Context
John Steinbeck was born in 1902 in
Salinas, California, a region that became the setting for much of
his fiction, including Of Mice and Men. As a teenager,
he spent his summers working as a hired hand on neighboring ranches,
where his experiences of rural California and its people impressed
him deeply. In 1919,
he enrolled at Stanford University, where he studied intermittently
for the next six years before finally leaving without having earned
a degree. For the next five years, he worked as a reporter and then
as caretaker for a Lake Tahoe estate while he completed his first
novel, an adventure story called Cup of Gold, published
in 1929. Critical
and commercial success did not come for another six years, when Tortilla
Flat was published in 1935,
at which point Steinbeck was finally able to support himself entirely with
his writing.
In his acceptance speech for the 1962 Nobel
Prize in literature, Steinbeck said:
. . . the writer is delegated to declare
and to celebrate man’s proven capacity for greatness of heart and
spirit—for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love.
In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally
flags of hope and of emulation. I hold that a writer who does not
passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication
nor any membership in literature.
Steinbeck’s best-known works deal intimately with the
plight of desperately poor California wanderers, who, despite the
cruelty of their circumstances, often triumph spiritually. Always
politically involved, Steinbeck followed Tortilla Flat with
three novels about the plight of the California laboring class,
beginning with In Dubious Battle in 1936. Of
Mice and Men followed in 1937,
and The Grapes of Wrath won the 1940 Pulitzer
Prize and became Steinbeck’s most famous novel. Steinbeck sets Of
Mice and Men against the backdrop of Depression-era America.
The economic conditions of the time victimized workers like George
and Lennie, whose quest for land was thwarted by cruel and powerful
forces beyond their control, but whose tragedy was marked, ultimately,
by steadfast compassion and love.
Critical opinions of Steinbeck’s work have always been
mixed. Both stylistically and in his emphasis on manhood and male
relationships, which figure heavily in Of Mice and Men, Steinbeck
was strongly influenced by his contemporary, Ernest Hemingway. Even though
Steinbeck was hailed as a great author in the 1930s
and ’40s, and won the Nobel Prize for literature
in 1962, many critics have
faulted his works for being superficial, sentimental, and overly moralistic.
Though Of Mice and Men is regarded by some as his greatest
achievement, many critics argue that it suffers from one-dimensional
characters and an excessively deterministic plot, which renders
the lesson of the novel more important than the people in it.
Steinbeck continued writing throughout the 1940s
and 1950s. He went
to Europe during World War II, then worked in Hollywood both as
a filmmaker and a scriptwriter for such movies as Viva Zapata! (1950).
His important later works include East of Eden (1952), a
sprawling family saga set in California, and Travels with
Charley (1962),
a journalistic account of his tour of America. He died in New York
City in 1968.
The History of Migrant Farmers in California
After World War I, economic and ecological forces brought
many rural poor and migrant agricultural workers from the Great
Plains states, such as Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas, to California.
Following World War I, a recession led to a drop in the market price
of farm crops, which meant that farmers were forced to produce more goods
in order to earn the same amount of money. To meet this demand for
increased productivity, many farmers bought more land and invested
in expensive agricultural equipment, which plunged them into debt.
The stock market crash of 1929 only
made matters worse. Banks were forced to foreclose on mortgages
and collect debts. Unable to pay their creditors, many farmers lost
their property and were forced to find other work. But doing so
proved very difficult, since the nation’s unemployment rate had
skyrocketed, peaking at nearly twenty-five percent in 1933.
The increase in farming activity across the Great Plains
states caused the precious soil to erode. This erosion, coupled
with a seven-year drought that began in 1931,
turned once fertile grasslands into a desertlike region known as
the Dust Bowl. Hundreds of thousands of farmers packed up their
families and few belongings, and headed for California, which, for
numerous reasons, seemed like a promised land. Migrant
workers came to be known as Okies, for although they came from many
states across the Great Plains, twenty percent of the farmers were
originally from Oklahoma. Okies were often met with scorn by California
farmers and natives, which only made their dislocation and poverty
even more unpleasant.
John Steinbeck immortalized the plight of one such family,
the Joads, in his most famous novel, The Grapes of Wrath. In
several of his fiction works, including Of Mice and Men, Steinbeck
illustrates how grueling, challenging, and often unrewarding the
life of migrant farmers could be. Just as George and Lennie dream
of a better life on their own farm, the Great Plains farmers dreamed
of finding a better life in California. The state’s mild climate
promised a longer growing season and, with soil favorable to a wider
range of crops, it offered more opportunities to harvest. Despite
these promises, though, very few found it to be the land of opportunity
and plenty of which they dreamed.
