John Steinbeck - Of Mice and Men

            John Steinbeck is one of America's most noteworthy writers during the 1900s (John Steinbeck 19). "Steinbeck is remembered for both his forceful writing style and his compassion for the disadvantaged (John Steinbeck 19)." In Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, a novel that constantly achieved tremendous success, two migrant farmhands wish to live out on the farms of California's Salinas Valley, a setting that Steinbeck uses a lot in his work (John Steinbeck 19). John Steinbeck is best known for his argumentative Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Grapes of Wrath (1939) (John Steinbeck 19). "When he was honored in 1962 with the Nobel Prize in literature, the awards committee cited Steinbeck's 'sympathetic humor and sociological perception' and his 'instinct for what is genuinely American, be it good or bad' (John Steinbeck 19-20)." In John Steinbeck's fiction, he acknowledged both sympathy and anger toward American society (John Steinbeck 19-20). "An active opponent of social exploitation, Puritanism, and materialistic values, Steinbeck is noted for his sharp, forceful writing style, his wry humor, and his profound compassion for the poor, the inarticulate, and the politically maligned (John Steinbeck 20)." In John Steinbeck's novel Of Mice and Men, George and his mentally disabled partner, Lennie, come close to accomplishing their American dream of purchasing a farm, but George's and Lennie's dream is overturned when Lennie accidentally kills their boss's son's wife (John Steinbeck 19). .
             Every character but one in John Steinbeck's extremely abbreviated novel Of Mice and Men is heartless if the range of the word human is understood to synchronize with the range this far established by fiction (Doren). "Two of them are evil, one of them is dangerous without meaning to be, and all of them are ignorant-all of them, that is, except the one who shall be named hereafter (Doren).