Of Mice and Men: Writing, Publication, and Circulation

John Steinbeck wrote Of Mice and Men around 1936, and Covici Friede published it in New York in February 1937. Tortilla Flat had already gained him readers, while In Dubious Battle had brought agricultural labor and conflict into his fiction. The shorter new work centered on California's itinerant farmworkers, continuing his exploration of the relationship between personal lives and working environments.

Peter Cash notes that the title comes from Robert Burns's 1785 poem “To a Mouse,” juxtaposing human and animal circumstances and suggesting that carefully planned futures can come to nothing. Even before the specific story begins, the title connects the work to an existing poetic tradition. Cash uses it to discuss the fragility of the American dream, rather than treating it simply as an explanation of animal imagery.

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The story takes place near Soledad, California. George and Lennie travel in search of ranch work, hoping one day to own a small piece of land where they can make their own decisions. George often grows frustrated by caring for his companion, yet also draws support from their partnership. Lennie is immensely strong but has limited understanding and memory, and often struggles to translate good intentions into safe actions.

The other people on the ranch have their own loneliness and anxieties. Age, disability, race, and gender affect whether they can participate in the imagined shared life. As conflicts intensify, the two men's plan ends in tragedy. The work places the desire for a secure home alongside the insecurity of laborers' lives. Its central concern is not only survival, but also whether care between people can endure.

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In a 2011 article in Miranda, Damien Alcade examines the relationship between symbiosis and movement, starting from Steinbeck's discussions with marine biologist Ed Ricketts. He argues that George and Lennie's relationship offers reciprocal benefits: caregiving is not merely a burden, because companionship also gives the carer a sense of a future. Constant movement expresses employment insecurity while becoming a way of life that sustains their bond.

Alcade uses biological concepts as tools for reading rather than medically diagnosing the characters. By contrast, Cash's 2012 article focuses on narrative structure, examining how foreshadowing across the six scene-like sections gradually creates a sense of approaching tragedy. One emphasizes interdependence, the other formal organization. Reading them together shows that relationships and structural design occupy different levels of interpretation; neither scholarly position can simply be equated with the author's sole creative intention.

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The novel quickly entered newspaper reviewing and book-selection systems. Joseph Henry Jackson's February 28, 1937 review in the San Francisco Chronicle recorded its selection as one of the Book-of-the-Month Club's choices for March. This contemporary evidence reveals a form of promotion shortly after publication and a channel extending beyond readers interested in California subjects. Selection itself, however, cannot be converted into unverified sales figures.

The work's publishing history did not end with the 1937 first edition. Viking issued a Compass Books edition in 1963, showing that this short novel still circulated in new editions more than twenty years later. Its appearance in 1937 and reissue in 1963 belong to different publishing stages, with the latter extending readers' opportunities to encounter it.

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Jackson admired the way ordinary people's desires drove the narrative, arguing that workers' portrayals could not be judged solely by political slogans. His review joined literary emotional power with the subject of labor, showing that contemporary readers could care about both the social background and the characters' emotional lives.

Mark Van Doren offered a different view in The Nation on March 6, 1937, criticizing the characters as predetermined and the course of events as overly mechanical. This was not a judgment about sales, but a challenge to the relationship between literary truth and contrivance. Together, these contemporary responses show that debate accompanied the novel's reception from the outset: its highly concentrated, readily recognizable tragic structure could appear powerful or seem to diminish the characters' complexity.

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Stage circulation began in the year of publication. In an October 1937 Theatre Arts review, Margaret Shedd described a summer production by San Francisco's Theatre Union, to which Steinbeck had earlier supplied an unpublished manuscript. Working-class actors rehearsed in their spare time, making a local theater company's participation part of the work's circulation. Shedd praised the production's immediacy while retaining reservations about structure and character development.

On November 23, 1937, a production directed by George S. Kaufman opened at New York's Music Box Theatre. Brooks Atkinson's review the following day named Wallace Ford and Broderick Crawford as the two leads and praised the production's restraint and sympathy. Since the San Francisco staging preceded it, the New York production should not loosely be called the world premiere. Books, the book club, newspapers and magazines, and theaters together formed the work's routes of circulation during its first year.

References: [6] [7]