OMAM Context Notes
Soundbites to add (where appropriate!) and look at as a reason for a character's
behaviour/Steinbeck's focus on a theme:
set in the 1930s against the backdrop of the United States’ catastrophic economic
downturn, known as the Great Depression.
Amongst the worst-hit were the agricultural workers of the American West, many of whom
were left homeless and wandering for work.
Steinbeck, who lived in Salinas, California, was appalled by the terrible suffering of the
homeless and starving families he saw around him.
The characters, n a series of articles for the San Francisco News titled “The Harvest Gypsies,”
he described the conditions in which homeless migrants lived and worked.
Steinbeck saw California’s farmers, landowners, and bankers as partly to blame for the
migrants’ suffering, due to their deliberate exploitation of the cheap labor provided by the
migrant workers.
He wrote Of Mice and Men in part to expose the role that the cruelty and indifference of
landowners—represented in the novel by the boss and his son Curley—played in the
suffering of homeless workers like George and Lennie.
Of Mice and Men helped to persuade America’s political leaders to provide more aid to the
people left destitute by the Depression.
Soundbites to add (where appropriate!) and look at as a reason for a character's
behaviour/Steinbeck's focus on a theme:
set in the 1930s against the backdrop of the United States’ catastrophic economic
downturn, known as the Great Depression.
Amongst the worst-hit were the agricultural workers of the American West, many of whom
were left homeless and wandering for work.
Steinbeck, who lived in Salinas, California, was appalled by the terrible suffering of the
homeless and starving families he saw around him.
The characters, n a series of articles for the San Francisco News titled “The Harvest Gypsies,”
he described the conditions in which homeless migrants lived and worked.
Steinbeck saw California’s farmers, landowners, and bankers as partly to blame for the
migrants’ suffering, due to their deliberate exploitation of the cheap labor provided by the
migrant workers.
He wrote Of Mice and Men in part to expose the role that the cruelty and indifference of
landowners—represented in the novel by the boss and his son Curley—played in the
suffering of homeless workers like George and Lennie.
Of Mice and Men helped to persuade America’s political leaders to provide more aid to the
people left destitute by the Depression.
