«Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love.
Try to understand each other» ¹

Is a short novel by Jhon Steinbeck published in 1937.

The title refers to a poem by Scottish poet Robert Burns and suggests that the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry: no matter how hard or well we plan for something, our plans can often fail to become reality…or worse, they can end up going terribly wrong.
The original title was «Something That Happened» but Steinbeck changed it after reading Burn’s poem To a Mouse.

Telling the tragic story of George Milton and Lennie Small, the novel faces the condition of the itinerant farm workers during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
These men were forced to move across the States wandering from ranch to ranch seeking temporary employment.

SUMMARY

The novel begins beside the Salinas River near Soledad, where Lennie and George stop off for the night before going to a ranch where they’ve been hired to work.
George is described as a small and quick man, dark of face and cleaver.
Lennie is his opposite, a huge simple-minded man with a herculean strength.The two men talk about their problems in the past and their plans for the future.

They have recently escaped from a farm near Weed where Lennie was wrongly accused of rape when he touched a woman to feel her soft dress (because Lennie likes to touch soft things).
They share a dream of having a small piece of land someday and Lennie is obsessed with one aspect of this dream: having a small rabbit hutch where he can tend soft rabbits and he never tires of hearing George describe this story.

«Please George, tell about how it’s gonna be!»

«Why’n't you do it yourself? You know all of it»

«No… you tell it. It ain’t the same if I tell it. I forget some things»

«An’ live off the fatta the lan’»

When they arrive at the ranch their hopes are at the first raised, when the aged Candy (one-handed ranch-hand) offers Lennie and George money in order to buy a piece of land with them.
But then two murders are committed; one of a puppy, the other of Curley’s wife, who Lennie accidentally kills while trying to stroke her hair.

While Curley and the farm hands begin their search for the killer, George realizing that he is doomed to a life of loneliness and despair like the rest of the migrant workers, and wanting to spare his friend a painful death at the hands of the vengeful and violent Curley, finds Lennie and gently recites with him their dreams of owning their own land just before shooting him in the back of the head.

THEMES

Steinbeck depicts George and Lennie as two innocents whose dream conflicts with the realities of a world dominated by materialism and greed. Their extraordinary friendship distinguishes them from other hopeless and lonely migrant farm workers. The novel portrays a class of ranch workers in California whose plight had been previously ignored in the early decades of the twentieth century. In fact, George and Lennie are like mice in the maze of modern life.
The great friendship they share does not prove sufficient to allow them to realize their dream.

This novel deals with a lot of different themes such as dreams, loneliness, weakness, man’s cruelty, violence, friendship, justice, prejudice, and uncertainty of the future.

Dreams, hopes, and plans are not about realistic ambitions, but about finding a way to survive the Depression, even if it’s just filling your mind with visions that may not come true. Dreams don’t escape the general unhappy futility that seems to characterize this era of American history.

Also it argues that there is no single America. Rather, there are many different groups (women, blacks, farm workers, others), each with its own unique struggle.
The novel thrives on the notion that everyone is isolated, and everyone seems to get along quite well together by talking about how isolated they are.
Loneliness is a significant factor in several characters’ lives.
The author further reinforces this theme through subtle methods by situating the story near the town of Soledad, which means «solitude» in Spanish.

CENSURE

Of Mice and Men was the first work to bring John Steinbeck national recognition as a writer.
Critical response to the novel was generally positive. There were, however, critics who were offended by the rough earthiness of the characters and their lives.

Indeed it’s a frequently banned book.
Teachers, parents, and school board members have often taken this novella off the required reading list. Because there’s a considerable amount of killing and violence (died mice, puppies, a dog and Curley’s wife).
The characters all swear a lot, talk about sex, and go to brothels once a week. Many characters are racist, ageist and sexist. The book’s ending is beyond sad, and might be considered an endorsement of euthanasia.
Not to mention, its message isn’t exactly praiseworthy of the American way of life.

MORE

Division into acts
The action of the novel occurs over the course of three days.
Each chapter is arranged as a scene, and each scene is confined to a single space: a secluded grove, a bunkhouse, and a barn.

Realistic or symbolic?
«Readers continue to strap Steinbeck to be the procrustean bed² of realism, he simply will not fit. All his text are in fact far more consciously symbolic than historic».

