinbeck’s words
become those of Hemingway, for example? What changes in the act of
transference? Does it make any difference? The point is that when anyone
writes, the text cannot emerge free of influence. My words are their words,
and I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.
This assertion of influence also aligns with theories of Roland Barthes,
another mid-twentieth-century semiotician, who wrote:

Any text is a new tissue of past citations. Bits of code, formulae, rhythmic
models, fragments of social languages, etc., pass into the text and are redis-
tributed within it, for there is always language before and around the text.
Intertextuality, the condition of any text whatsoever, cannot, of course, be
reduced to a problem of sources or influences; the intertext is a general
field of anonymous formulae whose origin can scarcely ever be located; of
unconscious or automatic quotations, given without quotations.5

Thus, my students performed purposeful intertextuality when they

participated in this project. Furthermore, when they enter the teaching
profession and have their own students carefully and purposefully read Of
Mice and Men and think about it with a studied ear, they too will recog-
nize countless musicians.
Of course one could claim that intertextuality is merely a reconstructed
term for allusion, but that would miss a significant difference between the

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two. One is a dynamic theory of the relatedness of things, “overarching”

in the jargon of the day, while the latter has become an outdated teaching
term for the indirect reference to appropriate fragments of other works.

Relation of Intertextuality to
Reader Response Theory
Around the original publication date of the Steinbeck novella, educational
theorist Louise Rosenblatt developed the Reader Response Theory in her
seminal 1938 work, Literature as Exploration. Considered the “inaugural
text”6 of the reader response movement, Literature as Exploration puts
forth the idea that in making meaning when engaging a text, readers will
rest heavily on their past experiences with literature and life. “The reader
brings to the work personality traits, memories of past events, present
needs and preoccupations, a particular mood of the moment, and particu-
lar physical condition . . . in a never-to-be-duplicated combination.”7
Intertextuality, at least in the context of the classroom, is a byproduct,
perhaps even a result of Reader Response Theory. It supports the asser-
tion that the making of meaning in what we read is as much the function
of us, the lonely reader or imbibing member of the audience, as it is the
responsibility of the distant author. According to Graham Allen, “The
act of reading . . . plunges us into a network of textual relations.” He
continues, “To interpret a text, to discover its meanings, is to trace those
relationships.” Similarly, Daniel Chandler contends that texts are framed
by others, which ultimately “provide[s] contexts in which other texts can
be created and interpreted.”8
Earnest Morell and Jeffrey Duncan-Andrade lend further support for
the use of music lyrics in a language arts setting. “Literary texts can be
used to scaffold literary terms and concepts and ultimately foster literary
interpretations. [These texts] are rich in imagery and metaphor and can
be used to teach irony, tone, diction, point of view . . . theme, plot, motif,
and character development.” Certainly, state and national standards can
be met with the use of music lyrics. In fact, the standards are likely to be
exceeded when teachers have students “perform feminist, Marxist, struc-
turalist, psychoanalytic, or postmodern critiques” of the lyrics.9 While it
isn’t my goal to torch the literary canon in favor of a lyrics-based curricu-
lum, it is my goal to direct all educators to look beyond traditional forms

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of textual reality and embrace alternative versions of the written word. In

particular, I champion the value of pop-tune lyrics in their written form
in order to enhance student literacy, and I advocate the utility of such
lyrics because they inspire critical thinking skills as they open thoughtful
connections to the “classic” novels, plays, poems, and essays that presently
dominate the curriculum.
In addition to the activities and connections, musical lyrics can help
teachers attempting to introduce great literature to their students and can
also directly affect the climate and social context of a classroom, because
normally, such lyrics are the student’s domain outside of the halls and
walls of today’s schools. In a previous publication, I stated that music, if
properly used, is a key way to engage the students in today’s standards-
based curriculum: “Rarely do teenagers go without music. Whether it is
in their cars, at home, or even on a portable player, music serves as the
universal backdrop to almost all adolescent lives.”10 However, when a stu-
dent’s musical connection is not properly acknowledged (for example, if a
teacher asks students to make connections to something the class is read-
ing and then rejects the music or the lyrics they provide), the social con-
text of a classroom can be destroyed just as easily as it can be enlivened and
enriched by including popular culture. Carol Lee agrees the potential for
social benefits outweighs any inherent risk to the classroom or the instruc-
tor. “The interplay between structures of knowledge constructed through
social activity outside classrooms and structures of knowledge embedded
in school learning is potentially powerful because the resulting network
of associations is richer in both its specificity and generalizability.”11 It
follows that when students are able to effectively manipulate a medium
such as song lyrics with skill and comfort they are likely to find greater
motivation to tackle a text that might otherwise seem distant or irrelevant
to them.
Consequently, the use of music is favorable because it ultimately
builds in students the skills to tackle difficult canonical texts. Through
discussions of music lyrics, students gain the critical eye with which they
can view other works. And, as Steven Luebke advocates, teachers will
want to “illuminate and make relevant what may appear to [their] stu-
dents as the cryptic experiences of obscure humans in ancient times.”12 I
advocate classrooms rich with intertextuality, classrooms where students’
personal opinions of texts are valued and raised above the teachers and

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authors. When this occurs, students can be motivated and enticed to read
the highest quality literature; today’s educators need to accept that the
days of simply assigning a book-length text and expecting it to be read
are forever lost.

Methodology
For the purposes of this chapter, I asked a class of twenty-one pre-
service English educators in a methods of English instruction course at
the University of Arkansas if anyone self-identified as both interested in
and knowledgeable about music. I also asked whether or not they would
be willing to read another book in addition to the current exorbitant read-
ing requirements for the course. Five students volunteered for just such
a challenge; their task was to read Of Mice and Men and record all of the
connections they made from the text with music. Next, I provided stu-
dents with copies of the novella, a list of the various LitTunes connection
types (theme, setting, character, tone, plot), a set of instructions regarding
how to read the text and make connections, and a printed table to record
musical connections during the process of reading with categories of page,
type of connection, song title, and artist.
The next step in the process was for the students to read the book and
bring in their results. A friendly conversation ensued as the students real-
ized both how different their musical backgrounds were and how similar
some of their connections were. Once the connections were compiled, I
asked the students to select three to five of their connections to expound
upon in greater detail. Selections were made based on three stated criteria:
uniqueness of connection, clear association between song and text which
could be described without the use of the song’s lyrics, and a connection
based on each person’s individual taste in music. These connections, given
here in the writing voices of the students, provide a glimpse into the read-
ing minds at work as these individuals discovered the importance and
relevance of musical intertextuality.

Participants
As mentioned, the five coauthors of this piece are currently students
working towards a master of arts in teaching (MAT) degree, and as such,

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are part of the pre-service licensure program at the University of Arkansas.

As we write, they are enrolled in nine hours of graduate studies, preparing
to embark on a full-time internship as the fall semester begins in the local
schools. The group brings diverse talents and insights of previous experi-
ences to the methods course as well as to this writing effort. Kelly (age 36),
a Texas native, has earned an MA in English and is working on a Reading
Specialist Licensure in addition to her training as a secondary English
teacher. J. Olive (age 36) came from the University of Michigan and
has switched careers from landscaping to English education. Stephanie
(age 25) was born in North Carolina, raised partially in California before
moving to Arkansas with her family. She finished a degree in marketing
before returning and taking the necessary coursework to be a high school
English teacher. Scott (age 31) also hails from California and has worked
as a counselor for youth since earning his English degree a few years ago.
Finally, Katherine (age 25), another Texas native, dual majored in clarinet
and English at the University of Arkansas and after her husband went
through the MAT program, she exchanged a bank job for another year
of school and the chance to affect the lives of students. Interestingly, out
of a class of twenty-one future teachers, these five are all second career
seekers, and though that is not the focus of the program, in this particular
section the nontraditional students outrank the traditional students. The
geographical and age diversity represented in this group and class in gen-
eral is also remarkable. In contrast, last year’s pre-service English teachers
were all under twenty-seven and most were native to Arkansas.

Results
The musical intertextuality created during the reading experiences of
these five students resulted in a database (see Appendix A) of nearly
one hundred songs connected to Of Mice and Men. Many of these songs
would connect for any reader, but it is the individuality of each reader as
he or she meets the text that provides the unique nature of this list. I have
elected to leave the text as it was when I received it from the students.
Here, their words sing out the connections between classic text and their
accessible musical knowledge. As each student describes three to five
selections of their choice, an understanding of their unique musical inter-
textuality emerges.

