Recommendations
Books Like Of Mice and Men
Best books to read after Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Of Mice and Men is the most economical tragic novella in American literature — the friendship of George and Lennie, the dream of owning a farm, and the world that makes that dream impossible. If the novel's emotional precision and its portrait of the dispossessed moved you, these books share its compassion for people on the margins, its concern with the American Dream and its defeat, and its ability to make simple characters carry immense moral weight.
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The Grapes of Wrath
by John Steinbeck
Steinbeck's masterpiece and the great American novel of the Depression — the Joad family's migration from Oklahoma to California; where Of Mice and Men is intimate and tragic, The Grapes of Wrath is panoramic and angry; the essential next Steinbeck for readers who want to continue
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East of Eden
by John Steinbeck
Steinbeck's most ambitious novel — a multigenerational saga organized around the Cain and Abel story, set in the Salinas Valley; the culmination of his career and the novel he worked hardest on; for readers who want the full scale of what Steinbeck could do beyond the compression of Of Mice and Men
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Cannery Row
by John Steinbeck
Steinbeck's most lyrical and affectionate novel — the marine biologist Doc and the inhabitants of the Monterey waterfront; where Of Mice and Men presents the friendship of the dispossessed as tragically defeated, Cannery Row presents it as celebrated; the other major Steinbeck portrait of people outside the economic system
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To Kill a Mockingbird
by Harper Lee
Lee's novel about a lawyer defending a Black man falsely accused of rape in Depression-era Alabama shares Of Mice and Men's portrait of the South's casual violence against those who cannot defend themselves, its moral outrage at social injustice, and its ability to make that outrage felt through the perspective of a child innocent enough to see the truth clearly
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The Pearl
by John Steinbeck
Steinbeck's parable about a poor Mexican diver who finds a great pearl and discovers that good fortune brings only danger — the companion piece to Of Mice and Men in its use of simple characters and fable structure to make a moral argument about how the world destroys the hopes of the poor
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston
Hurston's novel about Janie Crawford's search for selfhood through three marriages and the Florida community she belongs to — published the same year as Of Mice and Men and the most direct parallel in African American fiction to Steinbeck's portrait of people finding dignity in community and friendship outside the mainstream economic system
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The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy's novel about a father and son traveling through a post-apocalyptic America shares Of Mice and Men's portrait of a protective relationship in which the stronger person carries a burden of care for the more vulnerable — and its question of whether that care is ultimately possible in a world organized against human connection and survival
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A Fine Balance
by Rohinton Mistry
Mistry's novel about four people from different backgrounds who come together in 1970s India during the Emergency — the most direct contemporary parallel to Of Mice and Men in its portrait of a friendship that forms among the dispossessed and is destroyed by the forces that organize society against them; devastating in the same structural way as Steinbeck's novella
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