Of Mice and Men – Context
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The Context of Of Mice and Men
Overview
– Written in 1937 within the context of the Great Depression (began in 1929 and didn’t
truly end until the Second World War began) and its effect on the Californian working
class.
– Steinbeck drew heavily from his own experiences as a teenage farm hand in California
– he had lived through many of the same experiences as his characters. It also draws
from his friendship with Ed Ricketts, an early proponent of ecological thinking.
– Steinbeck was very political; he worked as a reporter prior to the publication of Tortilla
Flat (his first commercially successful novel) and thought of farmers, landowners and
bankers as immoral in the way by which they exploited workers. Of Mice and Men is an
example of a social protest novel – in the tradition of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s
Cabin. However, where Of Mice and Men diverges from Uncle Tom’s Cabin is in its relative
lack of idealism.
– Steinbeck did not abide by the Romanticism (focus on human ideals, moral virtue,
emotional sensibility) and was instead one of the first and most influential American
proponents of literary realism. Rather than try and show the world as it could be,
Steinbeck was interested in showing the world as it was.
– His terse style was heavily influenced by his contemporary, Ernest Hemingway. He,
much like Hemingway, focussed on themes such as masculinity and manliness; as
evidenced by the book’s intense focus on what makes a man – often at the expense of its
characterisation of women.
– The inspiration behind the title of the novella came from Robert Burns’ To a Mouse, on
Turning Her Up in Her Nest With the Plough, November, 1785. The original title was
‘Something that Happened’.