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From Kelly
Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men depicts, among other things, the
conflicted relationship between George Milton and Lennie Small.
Throughout the novella, George expresses and demonstrates his love for
Lennie—“We got somebody to talk to that gives a damn about us.”13 Al-
though George loves Lennie like a brother, his love is complicated by feel-
ings of burden—“If I was alone I could live so easy” (OMM 7, 11); feelings
of responsibility for Lennie’s dangerous actions—“You ain’t gonna do no
bad things like you did in Weed, neither” (OMM 7); and feelings of guilt
for being conflicted about Lennie—“He looked across the fire at Lennie’s
anguished face, and then he looked ashamedly at the flames” (OMM 11).
Bruce Springsteen’s song “Highway Patrolman” portrays a similarly con-
flicted relationship between two brothers. Both the lyrics and the tone of
the song correlate to the novella.
Similarly, in Gillian Welch’s “One Little Song,” the persona expresses
a longing to write a song that no one has ever sung before. This song art-
fully weaves together opposing moods of mournfulness and hopefulness
in a way that parallels the tones in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. Like
the persona in Welch’s song, the characters in the novella find both hope
and despair in their dream of having a little plot of land to call their own.
Crooks describes these feelings of despair when he says, “Every damn one
of ’em’s got a little piece of land in his head. An’ never a God damn one
of ’em ever gets it. Just like heaven” (OMM 72); yet, shortly after mak-
ing this comment he exposes his own desire for hope when he requests
to be included in the dream: “If you guys would want a hand to work for
nothing—just his keep, why I’d come an’ lend a hand” (OMM 75). At the
end of the novella, Steinbeck leaves readers on their own to sort out the
tensions between despair and hope, for Lennie’s death certainly invokes
despair; however, George’s sincerity and sacrifice inspires hope.
The characters in Of Mice and Men persistently long for connection
with yet remain alienated from the people around them. Steinbeck fills
the work with fleeting moments of intimacy that seem to open doors for
connection between characters. Sadly, these doors always close just before
any authentic connection can be forged. However, Steinbeck leaves one
of these doors ajar at the end when he depicts, in the final scene, a mo-
ment of understanding between George and Slim—“You hadda, George.

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I swear you hadda. Come with me” (OMM 104–5). This final moment
seems to suggest the possibility for genuine connection between these two
characters. Like the Steinbeck novella, Jamie Byrd and Steve Fisher’s duet
“String of Pearls” describes the divergent perspectives that inhibit connec-
tion between two people. The song ends with both characters standing in
front of and looking through an open door, which implies that they will
overcome the obstacles and reach a point of understanding.
Finally, Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” is told from the perspective of
someone who is attempting to escape a desperate situation. In the song,
the persona is addressing someone who is also trying to escape. The per-
sona expresses her fear that they will end up remaining in and dying in
their current position. With urgency, she presses for a decision, fearing
that if they don’t decide quickly their chance for escape will be lost. Al-
though the song has a moments of hope, the dark tone and bleak situation
ends up overshadowing brightness. Chapman’s song echoes the situation
of many of the characters in Of Mice and Men. Lennie, George, Candy,
and Crooks all face poverty, oppression, and alienation. However, Len-
nie and George’s dream of owning their own land gives them hope for
escape, and this hope spreads to both Candy and Crooks. Interestingly,
by sharing this dream, these characters are able to briefly connect with
one another; however, all is lost when Lennie accidently kills Curly’s wife.
Their chance for escape has passed.

From Scott
Male relationships are rarely explored in literature, let alone in music.
Steinbeck takes a risk with Of Mice and Men by presenting a friendship
rooted in a dangerous, unspoken notion—that of love. George and Len-
nie travel the country working toward the American dream, not alone and
isolated like the other farmhands, but together, with the bond at the base
of any true friendship. In Sufjan Stevens’s song “The Predatory Wasp of
the Palisades Is Out to Get Us!” he echoes Steinbeck by taking that same
chance, singing about the love of another male, a best friend from his
youth. Though the music doesn’t stir up the dusty back roads of Salinas,
Stevens’s sentiment plays beautifully with Steinbeck’s theme of brother-
hood, and the profession—if never in words or lyrics such as Stevens’s
song—of love for your fellow man.

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Another parallel can be seen in the reaction of Steinbeck’s characters

to the loss of home. When the dream is crushed—when the reality of
the farm, with the rabbits, with the fat of the land, is cruelly taken from
his hands—Candy spits out anger toward Curley’s wife. And who could
blame him? Surrounded by a society that devalues the working man, Can-
dy—as well as Crooks, George, and Lennie—has been scraping for his
small piece of nothing all of his life. Matthew Ryan’s dark, brooding song
“American Dirt” takes Steinbeck’s anticapitalist rage and places it squarely
in today’s world. A man works, a man dreams, and all he’s left with at the
end of a long day of baling hay, or tacking horses, is the taste of the dirt
in his mouth, and the angry rock sound of Ryan’s bitter vocals.
Finally, Paul Westerberg’s playful song “Mr. Rabbit” fits nicely in
relation to Lennie’s obsession with the farm and with the rabbits. West-
erberg constructs a deceptively simple piece, with an almost nursery rhyme
quality—just a wise, knowing voice and an electric guitar—that suits
Lennie’s naïve ideas and hopes for a better life. All things must have their
place—“shine,” according to Westerberg—and Steinbeck mirrors this in
his writing. To Steinbeck, a human being, no matter the station, should
have value. A man’s work should have value. A man’s life should have
value. Even a rabbit and Lennie’s childish dreams for a rabbit have their
valued place.

From John
Pulsing red from lip to instep, Curley’s wife seems to slink into the
bunkhouse solely to tempt and torment, entangle and endanger the work-
ing stiffs in Of Mice and Men (OMM 31). She is described variously as
“tart,” “bitch,” and “jailbait” throughout the book, but, when she later
confides in Lennie in the barn (OMM 88), Steinbeck paints a subtler por-
trait of her as a small town girl yearning for recognition and a better life.
Like Jezebel in the Sade song of that name, Curley’s wife may be better
understood as a poor, disempowered female who makes use of her beauty
to free herself from limitations. Both women have been reviled for over-
exercising the very qualities that draw attention and admiration to them;
they are hated for wanting to be loved.
In the Squirrel Nut Zippers’ “That Lowdown Man of Mine,” the
vocalist laments being not only mistreated but also misunderstood by her
lover. Curley’s wife also expresses this dual suffering, for her complaint is

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not just that Curley “ain’t a nice fella” (OMM 86) but that he won’t “let
her talk to nobody” (OMM 84). In this book full of tough but lonely char-
acters, only verbal communion lightens the heaviness of isolation.
Even in death, Curley’s wife is not recognized as a human loss. Like the
dead puppy that shares her fate, she is only another accident to Lennie—a
problem insofar as it may bring possible punishment. Candy and George,
too, mourn the dissolution of their dream more than her loss of life. In fact,
Candy still calls her a “God damn tramp” (OMM 93) and blames her for
his loss. Similarly, Nick Cave relates his own pain while waxing accusingly
about some other bitch in the song “Your Funeral . . . My Trial.”

From Stephanie
George and Lennie’s relationship, with all of its unusual circumstances
and acceptance of their individual characteristics, mirrors a marriage that
is less than ideal and picturesque. On page 12, the pair are having an
evening meal together, silently chewing their food and discussing how
Lennie should behave on the ranch. This scene reveals that, much like
the song “In Spite of Ourselves” by John Prine and Iris DeMent, George
and Lennie act as a team and remain together despite their shortcomings
and disagreements.
On page 84, Steinbeck opens the chapter by describing the quiet
laziness of a Sunday morning. The tone of the passage is calm and fluid,
much like the sound and feeling evoked by The Commodores in their
song “Easy Like Sunday Morning.”
On pages 87–88 (among others that seem to mark the loneliness and
alienation that the hired hands suffer from), Steinbeck echoes the theme
of isolation that Pink Floyd laments in “Is There Anybody Out There?”
When the band begs if anyone can hear them or if anyone is around, they
articulate the feeling of loneliness that pervades the bunkhouse and disil-
lusions its occupants. The song also acts as a cry that many of the ranch
hands fail to vocalize and, in so doing, fail to form bonding relationships
with each other.

