On this day back in 1937, readers were introduced to George Milton and Lennie Small, two displaced migrant ranch workers moving from place to place in California searching for jobs during the Great Depression. The writer was a relatively new one, just gaining public attention with his previous novel, Tortilla Flat, but still a few years away from the Pulitzer Prize he’d win for another of his novels, The Grapes of Wrath.

The man was John Steinbeck, of course. And the book he released eighty-nine years ago today?

Of Mice and Men.

Steinbeck was born and raised in the Salinas Valley, and he based the novella on his own experiences as a teenager working alongside migrant farm workers harvesting wheat and sugar beets in the 1910s after dropping out of Stanford. Lennie, the strong but mentally disabled protagonist, was even modeled after a real person Steinbeck met during his work. He later said of the inspiration: “Lennie was a real person. He’s in an insane asylum in California right now. I worked alongside him for many weeks. He didn’t kill a girl. He killed a ranch foreman. Got sore because the boss had fired his pal and stuck a pitchfork right through his stomach. I hate to tell you how many times. I saw him do it. We couldn’t stop him until it was too late.”

Steinbeck wrote Of Mice and Men while living in a house in Monte Sereno, California with his first wife Carol Henning, whom he married in 1930. It had been a gift to the couple from Steinbeck’s father, who provided it to them (as well as a small salary) while his son struggled to break into the publishing world. Despite having been a good student and working as a journalist in New York City for several years, Steinbeck’s first three novels, Cup of Gold (1929), The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and To a God Unknown (1933), had all flopped. His last novel, 1935’s Tortilla Flat, had proved moderately successful, and Steinbeck was eager to built on his growing momentum.

It would not be easy going.

Legend has it that Steinbeck’s dog ate the manuscript of Of Mice and Men at a time when drafts were written by hand or composed on typewriters. There was no “back up” and Steinbeck, understandably, suffered considerable frustration. In a 1936 letter, he wrote: “My setter pup, left alone one night, made confetti of about half of my book. Two months [sic] work to do over again. It sets me back. There was no other draft. I was pretty mad, but the poor little fellow may have been acting critically.” Not only that, but when Steinbeck did finally manage to complete the book (again) and sent it off to his agents, they didn’t like it, complaining about the novel’s “narrow scope.”

Nevertheless, the book went to press.

Originally titled “Something That Happened,” Steinbeck changed it after reading a poem called “To A Mouse,” written by 18th-century Scottish poet Robert Burns. It tells of the narrator’s regret after inadvertently destroying a mouse nest while plowing a field and contains the famous line: “The best-laid plans of mice and men/Often go wrong.” The haunting title, along with the book’s poignant exploration of grief, loneliness, oppression, abuse, and fate, struck an instant chord with readers.

Of Mice and Men received the best critical and commercial reception of any of Steinbeck’s books to date.

But even that didn’t come without caveats. Since it’s release, the book has been proposed for censorship fifty-four times, with critics citing problematic content such as “promoting euthanasia”, “condoning racial slurs”, being “anti-business”, containing profanity, and generally containing “vulgar”, “offensive language”, and containing racial stereotypes. In fact, Of Mice and Men still appears on the American Library Association’s list of the Top 100 Banned/Challenged Books: 2000–2009 (number five) and Top 100 Banned/Challenged Books: 2010–2019 (number 28).