1. An introduction to his life and his novel Of Mice and Men
John Steinbeck
An introduction to his life
and his novel
Of Mice and Men

2. Steinbeck’s Life He was born in 1902 in Salinas, CA.
He grew up and spent most of his adult life there.
He attended Stanford University from
As a young man, he took a series of jobs so he could find out how working people actually live.

3. Steinbeck’s Life
During this time, he worked on a ranch. This experience became the basis for Of Mice and Men.
His first novel was published in 1929.
He won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1940 for The Grapes of Wrath.

4. Steinbeck’s Life In 1962 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
He was a private person in life and shunned publicity.
He died in New York City on December 20, 1968 and is buried in Salinas, CA.

5. Steinbeck’s Novels
His novels deal with the struggles of ordinary people.
His work was controversial because of his support for the underprivileged.
In the 1930’s, tension between state agribusiness and the underpaid, overworked laborer was high.

6. Steinbeck’s Novels
Between 1935 and 1940 more than 350,000 people left the Dust Bowl for California.
The West was viewed as the promised land, a place to start a new life.
Steinbeck’s trilogy, In Dubious Battle, Of Mice and Men and Grapes of Wrath deals with agricultural labor.

7. Of Mice and Men
The novel covers a three- day period in the lives of George and Lennie, the main characters.
The novel takes place in the Salinas Valley, near Soledad, CA. in the 1930’s.
Soledad is about 80 miles from San Francisco.

8. Of Mice and Men George and Lennie are itinerate workers.
They “buck barly” or lift grain bags – backbreaking, unskilled labor.
The ranch represents a world of uneducated, low-class people trying, with little success, to change their lives.

9. Of Mice and Men The novel is written with the structure of a play.
Steinbeck calls it “neither a novel nor a play but it is a kind of playable novel.”

10. Of Mice and Men
The following slides are pictures that were taken during the Great Depression. Many depict migrant workers from Oklahoma working and living in California. These are images of the “real” life that inspired Steinbeck to write about the common man.

11. A family on their way from the Dust Bowl to California.

12. Dust piled against an abandoned farm.

13. Dust Bowl farm

14. Migrant mother

15. Migrant worker

16. School recess for migrant children