From Katherine
Ben Harper’s “Glory and Consequence” represents the theme of the
American Dream in Of Mice and Men for me. After the reader is initially

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introduced to Lennie and George’s plan to “live offa the fatta the lan’,”
(OMM 14) the reader wants them to attain that goal. Although every
individual in the story who is introduced to their idea of a farm is initially
skeptical, they all want to join the quest for independence and happiness.
They even raise a reasonable amount of money toward attaining a mutual
goal. However, their dreams are overshadowed by Lennie’s tragic flaw
resulting in their potential success being overshadowed by tragic conse-
quences.
While “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” by the Beach Boys is slightly uncon-
ventional because the relationship in the song is between lovers, it still
holds merit and connects with Lennie’s character. Lennie is a simple
thinker, and, if he knew this song, I am confident it would be playing in
his head while he daydreamed of his farm and rabbits. The idea of their
self-sustaining farm and his simple wish to tend the rabbits and bag alfalfa
deserves a happy, dreamy song such as this one.
The main appeal that “Killing the Light” by Black Rebel Motorcycle
Club has to the book is the sound in relation to a specific scene in the
book, a scene where Lennie is in the barn with Curley’s wife. Since the
music has a dark tone and strong pulse, it helps mimic and intensify the
death of Curley’s wife. Also, the lyrics of this song mention that there is a
wasted effort that perpetuates an unwelcome result, which, in turn, lends
itself to foreshadow Lennie’s fate.
Simply because of its title, “Don’t Go into That Barn” by Tom Waits
can also be easily paralleled to the book. Once the music starts and there
is a gritty character singing the lyrics with the sounds of men in intense
labor in the background, the listener can’t help but imagine that scene
and try to imagine what it must have felt like to have Lennie’s simple
mind as he attempts to understand what he has done. Eventually, he
recognizes that Curley’s wife is dead and that his dream of tending the
rabbits is shattered; he has to run to escape from the consequences of
the murdering strength of using his massive hands to caress animals and
human beings.
The narrative of “Storm Coming” by Gnarles Barkley is particularly
interesting when looking at the progression of death throughout Of Mice
and Men. Since the song describes a storm coming from the distance, each
death in the story becomes stronger and more meaningful: the mouse,

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Candy’s dog, Lennie’s puppy, Curley’s wife, and finally Lennie. There-
fore, it is easy to compare this perpetual flow to that of a storm building
on the horizon. Eventually even the American Dream will die as the ap-
proaching storm escalates to its highest pitch.

List of Connections
Appendix A is the compilation of the connections all five participants
made during the directed reading of the novella. As previously mentioned,
there are ninety-eight original connections made. Of those ninety-eight
connections, Woody Guthrie’s song, “Blowin’ Down the Old Dusty Road”
was chosen three times as a connection, making it the most frequent song
to appear. In terms of artists, Guthrie, Bruce Springsteen, Gillian Welch,
and Tom Waits all received four connections, with Guthrie the only artist
receiving multiple connections to a single song. Notably, Pink Floyd and
Simon and Garfunkel each received three connections. While the number
of connections is interesting, perhaps more intriguing is different types
of connections made. If a song connects by theme, in other words, that
is one connection, but if it connects to theme, character, and tone, that
is three. The five readers classified 202 types of connections to the songs
during their reading of Of Mice and Men. While examining the list in this
way is insightful, the purpose of creating such a list is for these future
teachers to use it as a tool for teaching this classic work.

Discussion
Clearly these five students have not only demonstrated an interest in
music and reading but also indicated a clear desire to further professional
knowledge by offering their insights here and subsequently on LitTunes.
As the students brought their unique experiences as listeners to the table
to create the list of connections and shared their descriptions of the con-
nections, they entered into the professional dialogue on the teaching of
literature, or more importantly, book-length literature. Their connec-
tions and writing about their ideas provide an understanding of what
kind of musical influences were at play as they read the novella, but more
importantly perhaps, they also provide essential insight into their reading

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processes. The list they have compiled could be used to help others teach
Of Mice and Men at a variety of scholastic levels and serves as a stellar
example of musical intertextuality to their future students.
While these students have helped create a resource for anyone inter-
ested in using this approach to teaching, they have also helped uncover a
promising research agenda. Since no limit exists in terms of books taught
in schools or different groupings of people with whom a project such as
this could be done, ideas for future projects have begun to spin out of this
first attempt. For example, it would be interesting to repeat this same
project with high school students reading the novella for the first time
but even more interesting to complete this with students who represent
diversity in race, gender, and culture. In much the same way, selecting a
random multiage group from around the country would yield still other,
different results. If five students can connect the novella to nearly one
hundred different songs, it stands to reason the number of text-to-song
connections that could be made from one book is nearly limitless, only
restricted by the number of people who would read the book and make
the connections. I suspect as more people engage in this activity, more
songs would repeat, providing potential for deep textual analysis of the
songs appearing with the most frequency. In a similar fashion, a teacher
or researcher could ask participants to read a book and instead make con-
nections to other media including film, television, or art.
Of course, Of Mice and Men was never intended to be discussed
alongside the genres and styles of music as those represented here.
Steinbeck wasn’t eyeing Rage against the Machine or Gillian Welch
or even Bruce Springsteen with his carefully woven tale. Nevertheless,
the musical intertextuality on display provides long-studied Steinbeck
aficionados with new material for discussion and consideration; it pro-
vides new readers of any age the potential to engage their own musical
knowledge and apply it to reading. This explicit musical intertextuality
demonstrates the wide variety of ways a student or scholar can look at
any text through music. Whether or not this type of approach takes hold
in the scholarly world is of little importance to me. It ultimately serves
as a model, desperately needed for some less reader-friendly books, for
teaching book-length literature in an innovative, creative, and engaging
manner—in a LitTunes way.

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Notes
1. Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten, eds. Steinbeck: A Life in Letters
(New York: Viking Press, 1975), 193.
2. Jane Norwood (chair of the study group), Reading at Risk: The State
Response to the Crisis in Adolescent Literacy, the Report of the NASBE Study
Group on Middle and High School Literacy, rev. ed. (Alexandria, VA: National
Association of State Boards of Education, 2006), 6; David Moore, Thomas
Bean, Deanna Birdyshaw, and James Rickik, Adolescent Literacy: A Position
Statement (a report for the Commission on Adolescent Literacy of the Interna-
tional Reading Association, Newark, DE: International Reading Association,
1999), 1.
3. Teri Lesesne, “Of Times, Teens, and Books,” in Adolescent Literacy: Turn-
ing Promise into Practice, ed. Kylene Beers, Robert E. Probst, and Linda Rief
(Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2007), 62.
4. Julia Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue and Novel,” trans. Alice Jardine, Thomas
Gora, and Leon S. Roudiez. In The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1983), 56.
5. Roland Barthes, “Theory of the Text,” in Untying the Text: A Post-
Structuralist Reader (New York: Routledge, 1981), 39.
6. John Clifford, ed., The Experience of Reading: Louise Rosenblatt and Reader-
Response Theory (Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1991), 1.
7. Louise Rosenblatt, Literature as Exploration (New York: Appleton-
Century Crosts, 1938), 30–31.
8. Graham Allen, Intertextuality: The New Critical Idiom (New York: Rout-
ledge, 2000), 1; Daniel Chandler, “Semiotics for Beginners,” www.aber.ac.uk/
media/Documents/S4B/sem09.html (accessed 5 November 2003), 5.
9. Earnest Morell and Jeffrey Duncan-Andrade, “Promoting Academic Lit-
eracy with Urban Youth through Hip-Hop Culture,” English Journal 91, no. 6
(July 2002): 89.
10. Christian Goering, “Music and the Personal Narrative: The Dual Track to
Meaningful Writing.” Quarterly 26, no. 4 (December 2004): 14.
11. Carol Lee, Signifying as a Scaffold for Literary Interpretation: The Peda-
gogical Implications of an African American Discourse Genre (Urbana, IL: National
Council of Teachers of English, 2003), 8–9.
12. Steven Luebke, “In Defense of Popular Music” (paper presented at the
joint meetings of the Popular Culture/American Culture Association, Philadel-
phia, PA, 12–15 April 1995), www.eric.ed.gov (accessed 10 June 2005), 11.

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13. John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men, 1937 (New York: Penguin Classics,
1993), 14. All subsequent quotations will be cited parenthetically in the text as
OMM followed by the page number.

Works Cited
Allen, Graham. Intertextuality: The New Critical Idiom. New York: Routledge,
2000.
Artists for Literacy. “Songs Inspired by Literature.” Deborah Pardes, founder.
www.artistsforliteracy.org (accessed 3 April 2008).
Barthes, Roland. “Theory of the Text.” In Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist
Reader, 31–47. New York: Routledge, 1981.
Chandler, Daniel. “Semiotics for Beginners.” www.aber.ac.uk/media/
Documents/S4B/sem09.html (accessed 5 November 2003).
Clifford, John, ed. The Experience of Reading: Louise Rosenblatt and Reader-
Response Theory. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1991.
Goering, Christian. “Music and the Personal Narrative: The Dual Track to
Meaningful Writing.” Quarterly 26, no. 4 (December 2004): 11–17.
Kristeva, Julia. “Word, Dialogue and Novel.” Trans. Alice Jardine, Thomas
Gora, and Leon S. Roudiez. In The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi, 34–61.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.
Lee, Carol D. Signifying as a Scaffold for Literary Interpretation: The Pedagogical
Implications of an African American Discourse Genre. Urbana, IL: National
Council of Teachers of English, 2003.
Lesesne, Teri. “Of Times, Teens, and Books.” In Adolescent Literacy: Turning
Promise into Practice, ed. Kylene Beers, Robert E. Probst, and Linda Rief,
61–79. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2007.
Luebke, Steven. “In Defense of Popular Music.” Paper presented at the joint
meetings of the Popular Culture/American Culture Association (Philadel-
phia, PA, 12–15 April 1995). www.eric.ed.gov (10 June 2005).
Moore, David, Thomas Bean, Deanna Birdyshaw, and James Rickik. Adolescent
Literacy: A Position Statement. A Report for the Commission on Adolescent
Literacy of the International Reading Association. Newark, DE: Interna-
tional Reading Association, 1999.
Morrel, Earnest, and Jeffrey M. R. Duncan-Andrade. “Promoting Academic
Literacy with Urban Youth through Hip-Hop Culture.” English Journal 91,
no. 6 (July 2002): 88–92.
Norwood, Jane. Reading at Risk: The State Response to the Crisis in Adolescent
Literacy, the Report of the NASBE Study Group on Middle and High School

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Literacy. Rev. ed. Alexandria, VA: National Association of State Boards of

Education, 2006.
Rosenblatt, Louise. Literature as Exploration. New York: Appleton-Century
Crosts, 1938.
Steinbeck, Elaine and Robert Wallsten, eds. Steinbeck: A Life in Letters. New
York: Viking Press, 1975.
Steinbeck, John. Of Mice and Men. 1937. New York: Penguin Classics, 1993.

