TLDR Of Mice and Men

Of Mice and Men

by John Steinbeck

George Milton and Lennie Small, two migrant ranch hands in California, dream of owning a farm where Lennie can tend rabbits. At a ranch near Soledad, Curley, the boss's aggressive son, picks on Lennie. Lennie, enormously strong and mentally childlike, accidentally kills Curley's wife while stroking her hair. Curley organizes a hunt. George finds Lennie by the Salinas River, tells him the dream story one more time, and shoots him in the back of the head. Slim, a respected mule driver, understands. Carlson, clueless, asks what is eating those two.

• A puppy destroyed half the first draft. Steinbeck's setter puppy chewed up roughly half the handwritten manuscript, and he had to redo it. The book about a man who accidentally kills a puppy nearly died by puppy.
• The title comes from a Scottish poem. It borrows from Robert Burns's poem 'To a Mouse,' which says the best laid schemes of mice and men often go wrong. George and Lennie's farm is the scheme.
• The story hit Broadway the same year. This one is about the adaptation, not the book: a stage version of Of Mice and Men opened on Broadway in 1937, the year the novella came out, directed by George S. Kaufman.

• “George shoots Lennie because he's sick of him.” Not even close. George does it to spare Lennie whatever Curley's mob would do, and he does it gently, telling Lennie to look across the river and picture the rabbits first.
• “Lennie murders Curley's wife on purpose.” Hardly a plot. He is stroking her hair, she yells, and he panics and shakes her until her neck breaks. He never means to hurt her, and he hides in fear.
• “Lennie and George are brothers.” Wrong family tree. George tells the boss they are cousins, which is a lie. Lennie's Aunt Clara raised him, and George took him along to work after she died.

• If they say: “Whose gun does George use on Lennie, and where did he get it?”
  You say: “Carlson's Luger, the same one Carlson used on Candy's old dog. George takes it from Carlson's bag, and Carlson notices it missing right after Lennie vanishes.”
• If they say: “It's just a sad story about two buddies.”
  You say: “I'd say it's also about who gets shut out. Crooks stays apart from the other men because he's Black, and Curley's wife never gets a name.”