John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck was born in California, in 1902 and grew up in Salinas, one of the richest agricultural valleys in California.
During his childhood Steinbeck spent his summers working on nearby ranches and later with migrants on a huge ranch. He became aware of the harsher aspects of migrant life in the region and of the darker side of human nature – material which was to be exploited in such works as Of Mice and Men.
Indeed, the episode that inspired the novel probably occurred on one of these ranches.

Working as a blinde stidd himself in the early 1920s, Steinbeck saw a huge and troubled man kill a ranch foreman. «Lenny was a real person» he said once time «I worked alongside him for many weeks. He didn’t kill a girl. He killed a ranch foreman».
Many of his works, including The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Cannery Row (1945), The Pearl (1947) and East of Eden (1952), went on to become Hollywood films and Steinbeck also achieved success as a Hollywood writer, receiving an Academy Award nomination for Best Story in 1944 for Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat.
In 1962 Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
He died in New York City four years later.

NOTE

1. John Steinbeck in his 1938 journal entry.

2. The procrustean bed is a figure from Greek mythology, he had an iron bed into which he invited every passerby to lie down. If the guest proved too tall, he would amputate the excess length.
A Procrustean bed is an arbitrary standard to which exact conformity is forced.
Con la locuzione “letto di Procuste” o “letto di Damaste”, derivata da questo mito, si indica il tentativo di ridurre le persone a un solo modello, un solo modo di pensare e di agire, o più genericamente una situazione difficile e intollerabile o una condizione di spirito tormentosa.

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Is a 1884 novel by Mark Twain.

According to Ernest Hemingway, it was the «one book» from which «all modern American literature» came, and contemporary critics and scholars have treated it as one of the great American novels.

The story is told in first person by Huck Finn and takes place on the Mississippi River («forty to fifty years ago») along which travel Huck and Jim on their raft.
Jim is a runaway slave and Huck helps him to escape toward the free states, where slavery is prohibited. The novel is filled with rich descriptions of the river and the colorful people who lived along it.

Year in which the book takes place

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn appears to take place in or about the year 1839. The author gives several indications of this. In the Foreword he describes the events as taking place «forty to fifty years ago».

Huck Finn is a poor boy with a drunken bum for a father, Huck is the best friend of Tom Sawyer;

Tom Sawyer is a middle-class boy with an imagination too active. He is the main character of the previous novel of Twain and Huck Finn was initially conceived by the author as a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer;

Jim is a runaway slave who accompanies Huck Finn down the Mississipi River. He runs away from Miss Watson after hearing that she wanted to sell him to a trader from down south.

The King and the Duke an elder and a young man with whom Huck is forced to travel. They are later tarred and feathered in Pikesville.

SUMMARY

At the end of the previous novel Huck and Tom Sawyer found a robber’s stash of gold and Huck was adopted by the widow Douglas and her sister miss Watson who try to civilize him.
As Huckleberry Finn opens, Huck is none too thrilled with his new life of cleanliness, manners, church, and school.
Anyway all is well and good until Huck’s father, Pap, reappears in town and demands Huck’s money.
«Pap» was a brutish and drunken man. When the Widow Douglas warns him to stay away from her house, he kidnaps Huck and holds him in a cabin across the river from St. Petersburg.
Whenever Pap goes out, he locks Huck in the cabin, and when he returns home drunk, he beats the boy.

Tired of his confinement and fearing the beatings will worsen, Huck escapes from Pap by faking his own death, killing a pig and spreading its blood all over the cabin.
Hiding on Jackson’s Island in the middle of the Mississippi River, Huck watches the townspeople search the river for his body. After a few days on the island, he encounters Jim, one of Miss Watson’s slaves.
Jim has run away from Miss Watson after hearing her talk about selling him to a plantation down the river, where he would be treated horribly and separated from his wife and children.

Huck and Jim team up, despite Huck’s uncertainty about the legality or morality of helping a runaway slave.
So they start downriver on the raft toward the free states, where slavery is prohibited.
During the journey they have a lot of adventures encountering gang of robbers, slaves escaped hunters, families in fight… even two fraudsters who claim to be a displaced English duke (the duke) and the long-lost heir to the French throne (the dauphin).
The duke and the king pull several scams in the small towns along the river.
After a few more small scams, the duke and the king commit their worst crime yet: they sell Jim to a local farmer, telling him Jim is a runaway for whom a large reward is being offered.