Appendix A—Musical Intertextuality Table

Key
Text used: Steinbeck, John. Of Mice and Men. New York: Penguin, 1993.

Types of Connections
1. A song is inspired by literature directly.
2. A song connects to a text thematically.
3. A song’s setting connects to the setting of a literary work.
4. Characters in a song mirror the characters from the literary work.
5. The tone of a song is similar to the tone of a piece of literature.
6. A song’s plot structure or narrative follows that of a literary work.

Type of
Author Page Connection Song Title Artist
JO 3 3,4,5,6 “Blowin’ Down This Old Dusty Woody Guthrie
Road”
JO 8 2, 3, 6 “Friend of the Devil” The Grateful Dead
JO 15 2 “You’ve Got a Friend” James Taylor
JO 31 4, 5, 6 “A Red Headed Woman” Gershwin (Porgy &
Bess)
JO Whole 4 “Superfreak” Rick James
JO 31/86 4,5,6 “Jezebel” Sade
JO 49 4 “I am the Walrus (Dead Dog)” The Beatles
JO 51 2 “Little Drop of Poison” Tom Waits
JO 56 3, 6 “Peaches” Presidents of the
USA
JO 77 3, 5, 6 “Don’t Fence Me In” David Byrne (Bing
Crosby)
JO 84 4, 5 “Red Shoes” Tom Waits
JO 84 2, 4, 6 “(Angels wanna wear my) Red Elvis Costello
Shoes”
JO 89 3, (6) “Murder in the Red Barn” Tom Waits
(continued )

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Type of
Author Page Connection Song Title Artist
JO 89 4, 5, 6 “Your Funeral . . . My Trial” Nick Cave and the
Bad Seeds
JO 93 4 (ironic) “All I Have to Do Is Dream” The Everly Brothers
JO 103 3, 5, 6 “A Place in the Sun” Stevie Wonder
JO 103 3, 4, 5, 6 “Blowin’ Down This Old Dusty Woody Guthrie
Road”
JO 86 4, 5 “That Lowdown Man of Mine” Squirrel Nut
Zippers
SP 15 2 “Golden Girls Theme Song” Cynthia Fee
SP Whole 4 “In Spite of Ourselves” John Prine and Iris
DeMent
SP 31 6 “Roxanne” The Police
SP 57 2 “When the World Ends” DMB
SP 82 5 “Easy Like Sunday Morning” The Commodores
SP 84 5 “Hello” Pink Floyd
SP 86 4 “American Woman” Pink Floyd
SP 5 4 “Don’t Drink the Water” DMB
SP Whole 6 “Going to California” Led Zeppelin
SP 102 4 “Wish You Were Here” Pink Floyd
SP 22 4 “Pinball Wizard” The Who
SK 103 5 “Underneath Weeping Willow” Granddaddy
SK 61–62 5 “Flight Test” Flaming Lips
SK 85–86 5 “Get the Wheel” Greg Dulli
SK 14–15 2, 5 “Paradise City” Guns ‘N Roses
SK 4 3 “Waiting for the Sun” The Jayhawks
SK 38 2, 5 “Nobody’s Darlings” Lucero
SK 93 2, 5 “American Dirt” Matthew Ryan
SK 103 2, 5 “Mansion on the Hill” Bruce Springsteen
SK 3 2, 5 “The World at Large” Modest Mouse
SK 59 2, 5 “Heavenly Day” Patty Griffin
SK 56 2, 5 “Mr. Rabbit” Paul Westerberg
SK 81 2, 5 “Nothingman” Pearl Jam
SK 69–70 2, 5 “High and Dry” Radiohead
SK 72 2, 5 “Freedom” Rage Against the
Machine
SK 37 2, 5 “Gimmie Shelter” The Rolling Stones
SK 39–40 2, 5 “The Predatory Wasp of the Sufjan Stevens
Palisades Is Out to Get Us”
SK 72 2, 5 “I Still Haven’t Found What I U2
Am Looking For”
SK 59 2, 5 “Dreams” The Cranberries
SK 15 2, 5 “Bastards of Young” Replacements
SK 52 2, 5 “Here Comes a Regular” Replacements
SK 12 2, 5 “Ball and Chain” Social Distortion
KC Whole 2 “Glory & Consequence” Ben Harper

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Type of
Author Page Connection Song Title Artist
KC 103 2, 5 “Apres Moi” Regina Spektor
KC 12–16, 55 2, 3, 5 “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” The Beach Boys
KC 7 2,3 “Mother Nature’s Son” The Beatles
KC 84 2, 4 “Killing the Light” Black Rebel
Motorcycle Club
KC Whole 2, 4 “Never Let Each Other Down” Brad
KC 89 2, 3, 4, 5 “Don’t Go into That Barn” Tom Waits
KC 45 2, 5 “Storm Coming” Gnarles Barkley
KR 56 2, 4 “Vincent” Don McClean
KR 103 2, 4, 5 “Pretty Bird” Hazel Dickens
KR 34 4 “Kindle My Heart” Patrick Doyle
KR 8–9 2, 4, 5 “Highway Patrolman” Bruce Springsteen
KR 44–46 4, 5 “Old Dogs and Children and Tom T. Hall
Watermelon Wine”
KR 75 2, 4, 5 “Everything Is Free Now” Gillian Welch
KR 31–32 4 “Barroom Girls” Gillian Welch
KR 34 2, 4, 5 “Song to Woody” Bob Dylan
KR 36–37 4 “Every Breath You Take” The Police
KR 27–28 4 “Cecilia” Simon and
Garfunkel
KR 15–16 2, 4, 5 “One Little Song” Gillian Welch
KR Whole 2, 3, 4, 5 “Alone and Forsaken” Hank Williams Sr.
KR 57–58 2, 4, 5 “Hope” Twista
KR 89–90 2, 4, 5 “Broken Wings” Cherish the Ladies
KR Whole 2, 4, 5 “Star’n Through My Rearview” 2Pac
KR Whole 2 “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” Judy Garland
KR Whole 2, 4, 5 “String of Pearls” Jamie Byrd
KR 103 2, 4, 5 “My City of Ruins” Bruce Springsteen
KR 57–58 2, 4, 5 “America” Simon and
Garfunkel
KR 15–16 2, 4, 5 “Innisfree” Clandestine (Yeats’s
poem set to
music)
KR 57–59 2, 4, 5 “Fast Car” Tracy Chapman
KR 103 2, 4 “The Fields of Athenry” Tom Donovan
KR 84–85 2, 4, 5 “Somebody” Depeche Mode
KR 3 2, 3, 4, 5 “Blowing Down This Old Dusty Woody Guthrie
Road”
KR 15 2, 3, 4, 5 “I Ain’t Got No Home Woody Guthrie
KR 15–16 2, 4, 5 “Castle on a Cloud” Cosette from Les
Miserables
KR 15–16 2 “Big Rock Candy Mountain” Harry McClintock
KR 32–33 2, 4, 5 “One More Dollar” Gillian Welch
KR 42–43 4 “I Love” Tom T. Hall

(continued )

329
CHRISTIAN GOERING ET AL.

Type of
Author Page Connection Song Title Artist
KR 48 2, 5 “Sounds of Silence” Simon and
Garfunkel
KR 56 2, 4 “Someday I’m Gunna Fly” George Woodard
KR 72–73 2, 4, 5 “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues” Chris Thomas King
KR 99 4 “White Rabbit” Jefferson Airplane
KR 99 4, 5 “River” Joni Mitchell
KR 98 4, 5 “Father and Son” Cat Stevens
KR 98 4 “Puff the Magic Dragon” Peter, Paul, and
Mary
KR 103 2, 4, 5 “Reconciliation” Nimah Parsons
KR Whole 5 “Iree Seose” Emma Chistian
KR Whole 5, 6 “Nebraska” Bruce Springsteen

