Of Mice and Men Deluxe

John Steinbeck

May 2011 · Penguin

About this ebook

John Steinbeck’s Nobel Prize–winning tale of commitment, loneliness, hope, and loss—now a Deluxe eBook enhanced with exclusive content, including an interview with James Earl Jones, for the ultimate educational experience.

An intimate portrait of two men who cherish the slim bond between them and the dream they share in a world marred by petty tyranny, misunderstanding, jealousy, and callousness. Clinging to each other in their loneliness and alienation, George and his simple-minded friend Lennie dream, as drifters will, of a place to call their own—a couple of acres and a few pigs, chickens, and rabbits back in Hill Country where land is cheap. But after they come to work on a ranch in the fertile Salinas Valley of California, their hopes, like “the best laid schemes o’mice an’ men,” begin to go awry.

A rarity in American letters, Of Mice and Men achieved remarkable success as a novel, a Broadway play, and two acclaimed films.

Now enhanced with additional content, Of Mice and Men Deluxe allows the reader to delve into one of Steinbeck’s most beloved novels as never before.

Of Mice and Men Deluxe includes the following:
 

• An introduction and suggested further reading by Susan Shillinglaw, a professor of English at San José State University and Scholar-in-Residence at the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas
• A video slideshow of historic 1930s Dust Bowl images that captures the period of several Steinbeck works by American documentary photographer Dorothea Lange
• The poem “To a Mouse, On Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough, November 1785” by Robert Burns (the original source of Steinbeck’s title Of Mice and Men)
• Stills from the 1992 film adaptation starring Gary Sinise and John Malkovich
• The 1962 Nobel Banquet Speech by John Steinbeck
• An exclusive Q&A with renowned composer and librettist Carlisle Floyd on Of Mice and Men as an American classic opera
• An exclusive audio interview with award-winning actor James Earl Jones on his stage performances in Of Mice and Men
• And much more

Ratings and reviews

I like Steinbeck. This one's not amazing or anything, just OK. It's short enough to read in a single evening or two. I wouldn't pay the $10.99 but if you can find it for about 2 dollars I say go for it!

Very goodbook .It is a page turner from the word go.You, wont be disappointed !

One of the greatest books written by the Master! My favorite of all time!

About the author

John Steinbeck, born in Salinas, California, in 1902, grew up in a fertile agricultural valley, about twenty-five miles from the Pacific Coast. Both the valley and the coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. In 1919 he went to Stanford University, where he intermittently enrolled in literature and writing courses until he left in 1925 without taking a degree. During the next five years he supported himself as a laborer and journalist in New York City, all the time working on his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929).After marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, he published two California books,The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and To a God Unknown (1933), and worked on short stories later collected in The Long Valley (1938). Popular success and financial security came only with Tortilla Flat (1935), stories about Monterey’s paisanos. A ceaseless experimenter throughout his career, Steinbeck changed courses regularly. Three powerful novels of the late 1930s focused on the California laboring class: In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and the book considered by many his finest, The Grapes of Wrath (1939). The Grapes of Wrath won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1939.

Early in the 1940s, Steinbeck became a filmmaker with The Forgotten Village(1941) and a serious student of marine biology with Sea of Cortez (1941). He devoted his services to the war, writing Bombs Away (1942) and the controversial play-novelette The Moon is Down (1942). Cannery Row (1945), The Wayward Bus (1948), another experimental drama, Burning Bright (1950), and The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951) preceded publication of the monumental East of Eden (1952), an ambitious saga of the Salinas Valley and his own family’s history.

The last decades of his life were spent in New York City and Sag Harbor with his third wife, with whom he traveled widely. Later books include Sweet Thursday(1954), The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication (1957), Once There Was a War (1958), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962), America and Americans (1966), and the posthumously published Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters (1969),Viva Zapata! (1975), The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976), and Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath (1989).
Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962, and, in 1964, he was presented with the United States Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Steinbeck died in New York in 1968. Today, more than thirty years after his death, he remains one of America's greatest writers and cultural figures.