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. First staged on 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 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: 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); 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. Small bookseller's ticket on rear pastedown. Head of spine lightly toned, a few spots of foxing to edges and rear pastedown; jacket spine toned, tiny spot of skinning on front panel touching one letter, slight creasing and foxing at extremities and flap folds, faint vertical crease mark to both flaps, else clean, unclipped: a very good copy in like 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.