This story was written by John Steinbeck, a world-famous author who would later win the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Grapes of Wrath. Of Mice and Men is set in the United States during the Great Depression, a very dark period in which countless people lost their jobs and many starved, unable to support themselves or their family.

  The story is about two good friends, George and Lennie, who are poor and uneducated itinerant workers. As members of the lowest class of society, they have to work hard every single day to make a living. George is a very clever person, who can often anticipate what is going to happen and knows what to say to different people to get what he needs, and is physically very small. Lennie is the opposite: he is very strong, like a bear, but is intellectually disabled. He always listens to George and follows George’s directions, because he is unable to think for himself, and when he does he makes big mistakes. Although he is very strong, his clumsy behavior continually causes problems for him and George as they try to realize their dreams.

  After Lennie makes a big mistake—touching a girl’s dress. Lennie doesn’t mean to do bad things, but he cannot control himself when he wanted to touch soft things for he loves that. Then George and Lennie have to go to a new place and find another job. They arrive in Weed and labor as common workers, but things don’t go well for them here, either, as Lennie gets into a fight with Curley, the son of the landlord. The reason why they fight is because Lennie doesn’t behave well in public; he doesn’t know when to stop smiling, and Curley thought Lennie was just laughing at him, which made himself annoyed.

  On their third day on the farm, Lennie, who isn’t aware of his own strength, accidentally kills Curley’s wife. He runs away, hiding in a place that George told him about earlier, because he understands he makes a big trouble, and everyone on the farm is angry and trying to find and kill him. However, George finds him first and kills Lennie by shooting him in the back of the head, to spare him the pain and misery if the others catch him.

  The story indicates the humanity during the dark period of the Great Depression. People at that time discriminated against the weak and treated them badly, not even as good as Lennie treats the mice for when George killed mice by accident, he will apologize.

  I learned a lot from reading this story. Basically, it mainly talks about the humanity. To express the characters’ lower-class background, Steinbeck describes George and Lennie without using advanced or beautiful words, instead employing basic, common vocabulary. However, this does not mean that they are bad men: Lennie is a good, moral person, and so is George, who cares about Lennie and protects their friendship. If I were alive during that time, I would want to be George rather than Lennie, since people without intelligence have a hard time surviving in this cruel world.