Huck finds out where Jim is being held and resolves to free him. But, as he quickly discovers, the people holding Jim are none other than Tom Sawyer’s aunt and uncle, Silas and Sally Phelps. The Phelpses mistake Huck for Tom, who is due to arrive for a visit, and Huck goes along with their mistake.
He intercepts Tom along the house’s way and Tom pretends to be his own younger brother, Sid.
Tom hatches a crazy plan to free Jim, adding all sorts of useless obstacles.
Tom Sawyer leads Huck through elaborate machinations to rescue Jim. Huck is sure Tom’s plan will get them all killed, but he complies nonetheless.
After a seeming eternity of pointless preparation, during which the boys ransack the Phelps’s house and make Aunt Sally miserable, they put the plan into action. Jim is freed, but a pursuer shoots Tom in the leg.
Huck is forced to get a doctor, and Jim sacrifices his freedom to nurse Tom.
All are returned to the Phelps’s house, where Jim ends up back in chains.

When Tom wakes the next morning, he reveals that Jim has actually been a free man all along, as Miss Watson, who made a provision in her will to free Jim, died two months earlier. Tom had planned the entire escape idea all as a game and had intended to pay Jim for his troubles.
Tom’s Aunt Polly then shows up, identifying “Tom” and “Sid” as Huck and Tom. Jim tells Huck, who fears for his future—particularly that his father might reappear—that the body they found on the floating house off Jackson’s Island had been Pap’s. Aunt Sally then steps in and offers to adopt Huck, but Huck, who has had enough «sivilizing», announces his plan to set out for the West.

STYLE

Something new happened in Huck Finn that had never happened in American literature before.
It was a book, as many critics have observed, that served as a Declaration of Independence from the genteel English novel tradition.
Twain used accents and slang words to bring his characters to life. Huckleberry Finn was different from anything most Americans had ever read.
Twain wrote dialogue for his characters that made them sound like real people. He didn’t make all his characters sound the same; instead they each had a unique voice. Indeed the novel contains different kind of writing: a fresh, no-nonsense, earthy vernacular kind of writing loaded by immediacy and energy.

THEMES

The novel faces many themes, the primary one is the conflict between civilization and «natural life».
Huck represents natural life against the rules of the society represented by the Widow Douglas.
As well the river can be considered a character who represents freedom.
The theme of slavery is perhaps the most well known aspect of this novel.

Twain was vehemently anti-slavery. It is easy to see that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn provides an allegory to explain how and why slavery is wrong. He employed humor to involve his readers in issues of justice and morality, but he faces also the themes of religion and superstition.
About the themes aroused by the novel, many critics have deprecated the final chapters, as a betrayal in conflict with the previous ones.
They claim that the book end devolves into a little show comedy.
Despite a few critics as Eliot and Leo Marx have defended the last chapters, many readers were disappointed by the novel’s end.

CENSURE

The novel was controversial from the outset and has been banned on social grounds.
Many libraries banned it from their stacks, an act that attracted a lot of publicity and discussion in the press.
In 1885 it was banned from the Concord Public Library that found offensive «the street vernacular spoken by Jim and Huck, as well as their coarse behavior», and called the book «trash suitable only for the slums».
So it was condemned by many reviewers in MT’s time as coarse and inelegant or not elevating, but was also condemned by many commentators in our time as racist because racial terms as «nigger» are frequently used in the novel.
This is true, but the references and treatment of African Americans in the novel reflect the time about which it was written.
According to the critic Lionel Trilling «Nigger is the only word for a Negro that a boy like Huck would know in his place and time [...] it is a fact that forms part of our national history, and a national history is not made up of pleasant and creditabile things only». Nevertheless to include the novel in schools and library publishers was often forced to update its language, changing the word «nigger» with «servant», «folks» or «hand».

Mark Twain

Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in the town of Florida, Missouri, in 1835.
When he was four years old, his family moved to Hannibal, a town on the Mississippi River much like the towns depicted in his two most famous novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884).

