Yes, Of Mice and Men Is Banned!

John Steinbeck’s 1937 novella follows George Milton and Lennie Small, two displaced migrant workers during the Great Depression who dream of owning their own piece of land. Lennie, who has an intellectual disability and enormous physical strength, doesn’t understand his own power. The story, set in Soledad, California, is short enough to read in an afternoon and devastating enough to stay with you for years. It won Steinbeck a spot on the ALA’s most challenged books list for multiple decades running.

The novella has been challenged for just about everything: profanity, racial slurs, “promoting euthanasia,” being “anti-business,” and containing “morbid and depressing themes.” In 2020, Burbank Unified in California removed it from required reading alongside To Kill a Mockingbird after parents objected to racial epithets. Idaho parents in 2015 branded it “neither a quality story nor a page-turner” and demanded its removal. In Brainerd, Minnesota, parents objected to the use of “Jesus Christ” as a curse word and racial slurs. The book has been called “derogatory towards African Americans, women, and the developmentally disabled,” which is an interesting way to describe a book that treats all three groups with more empathy than the society it depicts.

Why You Should Read This

Steinbeck wrote 107 pages about two men who own nothing, and somehow made you feel every single thing they’d lost. George and Lennie’s dream of a small farm with rabbits is pathetically modest, which is exactly what makes it so crushing when it falls apart.

The ending is one of the most debated in American literature. People argue about whether George did the right thing, and they should argue about it. That’s the point. Steinbeck doesn’t tell you what to feel. He just puts the gun in George’s hand and makes you watch.

The book is short. Read it in one sitting if you can. The compression is part of the power. Steinbeck stripped every sentence to the bone, and what’s left is all muscle.