By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Breakfast’ is a short story by John Steinbeck (1902-68), the shortest piece to be included in his collection The Long Valley. The story first appeared in The Pacific Weekly in 1936 before being reprinted in The Long Valley two years later. Although it’s often classified as a short story, ‘Breakfast’ had its origins in notes Steinbeck made while working on his novel, The Grapes of Wrath.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Snake’ is a short story by the American author John Steinbeck (1902-68), published in The Monterey Beacon in 1935 before being included in Steinbeck’s collection The Long Valley in 1938. The story tells of a young scientist who is at work experimenting with animals in his laboratory when he receives a visit from a mysterious woman who takes an interest in a rattlesnake he has in his lab.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Leader of the People’ is a short story by John Steinbeck (1902-68), the final instalment in the longer work The Red Pony. The story is about the son of a ranch owner who looks forward to a visit from his grandfather, the titular ‘leader of the people’ who enjoys regaling people with tales of his role heroically leading a group of people across America to the west coast.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Flight’ is a 1938 short story by the American writer John Steinbeck, included in his short-story collection The Long Valley, which focuses on the Salinas Valley in California. The story is about a young man from rural California who goes into town and kills a drunken man in a fight; he has to flee to the mountains to avoid being captured and arrested, hence ‘Flight’.
A short introduction to the classic novel Of Mice and Men, in the form of five interesting facts
1. John Steinbeck’s original title for his classic novella, Of Mice and Men, was ‘Something That Happened’. This deliberately nondescript title was intended to remove any sense of individual blame for the events that occur in the novella (something quite different from the ironic intention behind the similarly titled play Stuff Happens, David Hare’s recent play about the Iraq War). Of Mice and Men, as the novel came to be known, focuses on two migrant workers, George (a smart, quick-thinking man) and his friend Lennie (a simpler man, who is mentally disabled but physically big and strong – ironically, his surname is ‘Small’), who work on various farms during the Great Depression in America in the 1930s (Steinbeck was drawing on his own experiences as a ‘bindlestiff’, as he also would for his next novel, The Grapes of Wrath). Joseph Heller, author of Catch 22, was possibly alluding to Steinbeck’s working title when he called one of his own later novels Something Happened.