Of Mice and Men

What's inside (8 sections)

1. The riverbank and the dead mouse
2. Soledad and the bunkhouse crew
3. Candy, his dog, and the dream farm
4. Crooks and the woman nobody names
5. The fight and the barn
6. The river again
7. Key takeaways
8. FAQ

I picked up Of Mice and Men on a rainy weekend because I wanted a short classic that would not waste my time. Steinbeck published it in 1937 with Covici Friede, and the first edition ran 186 pages. It reads even shorter than that sounds, closer to a play than a novel, which makes sense since Steinbeck shaped it as a playable novel and later adapted it for the stage. I finished it in two sittings and sat quietly for a while after the last page. Few books earn their endings so quietly.

The title comes from Robert Burns, and Steinbeck lets the lines hang over the whole book:

The best laid schemes o' mice an' men Gang aft a-gley

Two men walk toward work, and one carries the other in every way that counts. Steinbeck gets to unbearable from there without tricks. He lets need and habit and bad luck run their course on a California ranch during the Great Depression.

The riverbank and the dead mouse

The book opens on the bank of the Salinas River, a few miles south of Soledad. Afternoon sun lies warm on still pools. Willows shade the sand. A heron stands in the shallows. Then two men come out of the path, and the place stops feeling like a postcard.

George Milton is small and quick, with restless eyes and sharp features. Lennie Small is huge in every way, with a shapeless face and wide sloping shoulders. He walks the way a bear drags his paws. George carries their blankets and work cards. Lennie carries a dead mouse.

That mouse tells you almost everything early. Lennie loves soft things and pets them without knowing his own strength, and they die, and he keeps carrying them. George throws it into the brush. Lennie sneaks back for it when George looks away.

They are headed to a ranch near Soledad to buck barley. The bus driver lied about the distance, so they camp by the river for the night. Over cold beans, George lays out the rules while Lennie drinks too much river water and forgets where they came from. George scolds him, then softens.

Slowly the past comes out. They fled the town of Weed after Lennie grabbed at a girl's red dress because the cloth felt soft and held on when she screamed, which got him accused of an attack. George pulled him away and they hid in a ditch until dark. It was not the first such scare. As boys, George played mean tricks on Lennie until the day Lennie nearly drowned because George told him to hold his breath in a river. Since then the arrangement has held: George does the thinking and Lennie does the lifting.

Before sleep, Lennie begs for the story he has heard a hundred times. The dream farm. Ten acres with a little house and rabbits for Lennie to tend. George recites it half annoyed and half held together by it. Then comes the order that matters most: if trouble comes, Lennie is to hide in the brush by this river and wait for George.

Soledad and the bunkhouse crew

The ranch sits in rolling country near Soledad. The boss is a short angry man in high heeled boots who distrusts George for speaking for Lennie, and George covers with a story about watching over a friend kicked in the head by a horse as a kid. The boss narrows his eyes and leaves them to the barley crew.

The real authority belongs to Slim, the skinner who drives the mule teams. His word settles disputes. When his dog bears a litter, he offers one of the surviving pups to Lennie. It is one of the few pure kindnesses in the book.

Then there is Curley, the boss's son: young and short, a former prizefighter who picks fights with bigger men. He keeps one hand soft in a glove full of vaseline, they say for his new wife. He sizes up Lennie at once and looks for a reason. Avoid that man, George tells Lennie.

Carlson is a big blustering hand with a Luger pistol. Whit is younger and full of gossip. Their chatter shows the life: single men drifting job to job, spending pay in town, owning nothing but a bedroll.

Curley's wife drifts through without a name of her own, in bright cotton dresses and heavy makeup, finding excuses to enter the bunkhouse. The men call her trouble in voices that mix hunger with blame. George orders Lennie to keep clear of her entirely. Weed taught him what a look can turn into on a lonely ranch.

Candy, his dog, and the dream farm

Candy is the old swamper who lost a hand in a machine and now sweeps the bunkhouse for a bunk and a few dollars. He owns a blind half deaf sheepdog that smells bad and drags one lame leg, and he dotes on it past all reason, because the dog has been with him since it was a pup.

Carlson decides the dog should die, and keeps pressing until the other men nod along. Candy looks to Slim for rescue and finds none. Carlson leads the old dog outside while Candy lies face down on his bunk, and a shot cracks in the distance, and the room goes silent. It hurts out of all proportion, because Steinbeck makes you feel what Candy feels: the old are used up here.

That night the dream farm stops being a bedtime story. When Candy learns the place can be bought for six hundred dollars, he makes his bid: savings from years of ranch pay plus settlement money for the hand he lost, all of it, for a corner of the house and a share of the chores. He cannot buck barley much longer, and this is his last chance to avoid ending like his dog.

George works the figures and they reach the price. A month or so of wages, and they can buy the little place and quit the road. The three sit up late adding hens and garden rows to a farm none of them has seen. Slim nods approval, which counts as a blessing. For one chapter, hope sits at the table like a fourth man.

The farm means something different to each of them. To Lennie, rabbits to tend. To Candy, shelter against the day his body quits. To George, an end to watching Lennie every minute. None of those wants is foolish. Together they still may not be enough.

Crooks and the woman nobody names

Crooks is the Black stable hand, living apart by rule and custom in a small room off the stable, with books and ointments for his crooked spine. He cannot eat or play cards with the white hands. Saturday nights he reads alone while the others go to town. He is the one man on the place who thinks in full sentences, and nobody wants to hear them.

