Of Mice and Men

George Milton and Lennie Small travel together through Depression-era California looking for ranch work. George plans their movements and protects Lennie, whose physical strength and intellectual disability repeatedly place both men in danger. At a ranch near Soledad they meet Candy, Crooks, Curley and Curley’s isolated wife while continuing to imagine a small farm of their own.

Their dream offers an alternative to the insecurity, loneliness and hierarchy of itinerant labour, but the ranch provides little protection for anyone who is old, disabled, Black, female or otherwise vulnerable. Steinbeck compresses the rhythms of a stage tragedy into a novella about friendship and responsibility within an economic system that treats workers as temporary and replaceable.