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 decades. Another film based on the novella was made in 1992 starring Gary Sinise as George and John Malkovich as Lennie. Steinbeck followed this wave of success with "The Grapes of Wrath" (1939), based on newspaper articles about migrant agricultural workers that he had written in San Francisco. It is commonly considered his greatest work. According to "The New York Times", it was the best-selling book of 1939 and 430,000 copies had been printed by February 1940. In that month, it won the National Book Award, favorite fiction book of 1939, voted by members of the American Booksellers Association. Later