What is this book about?
George and Lennie are two travelling workers in 1930s America during the Great Depression. They move from farm to farm looking for work. George is small, smart and careful. Lennie is large, physically very strong, but has a mental disability that makes him childlike. George looks after Lennie the way an older brother would.
Their shared dream is to one day save enough money to buy their own small farm — "to live off the fatta the lan'" as Lennie says. That dream of a little place of their own is what keeps them going. The novel follows what happens when they arrive at a new ranch and Lennie's inability to control his own strength creates trouble.
Why it hurts so much
The novel is only about 100 pages long. You can read it in two hours. But the emotional weight of it is enormous. Steinbeck builds the friendship between George and Lennie so warmly and so convincingly that when things go wrong — and you sense from early on that they will — it genuinely hurts.
The title comes from a Robert Burns poem: "The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry." That is the whole novel in one line.
What I took from it
- The dream of a simple, dignified life is not a small dream — for people at the bottom of society it is everything
- Loneliness is the most painful part of poverty — George and Lennie's friendship is precious precisely because it is so rare
- Weakness and disability are punished by a society that has no room for them
- The ending asks a terrible moral question about love and mercy that has no comfortable answer
I was not prepared for how much this book would affect me. It is so short that you almost do not expect it to deliver such a punch. The last few pages are among the most heartbreaking I have read in any language. Read it. And then sit quietly for a while after you finish.
Liked this summary? Try reading the full book — it is worth it.
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