Some works of Steinbeck played roles as millstones in his career life. In 1935 Steinbeck achieved his first critical success by publishing Tortilla Flat, which won the California Commonwealth Club’s Gold Medal. Steinbeck began to write a series of “California novels”, including In Dubious Battle, Of Mice and Men, and The Grape of Wrath. The Grape of Wrath, as a representative, based on newspaper articles about migrant agricultural workers, is commonly considered his greatest work and awarded prizes including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

1.2 Of Mice and Men

The novella Of Mice and Men, published in 1937 and becoming the bestseller soon after that, tells a story about two friends, George Milton and Lennie Small, who are displaced migrant ranch workers moving from place to place and yearning for a permanent home of their own in California during the Great Depression in the United States. This novel was adapted as a stage play and a Hollywood film. Short as it is, Of Mice and Men has aroused literary critics and reviews from various perspectives and Steinbeck’s 1962 Noble Prize citation called it a “little masterpiece”. Among all these researches, its epic themes are not attached by due importance abroad and home which I will have a further discussion in the section of Literature Review.

1.3 Literature Review

John Steinbeck and his Of Mice and Men have gained wide concerns from literary critics abroad. Research criticisms ranged from extremely praises to bitter sarcasm at first and gradually became more various as the development of the criticism. The methods taken include the annalistic style study, case study, biography criticism, comparative literary criticism, etc.

The serious study of John Steinbeck’s works began after the publication of Tortilla Flat and flourished after his Worker Trilogy, consists of In Dubious Battle, Of Mice and Men, and The Grapes of Wrath. These novels pided critics into mainly two standpoints. Some regarded them as proletarian novels and appreciated that life and social problems were portrayed from the perspective of the working class, while others attacked them for the overturning of the fundament of capitalism. They were on the suspicion of Steinbeck’s agreement on communism. Joseph Fontenrose, a representative of the former group, considered Steinbeck was one of three greatest novelists with William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway in John Steinbeck: An Introduction and Interpretation. Edmund Wilson, a leading authority in literary review that time, censured the animalization of human in Steinbeck’s novel was the biggest failure to portray a character. His statement led to a viewpoint believing that Steinbeck lacked innovation in art and relied much on politics and reality. This kind of view grew into an extremely radical one, which brought the study of Steinbeck into a depressing plight.

Peter Lisca’s The Wide World of John Steinbeck, published in 1958, reversed the tendency on the study of Steinbeck by examining his works from new perspectives of the natural tendencies and biological themes. During the 1960s and the 1970s, myth and archetypal criticism was applied into the study of Steinbeck’s works. William Goldhurst, the author of John Steinbeck’s Parable of the Curse of Cain, compared George and Lennie to Cain and Abel and revealed that what Steinbeck emphasized was on the nobility of his characters’ attempt to pursue the elusive grail of fellowship. The 1990s brought a perspective from feminist criticism on the study. Jean Emery, as a representative of these researchers, discussed the misogyny in the novella according to the depiction of Curley’s Wife, the only woman in the novella who has no name and is looked down by other men. The “supposed” homosexual innuendos in the relationship between George and Lennie were also widely discussed in the 1990s. The dream of George and Lennie was regarded as a reprehensive of California dream by Marsden in 1995.