330
 APPENDIX

Online Sites for Teaching Of Mice and Men

Ausland, Brian. “Of Mice and Men: Cast the Roles.” www
.education-world.com/a_tsl/archives/00-1/lesson0039.shtml
BestNotes.com staff. “Monkey Notes: Of Mice and Men by John Stein-
beck.” www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmOfMice
Men01.asp
Bjork, Linda. “Teacher CyberGuide: Of Mice and Men by John Stein-
beck.” Revised by Mary Jewell. www.sdcoe.k12.ca.us/score/mice/
micetg.html
BookRags. “Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck.” www.bookrags.com/
Of_Mice_and_Men
Burleson, Carolyn and Daniel Brewer. “WebQuest: Of Mice and Men.”
Created 2002 and updated 7 September 2007. drb.lifestreamcenter
.net/Lessons/mice-men/index.htm
edhelper.com “Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck.” www.edhelper
.com/books/Of_Mice_and_Men.htm?gclid=CMurpZCTjo0CFQ9
EgQodzEzXng
Mixed literature review unit containing chapter question, cross-
word puzzles, word searches, final review, word scramblers; designed
for grades 9–12
enotes.com. “Of Mice and Men Summary/Study Guide.” www.enotes
.com/ofmice/

331
APPENDIX

Grade Saver.“Of Mice and Men Study Guide.” www.gradesaver.com/

classicnotes/titles/miceandmen/
The Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies. “Of Mice and Men
(1937).” www.steinbeck.sjsu.edu/works/Of Mice and Men.jsp
The New York Times. “Of Mice and Men (1939).” http://movies2
.nytimes.com/gst/movies/movie.htm?v_id=35975
NovelGuide.com. “Novel Analysis: Of Mice and Men.” www.novelguide
.com/ofmiceandmen/
“Of Mice and Men: John Steinbeck.” www.bellmore-merrick.k12.ny.us/
mice.html
Reifschneider, Suzanne. “Lesson Plans.” http://homepage.wmich.edu/
%7Es0reifsc/lesson_plans.htm
Rutherford, Nancy Louise. “Of Mice and Men: The Student Survival
Guide.” www.lausd.k12.ca.us/Belmont_HS/mice/
Stephan, Ed. “Steinbeck: Of Mice and Men.” www.ac.wwu.edu/~stephan/
Steinbeck/mice.html
TeacherVision. “Of Mice and Men.” www.teachervision.fen.com/
curriculum-planning/teaching-methods/3754.html
Web English Teacher. “John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men: Lesson Plans
and Teaching Resources.” www.webenglishteacher.com/mice.html

332
 INDEX

1930s, v–vi, 1–2, 32, 47, 82, 96, 115, Aristotle, 234, 239, 241, 245, 289
121–23, 135, 137–38, 142, 158, Arthurian, 45, 60, 66, 296
160–62, 164–66, 168, 170–71, asymmetry, 176–77, 179
174–75, 177–78, 182, 183, 185–86, Astro, Richard, 46–74
212–13, 242, 244, 246, 248, 256, Atwood, Margaret, 158–60, 180
265, 273–74, 281–82, 292, 313 Ayers, Lou, 122

Abramson, Ben, 37, 43, 287 Babel, Tower of, 189

ACT UP!, 179 Badiyi, Reza, 256, 269–71
agrarianism. See Jeffersonian Baird, Irene, 162–71, 173–78,
agrarianism 180–81, 184
Algren, Nelson, 161 Baker, Carlos, 44
Allee, W. C., 231–32 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 149
allegory, 40–41, 43, 79, 171, 174–75, ballad, 47
187 Beach, Joseph, 32, 40, 44, 49, 60
aloneness. See loneliness Beatty, Sandra, 48
American Fiction: 1920–1940 (Beach), Bellman, Samuel, 48
32 Benson, Jackson J., 62, 112, 115,
American Moderns, from Rebellion to 122–24, 135, 137–38, 148–49, 157,
Conformity (Geismar), 31 220, 230–32, 234, 253, 272, 274,
“Am I my brother’s keeper?,” 46, 278, 282–83, 288–89
53, 55, 141, 188, 197, 200, 223, Bible/Biblical allusion, 46, 52,
284–85 54–55, 168, 174, 187, 193, 202,
animalism/animal imagery, 31–32, 58, 242
60, 64–65, 79, 79, 96, 108–9 Bildungsroman, 172

333
INDEX

Blake, Robert, 122, 205–6, 209, Christ/Christian, 22, 48, 57–61, 69,
213–14, 217 83, 182, 193, 195–97, 248, 267,
Bloom, Harold, 48, 281, 288–89 298
Bonus Expeditionary Force, 276 Classics and Commercials. See Wilson,
Boodin, John Elof, 231–32, 234 Edmund
book reviews, 3–30 Collins, Dorothea Brande, 24–26
Borges, Jorge Luis, 237, 249–50 communism, 166
Boys in the Back Room. See Wilson, community, 57, 125, 129–130, 145,
Edmund 169, 172, 178–79, 192–193, 195,
Brighouse, Harold, 28 197–201, 238–39, 244, 283, 299–
brotherhood, 56, 59, 139, 141, 186– 302, 304, 336
187, 215, 223, 286, 297, 299, 303, Collier,Katherine, 307–30
319, 333 Collins, Dorothea, 24, 27
Broun, Heywood, 20–22, 24, 120 “Control and Freedom in Steinbeck’s
Burgum, Edwin Berry, 32, 60, 220 Of Mice and Men” (Bellman), 48
Burning Bright (Steinbeck), 48, 254 Cool Million, A (West), 161, 166,
Burns, Robert, 25, 40–41, 46, 51, 63, 182
85, 90–91, 119, 149, 173, 255, Cooper, James Fenimore, 336
277–78, 283 cooperation, 46, 95, 151–52, 168, 267
Butcher, Fanny, 6 Covici-Friede, 35
Covici, Pascal, 35, 85, 120, 288, 296,
Cain and Abel, 5, 46–47, 49, 52–57, 297, 300, 306
61, 95–96, 141, 149, 152, 157, Crist, Judith, 204, 217
185–91, 193–97, 200–201, 223,
333 Dacus, Lee, 48
call and response, 199 Dahlberg, Edward, 161
Campbell, Joseph, 142, 149, 225, Daniel, Cletus, 137–39, 148–149
Canada, 158–60, 171, 173, 176 Darwin, Charles/Darwinism, 112,
Canby, Henry, 7, 120, 215, 219 166, 227, 232, 281–82, 284
Cannery Row (Steinbeck), 133, 148, “Deadly Kids, Stinking Dogs, and
225 Heroes: The Best Laid Plans in
capitalism, 164, 181, 190 Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men”
Captain Vere (Billy Budd), 193 (Owens), 220–35
Carpenter, Frederic I., 60 Depression, The Great, 123, 129,161,
cave imagery, 37–38, 70, 245, 260, 164, 172, 181–83, 236, 238, 248,
297, 321, 328 245, 276, 278, 334, 387
Cederstrom, Lorelei, 186 dialogical structure, 112, 146–47, 149,
Champney, Freeman, 60 153
Chaney, Lon, 121, 204 discontent, 68, 78–79, 132, 217