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Is a 1964 novel by Hubert Selby Jr.

The novel describes the lower class of the Brooklyn Waterfront in 1950s, which is depicted as a wasteland prowled by gangs, whores and transvestites.

When it was published its repulsive language and cruel images made the novel difficult to accept or reject. In England a jury found it to be obscene and fined the publisher (1966). In Italy it was banned untile 2000. In 1989 a Edel’s film adaption was relised becoming a commercial success.

The novel has aroused much strong feelings, with reactions ranging from the higest praises to horro, pity and disgust.
Altrough critics and fellow writers hailed this book as an original work and as a true documentary of life in a section of Brooklyn, the novel caused much controversy due to its frank portrayals of taboo subjects, such as drug use, street violence, gang-rape, homosexuality, cross dressing and domestic violence.

STYLE

With no formal training, Selby used his raw language to narrate the bleak and violent world that was part of his youth.
He wrote in a style of prose that ignores most conventions of grammar, as if it were a story told to a friend at a bar counter rather than a novel.
Selby used a slang coarse language, joined the words and inserted dialogues into the text, without quotation marks.
It all blends into huge paragraphs that look like a stream of consciouness.

SUMMARY

The novel is a collection of six stories that could work indipendently one from another but are held together by the location, among the housing project, bars and streets of Brooklyn.

1. Another Day, Another Dollar The first story sets the tone for the rest of the book and the violence involved. A gang of young hoodlums hang around at the Greek, an all-night cafe (sprawling and leaning, laughing and kidding around). Then they get a fight with a group of sailors.
Selby describes the fight persisting in an extensive description of the violence creating a very vivid and cruel image (such as blood, vomiting and violence of shots).

2. The Queen is dead The second story is about Georgette, a hip queer (to quote the book) in love with a hoodlum named Vinnie – who not only takes full advantage of the situation, but also treats Georgette horribly, especially when his friends are around.
She as no choise but to endure the humiliation, as it’s the only way she and Vinnie can be “together”.
One night she is knifed during a stupid game and when she returns home with female clothing and her injuried leg (gushing blood) her brother slaps her face and tears up her drug clothes.
After a few days if delirium due to her benzedrine abstinence, she escapes to her queer friends and they decide to organize a party for the Queen (Georgette), together with the Greek’s guys.
During the bennies-party Georgette, disapponted by her beloved Vinnie, shoots up with heroine.
The story ends without telling us what will happen to Georgette, but the title reference lets guess something.
In the movie she died after a car accident (car driven by the same Selby, as a Cameo).

3. And Baby makes three The third story is about a young woman marryng a man who may be (ot not be) the father of her child. Meanwhile her parents try to keep good spirits and mantain the family wedding traditions.

4. Tralala Fourth is Tralala a young drunk prostitute who makes a living propositioning sailors in bars and stealing theri money together with Greek’s guys. After a few days spent in Manatthan with a soldier, her returns to Brooklyn ends in a gang-rape, after a night of heavy drinking- and she is left ruined and bleeding from all orefices.

5. Strike The fifth story talks about Harry Black, a union worker helping run a factory strike.
He is a blustering, inadequate man and a brutal husband. He gains a temporary status and importance during this long strike and uses the union’s money to entertain the young street punks and buy the company of a transexual named Regina.
Really, he’s just using the union’s petty cash to escape from his unhappy marriage, and to explore his taboo gayness.
By the end of the story the strike ends and he finally become conscious that he is doomed to a life even more marginal than the one he’s already been living.

6. Landsend The last section is a series of short stories chronacling 24 hours in one of the housing project in Brooklyn, showing the horrid nature of its residents.

How book and film compare

There had been several attempts to adapt Last Exit to Brooklyn into a film.
The Last Exit screenplay dispenses with Selby’s episodic structure to create a linear narrative. Major changes include the sacking of Black as a union official and the set-piece labour riot that precedes it; Georgette’s death in a car accident rather than from a drug overdose; and Tralala’s ignominious end (the novel has it taking place years later). The character of Spook, the quiet kid with the crush on Tralala, is completely reinvented for the film, and the story around Big Joe (never named in the novel) is built up from few pages to a major part of the screen version.

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