Which American author wrote 'Of Mice and Men'?

The American author who wrote “Of Mice and Men” was John Steinbeck. Published in 1937, the work follows George Milton and Lennie Small, migrant ranch workers in California during the Great Depression who dream of owning a small farm.

Steinbeck drew on his own teenage experiences working alongside itinerant farm laborers. The book is unusually compact and was designed to function both as a novella and as a script for performance; Steinbeck called the hybrid form a “play-novelette.” Its dramatic structure helped it move quickly from the page to the stage, with a Broadway adaptation opening in 1937.

The title comes from Robert Burns’s poem “To a Mouse,” especially its idea that even carefully made plans can go wrong. Readers sometimes confuse Steinbeck with William Faulkner or Ernest Hemingway because all three wrote major American fiction about hardship, violence, and disillusionment. Steinbeck also wrote “The Grapes of Wrath,” another landmark work about struggling Americans during the Depression.