334
 INDEX

discourse analysis, 136, 139, 145–46, evolution, 234, 282, 284

150, 156, 165–66, 168–70, 178, experimental fiction, ix, 14, 36, 46,
182, 202, 232, 325–26 60, 74, 86, 109, 111, 117, 135,
the dispossessed, 175, 188, 199, 252, 171, 174, 191, 221, 231, 254, 259,
255 281, 285–86
dissonance, 159
documentary/documentarian, 87, 162, Factories in the Fields (Williams),
174, 278 278
domesticity, 151, 170, 181 Fahy, Thomas, 186
Dos Passos, John, 161, 182 family/fambly, 4, 12, 53, 62, 81, 87,
double, 59, 78, 146, 165–67, 177, 98, 108, 119, 121, 139, 151, 161,
191, 202, 296 164, 169, 172–73, 183, 185, 188,
deam, x, 3, 4, 8–11, 13–14, 16–20, 190, 197, 199, 226, 238–39, 242,
22, 25, 28–29, 37–42, 45–48, 50, 244, 246, 257, 259, 279, 317
55–59, 61, 63–71, 81–82, 88–90, fascism, 230, 233
92, 95–96, 98, 100, 102, 105–8, fatalism, 281, 283, 286
122, 125–28, 130, 137, 139–41, Faulkner, William, 61, 335
143–47, 151–57, 170, 190, 195, felix culpa, 187
211, 213–15, 220–21, 223, 225–26, feminine/femininity, 91, 125–32, 143,
246, 257–58, 261–62, 265–71, 276, 150, 155, 159, 175, 180, 185–86,
280–81, 283, 297, 301, 318–322, 208, 219, 226
328 Feminization of American Culture
dream, American, ix, 45, 60, 112–13, (Douglas), 171, 173, 183
119, 130, 138, 146, 223, 238, 319, Fenn, Sherilynn, 207–8, 216
321, 323 Fiedler, Leslie, 88–89, 164, 182
Dream, Edenic, 145 Field, Betty, 121, 204–5, 214
Du Bois, W. E. B., 244, 249–50 Floyd, Carlisle, 122, 261, 274
Fontenrose, Joseph, 46, 60–61, 105
East of Eden (Steinbeck), 53, 62, 65, Foote, Horton, 207, 209, 211,
71, 106, 187, 284, 289, 294 214–15, 247
Eden/Edenic, 52–53, 57, 60, 62–72, foreshadowing, 25, 47, 51, 79, 96,
96, 140–41, 145–46, 149, 157, 101–2, 105, 107–8, 156, 204, 211,
223–24 265, 322
Eliot, T. S., 201–2 Foucault, Michel, 177
Emery, Jean, 125–33, 150, 155–57, Four Quartets (Eliot), 201–2
333 fraternity. See brotherhood
entrappers, women as, 90, 127, 130 French, Warren, 45, 47, 60, 112, 122,
epic, 69 124, 131–32, 272, 274, 281–82,
eugenics, 285–86, 230–32, 234 288–89, 335

335
INDEX

Freud, Sigmund/Freudian, 128, 132, Hadella, Charlotte Cook, 111–12,

142, 154, 187 134–49, 220–22, 225, 234, 334
friendship, ix–x, 3,26, 30, 64, 66–68, Harlem Renaissance, 245
71, 81–82, 86, 105, 125, 142, harmony, 57, 75
150–51, 157, 163, 188, 215, The Harper Handbook to Literature,
239–41, 244, 247, 273, 280, 282, 279, 281, 285, 288–89
286, 299–300, 319 Harris, Trudier, 263, 273–74
Hart, Richard, 186, 271, 274
“A Game of Cards in Steinbeck’s Of Heavilin, Barbara A., 276–89
Mice and Men” (Shurgot), 97–103 Heilbrun, Carolyn, 133
Ganapathy, R., 47 Hemingway, Ernest, 61
Gannett, Lewis, xi, 4, 92–93, 120, Hingle, Pat, 122
285, 289 Hitler, Adolf, 186, 231, 232
Garrard, Maxine, 17–18 Hollywood, 43, 83, 107, 204, 216, 303
Geismar, Maxwell, 31, 47, 104 homosexuality/homophobia, 111,
gender, ix, 10, 87, 150, 153–54, 150–51, 153–57, 160, 177–78, 240
158–61, 169, 172–78, 180, 182, Holocaust, 277
184–85, 218, 249, 268, 303–4, 324 Hoover, Herbert, 277
Gibbs, Lincoln, 32 Hoovervilles, 43
Girard, René, 194–95, 200, 202 Huckleberry Finn (Twain), 88, 164
Gladstein, Mimi Reisel, 185, 203–19 Hymen, Stanley Edgar, 60
The Glory and the Dream
(Manchester), 288–89 In Dubious Battle, 12, 26, 35–37,
Gold, Mike, 165, 182–83 40–41, 64, 75, 82, 85, 91, 95, 105,
Goldhurst, William, 49–61, 95, 141, 108–9, 115, 120, 123, 135, 137,
149, 152, 157, 185 143, 148, 224–25
Goldsby, Jacqueline, 256, 273–74 independence, x, 46, 130, 168, 188,
Goering, Christian Z., 252, 307–30, 190, 192, 290, 322
334 innocence, vii, 38, 52, 61, 68–70,
The Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck), 38, 77–78, 80, 83–84, 106, 122, 146,
43, 69–70, 75, 87, 106, 108, 110, 148, 162, 186–89, 191, 198, 201,
116, 120–21, 123, 134, 153, 157, 208, 214, 263, 286
175, 186, 207, 220, 225, 232, 234, Ishmael (Moby Dick), 151–53, 164
261, 278, 288, 311, 333, 336
Gray, James, 47 Jackson, Joseph Henry, 9, 30, 292
Griesbach, Daniel, 253–75 Jain, Sunita, 48
group man, 36, 80, 231, 265, 267 Jeffersonian agrarianism, 112, 223
grotesques, 286 Jesus Christ. See Christ
Gurko, Leo, 47 Jews without Money (Gold), 182

336
 INDEX

John Steinbeck (French), 45, 47, 60, Lange, Dorothea, 161, 334
122, 124, 131–32 Lawrence, D. H., 164, 181, 337
John Steinbeck (Watt), 45–46, 284 “Lennie as Christian in Of Mice and
John Steinbeck: An Introduction and Men” (Dacus), 48
Interpretation (Fontenrose), 46, Levant, Howard, 47, 73–85, 109, 201,
60–61, 105 335
“John Steinbeck: Life Affirmed and Lewis, Wyndham, 164, 181
Dissolved” (Kennedy), 33 A Life in Letters (Steinbeck,
“John Steinbeck: Moralist” (Gibbs), Wallsten), 110, 124, 148, 219,
32 234, 272–73, 275, 289, 292, 297,
John Steinbeck’s Concept of Man: A 306, 325, 327
Critical Study of His Novels (Jain), Lisca, Peter, 31, 33, 35–44, 47–48,
48 75, 85, 90–91, 93, 95, 102–3, 106,
John Steinbeck’s Fiction: The 122, 124, 126, 133, 140, 149, 152,
Aesthetics of the Road Not Taken 154, 157, 183, 335
(Timmerman), 95–96, 104–10, 337 “Little Gidding,” 202
John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” LitTunes, 252, 307, 309–10, 312,
(Bloom), 288–89 316, 323–24, 334
John Steinbeck’s Re-Vision of America Log From the Sea of Cortez (Steinbeck,
(Owens), 96, 130, 133, 140–41, Ricketts), 41, 91, 224, 235, 294,
148–49, 156–57, 220, 234 306
Johnson, Charles, 285, 236–50, 261, Loftis, Anne P., 115–24, 138–39,
272, 335 149, 335
Johnson, Claudia Durst, 278, 288–89 loneliness, ix, 4, 8, 12, 24, 42, 53–54,
Jung, Karl/Jungian psychology, 95–96, 61, 64, 66–67, 95–96, 98–100,
142–45, 149, 225–26, 232 107–8, 112, 119, 140, 141, 151,
juxtaposition, 80, 82, 97, 100, 264 162, 199, 206, 210, 215, 222–23,
238–39, 143, 243–44, 246, 251–52,
Karson, Jill, 2, 32, 47–48 255, 259, 261, 264, 272, 279,
Kaufman, George, 43, 120, 138, 203, 290–306, 314, 321
222, 234, 253–56, 261–62, 268, Love and Death in the American Novel
272–73, 275 (Fiedler), 88–89, 164, 182
Kazin, Alfred, 31, 49, 60, 220–21, Luce, Claire Booth, 121, 124, 203,
224, 234 217, 257
Kennedy, John, 33 Luger, 82, 106, 129, 156, 196,
Kiernan,Thomas, 48, 220 228–30, 233–34
Koenig, Scott, 307–30 lynching, 29, 56, 67, 185, 211,
Kristeva, Julia, 312, 325–26 252–53, 255–56, 262–63, 265–67,
Krutch, Joseph, 43 270–71, 273–75

