"Of Mice and Men" 

John  Steinbeck 


Read "Of Mice and Men" by John Ernst Steinbeck Jr.  A must read.

It's a story of two displaced migrant ranch workers, who move from place to place in California in search of new job opportunities during the Great Depression in the United States.

The novella has been banned from various US public and school libraries or curricula for allegedly "promoting euthanasia", "condoning racial slurs", being "anti-business", containing profanity, and generally containing "vulgar" and "offensive language". Many of the bans and restrictions have been lifted and it remains required reading in many other American, Australian, Irish, British, New Zealand and Canadian high schools. As a result of being a frequent target of censors, Of Mice and Men appears on the American Library Association's list of the Most Challenged Books of the 21st Century (number 4). In the UK, it was listed at number 52 of the "nation's best loved novels" on the BBC's 2003 survey The Big Read. Of Mice and Men has been challenged (proposed for censorship) 54 times since it was published in 1936. However, scholars including Thomas Scarseth have fought to protect the book by arguing its literary value. According to Scarseth "in true great literature the pain of Life is transmuted into the beauty of Art."

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Mice_and_Men

A quote from the book "You're nuts." Crooks was scornful. "I seen hunderds of men come by on the road an' on the ranches, with their bindles on their back an' that same damn thing in their heads. Hunderds of them. They come, an' they quit an' go on; an' every damn one of 'em's got a little piece of land in his head. An' never a God damn one of 'em ever gets it. Just like heaven. Everybody wants a little piece of lan'. I read plenty of books out here. Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land. It's just in their head. They're all the time talkin' about it, but it's jus' in their head."