by Stella Mcintyre

Created on: February 26, 2009

Offensive and vulgar language; profanity; racism; sexism; promoting euthanasia and being anti- business: all accusations leveled at Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men". These are the reasons why it frequently finds itself in the list of top ten most challenged books and those placed on banned book lists.

Winner of both the Pulitzer and Nobel Prize for Literature, Steinbeck said of writing: "I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature."

I wonder how he would view the concerns that his novella raises. It is ironic that so many aspects of human behavior criticized in the novel are the very issues that create the problems for the book. I think it is important to take each charge and look at the evidence a sound reading of the novel provides.

There always will be concerns about teaching a novel at High School when most of the characters eschew racist attitudes. I have taught "Of Mice and Men" to countless teenagers in my sixteen years as a teacher of English. There will always be at least one child who feels the characters endorse and condone their own prejudice. I find that Steinbeck's response to this through Crooks in Chapter Four is a sufficient rebuttal.

Although the characters in the book are not well educated; "shown" not "told" to us through their dialogue, Crooks' description of his abject loneliness and its effects is one of the most compelling arguments against racial segregation I have ever read and the most articulate speech in the book. Many of the characters have hopes, dreams and aspirations. Crooks' situation is shown to be so dreadful that his "paradise" on earth is in his past; his childhood on his parents' chicken farm with his brothers uncomplicated by racism. Crooks' is an Adam ejected from his own personal Eden, forced to live in perpetual isolation by the narrow minded attitudes of men who are presented as his intellectual inferiors.

Steinbeck intended the ranch to act as a microcosm of American society and the characters to represent groups within that society. He said of himself: "This monster of a land, this mightiest of nations, this spawn of the future, turns out to be the macrocosm of microcosm me."

Crooks represents the African American sector of American society. His response to his segregation is intended to show the results of discrimination. Crooks becomes a separatist, if he isn't allowed in the bunkhouse then the men are not allowed in his room. Like

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