337
INDEX

“Lyricism in Of Mice and Men” NAFTA, 158, 180

(Ganapathy), 47 narrative focus, 83, 214
Natty Bumppo (Last of the Mohicans),
Malkovich, John, 207, 247 164, 193
“Manhood Beset: Misogyny in Of naturalism/naturalists, 1, 47, 51, 172,
Mice and Men” (Emery), 125–33, 251, 278–79, 281–82, 285
150, 155–57 Nature and Myth (Lisca), 48, 95, 102,
Marks, Lester Jay, 46, 97, 102 157
Marsh, Fred, 12–13 Needham, Wilbur, 13–14
masculinity, 125–30, 143, 150–51, new criticism, 89
156, 170, 336 New Deal, 165, 168–69, 182
McCarthy, Desmond, 171, 182 New York Drama Critics Circle
McCarthy, Paul, 95–96 Award, 44, 63, 221, 254–55
McEntyre, Marilyn Chandler, 185– Nietzche, Fredrich, 222
202 non-teleological thinking, 41, 44, 46,
McWilliams, Carey, 278 91, 97, 103, 106, 110, 135, 186,
melodrama, 1, 6, 9, 28, 47, 78, 82, 84, 224, 233, 252, 282–83
125, 130, 132, 187 The Novels of John Steinbeck: A Critical
Melville, Herman, 150–53, 157, 164 Study (Levant), 47, 73–85
Mephistopheles, 190 The Novels of John Steinbeck: A First
Meredith, Burgess, 121, 204 Critical Study (Moore), 1, 19, 43,
Meyer, Michael J., 290–306 75–76, 85, 128, 132–33
migrant worker, 32, 40–41, 43,
50, 63, 65–66, 90–91, 120, 123, O’ Berski, J. Olive, 307–30
137–38, 140, 144, 232, 246 “Of Mice and Men”: Film (1939), 121,
Milestone, Lewis, 121, 204–5, 256 124, 203–19, 247, 253–75
misogyny, 111, 125, 150, 157, 262, “Of Mice and Men”: Film (1992),
268 203–19, 253–75
The Moon Is Down (Steinbeck), 48, “Of Mice and Men”: TV (1968), 203
254 “Of Mice and Men”: TV (1981),
Moore, Harry Thornton, 1, 19–20, 203–19, 253–75
43, 59, 75–76, 85, 128, 132–33 “Of Mice and Men”: A Kinship of
morality, 2, 5, 47, 49, 57, 60–61, Powerlessness (Hadella), 111
79–81, 168 “Of Mice and Men: Steinbeck as
Morsberger, Robert, 112, 272, 274 Manichean” (Gurko), 47
“Motif and Pattern in Of Mice and “Of Mice and Men: Steinbeck’s Parable
Men” (Lisca), 33, 103 of the Curse of Cain (Goldhurst),
Motley, Warren, 153 49–61, 141, 149, 152, 157, 185
“My Short Novels” (Steinbeck), 43 Old Testament (Bible), 52
mythology, 192, 201 Oliver, James Ross, 5

338
 INDEX

“On the Dramatization of Of Mice and queer theory, 177–180

Men” (Krutch), 43 Quinones, Ricardo, 95
opposites, 78, 83, 154, 191
Otis, Elizabeth, 84, 124, 134–35, 294, Rascoe, Burton, 1–2, 60, 88, 93
296 Readings on “Of Mice and Men”
Owens, Louis, 96, 130, 133, 140–41, (Karson), 2, 32, 47–48
148–49, 156–57, 185–86, 220–34 The Red Pony (Steinbeck), 70, 106,
113, 278, 288–289
parable, v, 15, 32, 46–49, 51, 53, 55, Rice, Anne P., 263, 273, 275
57, 67, 71, 77, 122, 141, 149, 154, Ricketts, Ed, 46, 84, 112, 143,
157, 187, 196 224–25, 231, 294
paradise. See Eden imagery Riley, Kelly, 307–30
Parini, Jay, 272, 274 romanticism, 252, 276–89
The Pastures of Heaven, 4, 64, 109, Roosevelt, Eleanor, 24, 120
224 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 23, 168
pathos, 1, 32, 71, 79–80, 109, 130, Roth, Henry, 161
169, 172, 188, 223, 278 Royce, Josiah, 278–79
Paul, Louis, 15–17, 124
The Pearl (Steinbeck), 71, 113, 278, seduce/seduction, 78–79, 83, 118,
288–89 127, 143, 164–65, 214–15, 218
Person, Leland S., Jr., 112, 150–57 segregation, 129, 236, 243–45, 259
the phalanx. See group man Seixas, Antonia, 44, 84, 90, 106, 110
Pierce, Stephanie, 307–30 sentimentalism, 1, 9, 18, 24, 26, 28–29,
Plato, 59, 154, 157, 297 31, 42, 49, 68, 89, 95, 97, 112, 122,
“Play Accentuates the Consummate 125, 129, 132, 163, 171–75, 183,
Art of Steinbeck” (Rascoe), 1–2, 220–21, 223–26, 233, 285
60, 88, 93 setting, 9, 32, 50, 57, 59, 63, 95, 105,
play-novelette, 36, 73, 75–76, 79, 81, 115, 138, 173, 193, 204–5, 212,
84, 137, 187, 254, 257 258, 277–79, 308, 310, 316
popular culture, 160, 315, 325–26 sexual objectification, 205, 217
Preface to Lyrical Ballads sexual tension, 215–16, 219
(Wordsworth), 47, 286–87 shadow motif, 6, 19, 143–145, 196,
Pritchett, V. S., 28 225
Promised Land, 106, 238 Short Reign of Pippin IV (Steinbeck),
Puritan/Puritanical, 143, 193, 286 230, 234
Shurgot, Michael, 97–103
Quaid, Randy, 122 SIBL (songs inspired by literature),
Queequeg (Moby Dick), 151, 153, 164 309
“Queer Borders” (Irr), 158–84 Sinise, Gary, 207, 215, 247, 256,
Queer Nation, 179, 184 269–70

339
INDEX

Slater, John F., 86–94 Thoreau, Henry David, 89, 290

Sobel, Alan, 249, 250 Timmerman, John, 95–96, 104–10
social Darwinism, 227, 232. See also To a God Unknown (Steinbeck), 106,
Darwinism 143, 224–25
Soledad, 57, 63, 65, 89, 105, 136–37, “To a Mouse” (Burns), 46, 149, 277
242, 244, 259, 278 Tortilla Flat (Steinbeck), 4, 6, 12, 17,
solitaire, 42, 57, 97–103 26, 66, 71, 75, 86, 92–93, 120,
Solow, Eugene, 121, 206, 247 134, 292
“Something That Happened,” 41, torture, 72, 259–60, 264
106, 109, 119, 135, 224, 271, 277, tragedy/tragic, 1–4, 6, 8, 16, 20, 24,
279, 282–83 28, 32, 35, 41, 47, 49, 59–60,
Spilka, Mark, 62–71, 149–50, 157, 79–80, 97–98, 106–9, 121, 123,
242 130, 132, 171, 180, 186–87, 196,
Spreckles Sugar Ranch, 134, 137 201, 215, 224–25, 241, 256, 266,
Stage (magazine), 36, 43, 73–76, 79, 271, 273, 281, 284, 310, 322
84–85 trap imagery, 66–67, 72, 89–90, 111,
Steinbeck and His Critics: A Record of 127, 130, 150–51, 216, 228, 247,
Twenty-five Years (Tedlock and 255, 263, 302, 304
Wicker), 1, 31–33, 44, 60, 85, Travels with Charley (Steinbeck), 264,
92–93, 110, 287, 289 273, 275
Steinbeck, Carol Henning, 120, 135, The True Adventures of John Steinbeck,
142 Writer (Benson), 123, 148–49, 234,
Steinbeck, Elaine, 110, 124, 132, 148, 272, 274, 278, 288–89
207, 219, 234, 272, 275, 289, 297, Tularecito, 64
306, 325, 327
Steppenwolf Theater, 207 the unconscious, 14, 20, 27, 40, 60,
stereotypes, 47, 125, 128, 150, 155, 74, 141–45, 226, 232, 313
172–73, 224, 273 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 172, 183
structuralist analysis, 140–41 Understanding “Of Mice and Men,”
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 172 “The Red Pony,” and “The Pearl”
survival of the fittest, 282, 284 (Johnson), 113, 278, 288–89
Swaim, Don, 272, 275 utopia, 49, 151, 153, 155, 157, 160,
162, 164, 170, 172–73, 179, 184
Tedlock, Jr., E. W., 1, 31–33, 44, 60,
85, 92–93, 110, 287, 289 Van Doren, Mark, 22–23, 27, 43
Theater Union, 138 “The Vigilante” (Steinbeck), 265–66,
Thematic Design in The Novels of 275
John Steinbeck (Marks), 46, 97, violence, 1, 62, 68, 71–72, 80, 83,
102 132, 147, 149, 152, 157, 163, 185,
Thompson, Ralph, 8–9, 19 188–89, 192, 194, 196, 200, 202,

340
 INDEX

214–15, 222, 255–56, 263, 265–66, Wicker, C. V., 2, 31–33, 44, 60, 85,
271–72, 302 92–93, 110, 287, 289
The Wide World of John Steinbeck
Wagner, Charles, 3 (Lisca), 31, 33, 35–45, 75, 85,
Waste Heritage (Baird), 162–64, 167, 90–91, 93, 122, 124, 126, 133,
169–70, 174–76, 181, 183–84 140, 149, 152
Watt, F. W., 45–46, 184 Wilde, Oscar, 164
weed, 61, 63, 99, 101, 128, 136, 142, Wilder, Thornton, 121
155–56, 260, 265, 318 Williams, Annie Laurie, 107, 253
Weeks, Edward, 26–27 Wilson, Edmund, 122, 124, 220–21,
West/Western, 16, 20, 24, 43, 235
115–16, 124, 127, 129, 170, 182, women, role of, 258
193–94, 218, 246, 278, 290, 305 Wordsworth, William, 47, 286–87
West, Nathanael, 161, 166
Whitman, Walt, 151, 164, 166, 260 Yates, Cassie, 205, 213

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 ABOUT THE EDITOR
AND CONTRIBUTORS

Michael J. Meyer is adjunct professor of English at DePaul University

in Chicago. He is the present bibliographer for Steinbeck studies, hav-
ing published The Hayashi Steinbeck Bibliography: 1982–1996 (Scarecrow,
1998) and a follow-up volume in 2008. In addition to his bibliographic
work, Meyer’s essays have appeared in The Steinbeck Quarterly, The Stein-
beck Review, and The Steinbeck Newsletter. He has contributed chapters
to numerous monographs and books, including serving as editor for Cain
Sign: The Betrayal of Brotherhood in the Works of John Steinbeck (2000). He
is presently the poetry editor and bibliographer for The Steinbeck Review
and serves on its editorial board. Meyer’s other publications include A
John Steinbeck Encyclopedia (2006), where he served as coeditor with Brian
Railsback. Since 1994, Meyer has been the senior editor of Rodopi Press’s
new Dialogues series, which will feature a two-volume set entitled The
Grapes of Wrath: A Reconsideration scheduled to appear in 2009, the 70th
anniversary of the novel’s publication.


