Of Mice and Men Of Mice and Men Of Mice and Men is a novella written by author John Steinbeck. Published in 1937, it tells the story of George Milton and Lennie Small, two displaced migrant ranch workers, who move from place to place in California in search of new job opportunities during the Great Depression in the United States. Steinbeck based the novella on his own experiences working alongside migrant farm workers as a teenager in the 1910s (before the arrival of the Okies he would vividly describe in "The Grapes of Wrath"). The title is taken from Robert Burns' poem "To a
John Steinbeck includes "Rocinante", the camper-truck in which Steinbeck made the cross-country trip described in "Travels with Charley". His father's cottage on Eleventh Street in Pacific Grove, where Steinbeck wrote some of his earliest books, also survives. In Monterey, Ed Ricketts' laboratory survives (though it is not yet open to the public) and at the corner which Steinbeck describes in "Cannery Row", also the store which once belonged to Lee Chong, and the adjacent vacant lot frequented by the hobos of Cannery Row. The site of the "Hovden Sardine Cannery" next to Doc's laboratory is now occupied by the Monterey Bay Aquarium.