You will now read two extracts from the fi rst chapter of Of Mice and Men, written by John Steinbeck in 1937. This novel follows two migrant workers in California during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Thousands of people struggled to fi nd work and were living in poverty. Many people, like the story’s two protagonists, Lennie and George, had to migrate (move from one region to another) in order to fi nd work.
Author Bio.
John Steinbeck is an American author who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. He dropped out of college and worked as a manual labourer before achieving success as a writer. He wrote over thirty novels, his most famous being Of Mice and Men and the Pulitzer Prize winner The Grapes of Wrath. He received all of these awards for his ‘realistic and imaginative writings’.
California is a place very often depicted in films and TV programmes. Here are some of the words Steinbeck uses to describe this landscape, in particular the Salinas River and Galiban Mountains, in Of Mice and Men. Try to use them in sentences to describe what you think this landscape of Steinbeck’s California looks like.
deep golden
twinkling sandy
rocky crisp
to track and evaluate the development of relationships throughout a novel
What I will learn:
to recognise how a character is developed
to revise the creation of setting
Extract 1 from Of Mice and Men BY JOHN STEINBECK
A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green. The water is warm too, for it has slipped twinkling over the yellow sands in the sunlight before reaching the narrow pool. On one side of the river the golden foothill slopes curve up to the strong and rocky Gabilan Mountains, but on the valley side the water