Lennie wanders into the stable on a Saturday night, smiling and harmless, and Crooks tells him to clear out. But Lennie barely registers the rebuff, and his delight in the pups wears Crooks down. They talk. Crooks says what solitude feels like: books are no good without someone to talk back to, and a man goes mad alone.

Then Crooks finds the tender spot: suppose George does not come back from town. Lennie's face crumples and his huge hands clench. Crooks backs off half ashamed, having proved his point about need and feeling cruel for it. When Candy joins them and the talk turns to the farm, Crooks asks to join and work for his keep. For a few pages the dream holds four men instead of three.

Curley's wife breaks it. She comes to the stable restless and powdered, mocks their farm talk, and says she could have been in pictures. When Crooks tells her to leave his room, she reminds him where he stands: one word from her and he hangs. Both know it is true. Crooks shrinks back and takes back his wish to join the farm.

This chapter holds the book's sharpest ache and its fairest complaint. Curley's wife gets no name and little history beyond a marriage she despises. We see her only as the men see her. Steinbeck grants her one honest speech about loneliness, then uses her as the trigger for disaster. She is drawn well enough to make her fate sting, and not well enough to make her a full person.

The dialect raises a smaller question. Most of it rings true, though at times it tips toward stage dressing. Slim and George and Crooks each speak in distinct rhythms, yet a reader who winces at written dialect will wince here.

The fight and the barn

Curley picks his fight after days of circling. Deciding Lennie is laughing at him, he orders the big man to stand and slashes at his face. Lennie keeps his hands at his sides until George shouts for him to fight back. He grabs the coming fist and holds on, and crushes Curley's hand before George can pull him off.

Slim takes charge. He tells Curley to say the hand got caught in a machine, or the ranch will hear how a fighter got mauled by a man who never threw a punch. The men close ranks. George scolds Lennie for not letting go sooner, and Lennie cries that he only wanted to make Curley stop. Curley will wait for payback, and George knows it.

With most of the men gone to town, Lennie hides in the barn with the puppy Slim gave him, which he has petted too hard. He has killed it without meaning to, the way he killed the mice, and he whispers his fear that George will bar him from the farm. The grief is real and without grasp of cause, which makes it worse.

Curley's wife finds him there and talks at length for once. She hates the ranch and the silence of the house. She dreamed of pictures, and instead married Curley out of spite and boredom. Lennie answers with his refrain about rabbits. Two lonely people trade wishes past each other.

Then she lets him stroke her hair, and the scene turns with awful speed. He strokes too hard. She screams. He clamps a hand over her mouth because noise brings trouble, and shakes her to quiet her. Her neck snaps. He lays her in the hay and runs for the brush by the river, as George ordered long ago.

Candy finds the body, and his first thought after horror is for the farm, which tells you what the dream had come to mean. He fetches George. George looks once and knows everything is finished. He tells Candy and Slim what Weed was really about, so they grasp this was never malice. Then he slips Carlson's Luger from its hiding place and heads for the river ahead of the posse.

The river again

The last chapter returns to the pool where the book began: the sun, the willows, the heron in the shallows. Nature goes on exactly as before while men finish what they started. Lennie bursts from the brush and hides where George told him to hide, hearing his dead aunt scolding him in his head. He begs George whether the farm is lost. George lies with steady tenderness and says it is not.

What follows is the most merciful and most terrible act in the book. George tells the farm story one last time while the posse sounds far off. House and windmill. Rabbits for Lennie to tend. Lennie recites his part, glowing through his tears. And while Lennie stares across the river picturing rabbits, George shoots him in the back of the head. George drops the gun and sits over the body as the men arrive.

Slim grasps what happened before anyone speaks. He leads George gently away while Curley demands answers. He tells George he did what had to be done, and offers the only comfort available: a drink and a steady arm.

Calling the shooting merciful does not make it clean. George spares Lennie a crazed death at Curley's hands and takes the stain onto himself. Yet the farm dies with Lennie, and George walks back into the loneliness of the road. I read the ending as mercy wrapped around despair.

A fair account should admit where the book strains. The plot moves with such straight force toward disaster that some readers feel railroaded. Steinbeck plants each piece in plain sight, so the barn scene feels fated rather than surprising. I found that fatefulness honest, since men without power live inside traps.

The thinness of Curley's wife stays the sharpest complaint. She exists to tempt and to die, and her one long speech asks pity for a woman the story never lets us know. The choice to keep her nameless still rankles, even allowing for the world Steinbeck was writing about.

Even so, I closed the book shaken rather than lectured. Readers who want plot twists should look elsewhere. Readers who want to feel what it costs to care for someone helpless in a hard place will find few books that do it with such plain force. I will remember Lennie asking for the story again, and George telling it.

FAQ

Why does George shoot Lennie at the end?

After Lennie kills Curley's wife by accident, a party led by Curley sets out after him. George reaches Lennie first at the river and shoots him quickly while Lennie pictures the farm, sparing him a crueler death and a cell.

What is the dream farm in Of Mice and Men?

George and Lennie plan to buy ten acres with a house, rabbits, chickens, and pigs. Candy offers his savings and Crooks briefly asks to join, but the plan dies with the killing in the barn.

When was Of Mice and Men first published?

John Steinbeck published it in 1937 with Covici Friede. The first edition ran 186 pages.