The ranch in Of Mice and Men is a very hostile environment.
The ranch in ‘Of Mice and Men’ is a very hostile environment. What do
we learn about life during the Great Depression from John Steinbeck’s
novel?
In this essay I aim to describe how life was like on a ranch during
the great depression in John Steinbeck’s novel ‘Of Mice and Men’.
Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902 in Salinas, California. This
is where the book is set, in the Salinas valley. The books exact
location is in Soledad near the Salinas Valley. From research I found
out that Steinbeck chose the title ‘Of Mice and Men’ because of a poem
which inspired him by Robert Burns. Steinbeck wrote ‘Of Mice and Men’
hoping that future generations would realise the difficulties millions
of Americans like himself were facing.
The great depression was the cause of all these difficulties. It all
started because of the Wall Street crash (American stock exchange),
this made many businesses go bankrupt and were forced to close down.
Many banks also became bankrupt losing everyone’s savings, so people
were left with no money. Over 15 million Americans became jobless
during the great depression and many were left homeless because they
could not afford to keep the payments of the houses they had rented
out. Some people were left with almost nothing and committed suicide
because of this. The great depression really was a depressing time for
most Americans. The depression caused people to become migrant
workers, they had to leave home to find work. Families were split up
and many men and women became very lonely. We learn a lot about life
on the ranch during the great depression from Steinbeck’s novel.
Life on the ranch was a very unfriendly place....
... middle of paper ...
...men for her to socialise with.
Life on the ranch was also unpleasant because of the stressful
conditions that the ranch hands had to go through. The ranch hands
worked 6 day long weeks and had to work 11 hours a day in Steinbeck’s
book. Life was stressful for a few conditions of being lonely, being
away from family and having to move from place to place to try and
find work.
From reading Steinbeck’s book ‘Of Mice and Men’, I have learnt a lot
about how life was like during the great depression. I have also
learnt how hard life was on the ranch and what caused the
difficulties. ‘Of Mice and Men’ has been an interesting read and it is
best book I have read from the period of time when this book was
written in. I now understand why the depression had such a big effect
on the quality of life in America and why life on the ranch was a
hostile environment.
McCarthy’s plot is built around a teenage boy, John Grady, who has great passion for a cowboy life. At the age of seventeen he begins to depict himself as a unique individual who is ambitious to fulfill his dream life – the life of free will, under the sun and starlit nights. Unfortunately, his ambition is at odds with the societal etiquettes. He initiates his adventurous life in his homeland when he futilely endeavors to seize his grandfather’s legacy - the ranch. John Grady fails to appreciate a naked truth that, society plays a big role in his life than he could have possibly imagined. His own mother is the first one to strive to dictate his life. “Anyway you’re sixteen years old, you can’t run the ranch…you are being ridiculers. You have to go to school” she said, wiping out any hopes of him owning the ranch (p.15). Undoubtedly Grady is being restrained to explore his dreams, as the world around him intuitively assumes that he ought to tag along the c...
Overall, life as a married farmer in the 1930s was not a time anyone would chose to relive. They were low on money, as most were during the Great Depression, and did not have access to much technology in their home. Everyday life required long hours of hard manual labor and no luxuries of electricity or plumbing. They were segregated from the populous city, and contact was limited because of lack of roads and technology. Although the 1930s were a tough time for most, farmers had it rough because not only could they not make a profit, they lacked technology, and were isolated and secluded from the rest of the country.
would not like to live there. The hostile ness is built up well in the
The poem describes workers to be “Killing the overtime ‘cause the dream is your life, / Refusing to take holidays or go home to your spouse, / But for many the overtime comes, ‘cause the work is not done. / Deadlines to be met. So you continue to dream like a war vet, / Having flashbacks to make you shiver and scream” (Jones, stanza 7, lines 2-6). Jones reinforces that overworking for an incentive of money does not give one a sense of gratification, and it also distracts them from the values that should matter more to them than anything else. Both Kohn and Jones have a similar approach to showing the reader the effect that overworking can have on a person, and how it will change their values in life, causing unhappiness. Many students go through school dispirited and do not join various clubs and activities for their own enjoyment. A friend of Kohn’s who was also a high school guidance counsellor had a student with ‘…amazing grade and board scores. It remained only to knock out a dazzling essay on his college applications that would clinch the sale. “Why don’t we start with some books that
The story is told through the eyes of seven year old Luke Chandler. Luke lives with his parents and grandparents on their rented farmland in the lowlands of Arkansas. It takes place during the harvest season for cotton in 1952. Like other cotton growers, these were hard times for the Chandlers. Their simple lives reached their zenith each year with the task of picking cotton. It’s more than any family can complete by themselves. In order to harvest the crops and get paid, the Chandlers must find cotton pickers to help get the crops to the cotton gin. In order to persevere, they must depend on others. They find two sets of migrant farm workers to assist them with their efforts: the Mexicans, and the Spruills - a family from the Arkansas hills that pick cotton for others each year. In reading the book, the reader learns quickly that l...
John Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902 in Salinas, California. He had a pretty average childhood with a supportive family and a decent education. While growing up his mother, Olive Hamilton, was a major factor in his education, since she was a schoolteacher and made it her duty to educate him. His mother most likely was the reason he developed a love of reading and literature and ended up going to Stanford. In his child there were only two major events that affected his writing. These were when he worked on a ranch with migrant workers, and when his father’s business failed and the family was temporarily thrust into poverty. These two events most likely sparked his interest in the poor lives of the migrant workers. His experiences on the ranch taught him about the harsh and impoverished lives of the migrant workers and his experience of being in poverty enabled him to understand what life is like when one is poor, as the migrant workers were. This understanding inspired some of his most famous writings such as: Of Mice and Men, In Dubious Battle and The Grapes of Wrath. These experiences also allowed him to add a sense of realism to the stories. After graduating from his public high school in 1919 Steinbeck went to Stanford. He went there for 5 years before dropping out without a degree and moving to New York. The following years were highly tumultuous for Steinbeck and he held many odd jobs while trying to get his writing published. In 1935 he finally got his first big break when his critically acclaimed novel, Tortilla Flats, was published. After this he became quite successful and well known although the skill in his writing seems to fall after WWII. After researching his life I decided to focus on using his most famous n...
...to Americans: if their prospects in the East were poor, then they could perhaps start over in the West as a farmer, rancher, or even miner. The frontier was also romanticized not only for its various opportunities but also for its greatly diverse landscape, seen in the work of different art schools, like the “Rocky Mountain School” and Hudson River School, and the literature of the Transcendentalists or those celebrating the cowboy. However, for all of this economic possibility and artistic growth, there was political turmoil that arose with the question of slavery in the West as seen with the Compromise of 1850 and Kansas-Nebraska Act. As Frederick Jackson Turner wrote in his paper “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” to the American Historical Association, “the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”
1910-1917, another war rages on in the confines of a family ranch and in the lives of the
by John Steinbeck, there are many characters who are considered to be outcasts. An outcast is a person who does not fit in. Through many differences on the ranch, different people are put into the category of being an outcast. Because of their differences, Crooks, Curley’s wife, and Lennie are all outcasts on the ranch.
John Steinbeck is a brilliant storyteller capable of crafting such vibrant and captivating literary works that one can effortlessly exit their own life and enter another. John Steinbeck has a passion for divulging the flaws of human nature and he is not afraid to write about the raw and tragic misfortune that plagued the lives of people like the Okies in the Grapes of Wrath and residents of Cannery Row. He was also a brilliant commentator who contributed brilliant opinions on the political and social systems in our world. In heart wrenching words he tells us the story of peoples lives, which were full of love, corruption, faith and growth. However in the novels of Cannery Row and The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck specifically attempts to convey the thematic elements of socialism, survival and the role of women to blatantly present the lifestyle of down trodden migrant workers and the diverse ecosystem of prostitutes, marine biologists, store owners and drunks in a way that is unapologetic and mentally stimulating.
I. John Steinbeck used his personal experiences as a laborer to write many of his novels like Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath.
Turner, Fredrick Jackson. The Significance of the Frontier in American History. Thesis. N.p, 1893. Print.
In the interior, the desire to control house herds - a critical resource in California was the reason for American trappers, horse thieves, Mexican soldiers and rancheros congregate. Sutter’s connection to an Indian woman (p. 39)
The story “Ranch Girl,” by Maile Meloy, is darkly symbolic and full of disobliging introspection. The main character struggles to find meaning in an uneven and arbitrary existence. Via willful ignorance or merely the tribulations of a woman less fortunate than she herself believes, her internal conflict is unveiled as illusion. Yet she remains confined. While her ultimate goal is the modest life with her wanted cowboy, she is perpetually unable to reach her dreams, and unable to change them. The starkness of her self-wrought prison lends a certain sad ambiance to her world, reflected through characters that paint the setting. Her dreams flutter and settle unfulfilled, like dry dust, stirred by the story’s cattle.
John Steinbeck does not portray migrant farm worker life accurately in Of Mice and Men. Housing, daily wages, and social interaction were very different in reality. This paper will demonstrate those differences by comparing the fictional work of Steinbeck to his non-fictional account of the time, The Harvest Gypsies.