Jean Emery was a freelance journalist and independent scholar when she
wrote her analysis in 1992. At that time she was studying for an MFA at
the University of Montana.

Mimi Reisel Gladstein is current president of the John Steinbeck Society

of America. She has been awarded both the John J. and Angeline Pruis

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ABOUT THE EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS

Award for Outstanding Steinbeck Teaching and the Burkhardt Award

for Steinbeck Research. At the University of Texas at El Paso where she
teaches, Gladstein has been named Outstanding Faculty Member in the
College of Liberal Arts and won the University Award for Service to
Students. The author of three books and coeditor of two, Gladstein has
numerous articles in scholarly journals and anthologies.

Daniel Griesbach earned his PhD from the University of Washington in

2007. His dissertation is a study of artists who depict migrant farm work-
ers in the United States, including photographer Dorothea Lange and
writers John Steinbeck, Raymond Barrio, and Helena María Viramontes.
He has written articles on Steinbeck and an essay for MELUS on U.S.
Hispanic folklore during the Great Depression. He lives and teaches in
Seattle, Washington.

William Goldhurst was professor of the humanities at the University of

Florida. He is author of F. Scott Fitzgerald and His Contemporaries (1983)
and served as the editor of a journal entitled Contours of Experience.

Christian Z. Goering is assistant professor of secondary English and

literacy education at the University of Arkansas where he coordinates the
English education program and codirects the Northwest Arkansas Writ-
ing Project. He received a PhD in curriculum and instruction from Kansas
State University in 2007. He currently serves on the executive board of
the Arkansas Council of Teachers of English Language Arts and provides
educational outreach through his website dedicated to literacy and teach-
ing literature through the use of music (www.LitTunes.com).

Charlotte Cook Hadella is professor of English and writing in the De-

partment of Language, Literature, and Philosophy at Southern Oregon
University in Ashland. She teaches courses in American Literature and
English Education, and is director of the Oregon Writing Project at
Southern Oregon University. Her publications include a number of ar-
ticles on the work of John Steinbeck, the Twayne Masterwork study, Of
Mice and Men: A Kinship of Powerlessness, and Warm Springs Millennium
(coauthored with Michael Baughman).

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 ABOUT THE EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS

Barbara A. Heavilin is coeditor of The Steinbeck Review and has published

several books and numerous articles on John Steinbeck. She teaches lin-
guistics, grammar, and Restoration and Eighteenth-Century British Lit-
erature, among other subjects at Taylor University in Upland, Indiana.

Caren Irr teaches American literature at Brandeis University. She is the

author of The Suburb of Dissent: Cultural Politics in the United States and
Canada during the 1930s (1998), as well as a number of essays on U.S. and
Canadian fiction. Her most recent research concerns the resurgence of the
political novel in 21st-century fiction.

Howard Levant was one of the first critics to examine Steinbeck’s work
on a structural level. His work The Novels of John Steinbeck: A Critical Study
(1974) drew attention to what Levant considered serious flaws in Stein-
beck’s organizational plan for several of his works.

Peter Lisca (1925–2001) was the author of the first major Steinbeck
study, The Wide World of John Steinbeck (1958) and followed that with
John Steinbeck: Nature and Myth (1974). He is considered the dean of
early Steinbeck scholars along with Warren French. During his academic
career, he taught at University of Florida where he was a full professor and
dean. His articles on twentieth-century literature also included studies of
Faulkner’s The Hamlet and Sanctuary, Hemingway’s Across the River and
Into the Trees, and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

Anne Loftis is a historian and freelance writer based in California. Her

work includes Witnesses to the Struggle: Imagining the 1930s California La-
bor Movement (1998) and, with Dick Meister, A Long Time Coming: The
Struggle to Unionize America’s Farm Workers (1977). She is also known for
her study of Japanese internment camps, The Great Betrayal: The Evacua-
tion of Japanese–Americans During World War II (1969), which was cowrit-
ten with Audrie Girdner.

Charles Johnson is author of several books, including Faith and the Good
Thing, Oxherding Tale, Middle Passage, Dreamer, The Sorcerer’s Appren-
tice, and Soulcatcher and Other Stories. In 2007, Johnson coauthored, with

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ABOUT THE EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS

photographer Bob Adelman, Mine Eyes Have Seen: Bearing Witness to the
Struggle for Civil Rights, and his comic art appeared in The Writer’s Brush:
Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture by Writers, edited by Donald Friedman.
A professor at the University of Washington, Johnson is also a National
Book Award winner and was the recent recipient of an Academy Award
in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, having taught English for thirty years,

is now a writer living and working in Northern California. She remains
affiliated with Westmont College as a fellow of the Gaede Institute for
the Liberal Arts. She has written widely on literature and spirituality, lit-
erature and medicine, and, in Caring for Words (forthcoming in 2009) the
vocation to stewardship of language.

Louis Owens was professor of English at the University of California,

Davis, and author of two major Steinbeck studies, John Steinbeck’s Re-
Vision of America (1985) and The Grapes of Wrath: Trouble in The Promised
Land (1989). In addition, during his academic career, Owens served as
coeditor of American Literary Scholarship: An Annual and was the recipient
of Fulbright, NEH, and NEA Fellowships. His Native-American fiction,
including the novels Nightland, Dark River, and Wolf Song, established
him as a major American novelist as well as a stellar Steinbeck critic. He
died suddenly in 2002 at the peak of his career.

Leland S. Person is professor of English and senior associate dean for

academic affairs at the University of Cincinnati. He is the author of Henry
James and the Suspense of Masculinity (2003), Aesthetic Headaches: Women
and a Masculine Poetics in Poe, Melville, and Hawthorne (1988), and many
articles on 19th-century American writers. His most recent books are A
Historical Guide to James Fenimore Cooper (2007), The Cambridge Introduc-
tion to Nathaniel Hawthorne (2007), and a Norton Critical Edition of The
Scarlet Letter and Other Writings (2005).

Michael W. Shurgot retired from South Puget Sound Community Col-

lege in Olympia, Washington, where he received four Exceptional Faculty
Awards. He is the author of Stages of Play: Shakespeare’s Theatrical Ener-
gies in Elizabethan Performance (1998); editor of North American Players of

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 ABOUT THE EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS

Shakespeare: A Book of Interviews (2007); and has published on James Joyce

and Nadine Gordimer. He reviews Shakespeare productions in the Pacific
Northwest for Shakespeare Bulletin, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival
and London’s Globe Theatre for The Upstart Crow.

John F. Slater was assistant professor at the University of Wyoming when

he produced his analysis in 1974.

Mark Spilka was professor of English at Brown University from 1963 to

1995 where he chaired the English department from 1968 to 1973. For
many years, he also edited the journal, Novel: A Forum on Fiction (1967–
1995). During his lengthy career in academe, Spilka published eight
books, including The Love Ethic of D. H. Lawrence (1958); Virginia Woolf’s
Quarrel with Grieving (1980); and Hemingway’s Quarrel with Androgyny
(1990). A deep and ground-breaking thinker and an eloquent writer, he
published numerous other articles and was active in academic debates at
MLA conventions as well as through prolific correspondence with other
scholars and writers. Spilka died in 2001 at the age of seventy-five.

John Timmerman is professor of English at Calvin College in Grand

Rapids, Michigan, and is the author of twenty-two books, primarily on
American literature, and more than fifty critical articles. Among them
are two books on Steinbeck: John Steinbeck’s Fiction: The Aesthetics of the
Road Taken (1986) and The Dramatic Landscape of Steinbeck’s Short Stories
(1990).

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