Books

First edition, first printing, of Steinbeck's first "play novelette", an experimental literary form intended to be both a novella and a script for a play. Staged in Broadway on 23 November 1937, the story won the Drama Critics Circle Award for best play. Based on Steinbeck's experience working with migrant farm workers in the 1910s, the novella is titled after a line in Robert Burns's poem "To a Mouse". The book was "one of the first in a long line of 'experiments', a word he often used to identify a forthcoming project... [It] is a tightly drafted study of bindle stiffs whose dreams he intended to represent the universal longings for a home, 'the earth longings of a Lennie who was not to represent insanity at all but the inarticulate and powerful yearning of all men', he wrote his agent. Both the text and the critically acclaimed 1937 Broadway play... made Steinbeck a household name, assuring his popularity and, for some, his infamy. (The book's language shocked many, and it is still listed with frequency on lists of "objectionable reading" or "banned books" for secondary school students)" (ANB). This copy has all the requisite points of first printing: the copyright page giving the printer as J. J. Little and Ives Company rather than Haddon; the phrase "and only moved because the heavy hands were pendula" (p. 9, l. 20-1); a bullet point to the pagination of p. 88; and the dyed top edge. Octavo. Original buff cloth, spine and front cover lettered in buff on orange ground ruled in black, top edge blue. With dust jacket. Title page printed in similar fashion as binding design. Ticket of bookseller Harry Hartman of Seattle. Toned spine with a few spots, pale foxing to top edge; jacket unclipped and unusually bright, with little of the usual fading to spine, vertical crease to spine and panels where folded into book, blind stamp to rear panel: a very good copy in near-fine jacket. Goldstone & Payne A7a.

Of Mice and Men is a novella written by John Steinbeck. Published in 1937, it narrates the story of George Milton and Lennie Small, two displaced migrant ranch workers during the Great Depression in California.