The book Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck takes place during the great depression in California. There are two main characters named Lennie Small and George Milton who have just escaped from a farm after Lennie was wrongly accused of rape. Lennie is a mentally deficient, yet submissive man. George on the other hand is a smaller man but he is the one who takes care of the both of them and gets things done. .
Lennie has a dream to have a patch of land with a vegetable garden and a rabbit hutch. He wants to be in charge of the rabbits. George has an obsession with soft things and he loves to pet them. This is how George gets himself into trouble. But George tells Lennie if there is ever a time that he is trouble, he should return to the brush near the river and wait for George to find him. .
The trouble starts when Lennie and George get a job on a ranch. They start out bad with the boss of the ranch and his son Curly. Curly is a smaller man than Lennie and hates anyone bigger than he due to fright and jealousy. Curly also has a wife who is beautiful and quite flirtatious with the guys who work on the ranch. This is mainly because she is so lonely, being the only women n the ranch. Another worker on the ranch is Slim. He had just received a new litter of puppies from his old dog and decides to let Lennie visit them and pet them. That night, Lennie is petting one of the pups because he loves how soft they are, but he gets carried away. He had petted the puppy so hard he broke his little, fragile neck. He had once done this with a pet mouse he once had. He just pets and pets until he gets too aggressive with it and the animal dies. Curley's Wife finds him in the barn with the dead puppy, and when she allows him to feel how soft her hair is, he handles her too forcefully. When she screams, Lennie covers her mouth and, as she tries to struggle free from his grasp, he snaps her neck. Lennie remembers what George has said about being in trouble and where to go, and he leaves the ranch.
