This play took place in USA in the 30s during The Great Depression.
Mice and Men was written by John Steinbeck in 1937.
>John Steinbeck
John Steinbeck was born on February 27 in 1902.
John was an American writer. He wrote the Pulitzer Prize winning novel "The Grapes of Wrath", published in 1939, and he wrote the novel "Of Mice and Men", published in 1937.
Steinbeck wrote twenty-five books, sixteen novels, six non-fiction books and several collections of short stories. Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. John Steinbeck died December 20 in 1968.
The great Depression
The great Depression was from 1929 to 1939. It was the longest and most severe depression ever experienced by the industrialized Western world. The economy had gone into depression six months earlier, they say that The Great Depression began with a catastrophic collapse of the stock-market prices on the New York Stock Exchange in October 1929.
The Great Depression began in the United States, but it quickly turned into a worldwide economic slump owing to the special and intimate relationships that had been forged between the United States and European economies after World War I. The United States had emerged from the war as the major creditor and financier of postwar Europe, whose national economies had been greatly weakened by the war itself, by war debts, and, in the case of Germany and other defeated nations, by the need to pay war reparations. So once the American economy slumped and the flow of American investment credits to Europe dried up, prosperity tended to collapse there as well. The Depression hit hardest to those nations that were most deeply indebted to the United States, i.e., Germany and Great Britain. In Germany, unemployment rose sharpl, beginning in late 1929, and by early 1932 it had reached 6 million workers, or 25 percent of the work force. Britain was less severely affected, but its industrial and export sectors remained seriously depressed until World War II. Many other countries had been affected by the slump within 1931.
A plot of Mice and Men
George Milton and Lennie Small were two ranch workers, they dreamt of owning a small farm, one day. George was like a father for Lennie. Lennie loves animals and soft things, for example mice and rabbits. Lennie's physical strength causes problems, so his “father” George have to watch him often. One day, they went together to California and they got a job on a ranch there. When they came to California they started to save money for their future. They met an old man, Candy. He tells them about the other ranch hands. The boss's son, Curly, is small and he hates big and strong men and he didn't like Lennie. And so they met Curley's wife. George and Candy were not interested in her, but innocently Lennie finds her attractive. Candy overhears George and Lennie when they were talking about their dreams, and he asks if he can join them. He says he can give them a lot of money to their farm if he can live his life with them. They were all happy, and they said yes. They continued their dream, and they moved to a farm together in California, all together.
