“An' we got fren's”: Interracialism in John Steinbeck and William ...

“An’ we got fren’s”:
Interracialism in John Steinbeck and William Attaway’s
Migration Novels of the Depression Era
Erin Royston
History of American Civilization
Dissertation Colloquium
April 20, 2006
Advisors:
Professor John Stauffer
Professor Werner Sollors
Professor Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham

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Erin Royston
History of American Civilization
Dissertation Colloquium
April 2006
DRAFT
“An’ we got fren’s”: Interracialism in
John Steinbeck and William Attaway’s Migration Novels of the Depression Era
When William Attaway’s first novel, Let Me Breathe Thunder, was published in 1939,
critics seized upon its resemblance to John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. Stanley Young,
writing for the New York Times, heralded the promise of the “authentic young artist,” and made a
favorable comparison to Steinbeck: “His tough and tender story of two young box-car wanderers
and their love for a little Mexican waif who rides the reefers with them has some of the
emotional quality and force of the familiar relationship of George and Lennie in ‘Of Mice and
Men.’ We see two rootless men faced by hard reality yet still susceptible to dreams and
affection.” 1 Fred T. Marsh, writing for the New York Herald Tribune Books, drew the
comparison between Attaway and Steinbeck with more reserve, observing “the tale, in more
respects than one, bears a superficial resemblance to ‘Of Mice and Men’” and is “imitative of the
imitators who have trailed in the wake of Hemingway, James M. Cain and John Steinbeck.” 2
Attaway’s career shadowed Steinbeck’s over a four year period in the late Depression era: at age
twenty five, he published Let Me Breathe Thunder (1939), a novel about migrant workers two
years after Steinbeck’s similar novella Of Mice and Men (1937), and he published a longer novel
about a migrant family, Blood on the Forge (1941), two years after Steinbeck’s epic of the Okie
migration made its sensation on the American scene. These novels have striking parallels in
plot, theme, and form that contemporary critics recognized, but subsequent scholars have not
pursued. 3 Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1937) and Attaway’s Let Me Breathe Thunder (1939),
1 Stanley Young, “Tough and Tender,” New York Times (25 June 1939): BR4.
2 Fred T. Marsh, untitled review of Let Me Breathe Thunder by William Attaway, New York Herald Tribune Books
(25 June 1939): 10.
3 Not only have these texts not been compared before, but some critics have even warned us against comparing these
kinds of texts. Literary critic Jerry Ward, Jr., for example, notes that Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
“invited comparison” with Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), yet he challenges the grounds for comparison
because these authors emerged from different political traditions. In The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition,
Richard Bell gives a brief mention of Attaway’s first novel, mentioning Steinbeck’s influence, and then provides an
extended analysis of Attaway’s second book, Blood on the Forge, and its debt to Richard Wright. Jerry W. Ward,
Jr., “Everybody’s protest novel: the era of Richard Wright” in The Cambridge Companion to the African American

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both set in the Pacific Northwest, depict the intimate friendships of migrant agricultural workers,
who are caught between the freedom of the road and the sorrow of social alienation. These
books also resemble each other in terms of form: they are sentimental novellas written for
popular audiences, with a heavy use of dialect, and staged so as to be adapted easily to theater or
film. 4 Two years after the publication of each novella, Steinbeck and Attaway shifted from
writing about single, male, migrant workers to writing about migrant families. Steinbeck’s The
Grapes of Wrath (1939) and Attaway’s Blood on the Forge (1941) are epic tales of the
migrations of sharecropper families from the South to California’s corporate farms and in
Pennsylvania’s steel mills.
Why compare these texts, one dismissed by academic critics for many of the reasons
popular audiences love it, the other discounted generations ago by critics and general readers
alike? Of all the dramatic events in the Depression era—the Stock Market crash, the Scottsboro
case, violent strikes, and grassroots protests —none captured the public imagination like stories
of migration and migratory labor. The symbolic power of the migrant figure derived from its
reference to American origin myths—narratives of freedom, individualism, and progress that
seemed inadequate in the context of the Depression. Looking at the connections between
Steinbeck and Attaway’s migration narratives not only gives us a fuller picture of the cultural
icon of the migrant in the 1930s, but it also brings to light a dialogue between black and white
Novel, edited by Maryemma Graham (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 177. Bell, The Afro-American Novel
and Its Tradition (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), p. 168.
4 Many writers of the 1930s turned to theater as a medium to express social concerns because it fostered grassroots
cultural and political dialogue more effectively than the novel. According to Laura Browder, the “Living
Newspaper” plays of the Federal Theater Project provided a collective radicalizing experience for audiences.
Attaway wrote his first play, Carnival, while a student at the University of Illinois in 1936. He then joined his sister
Ruth, a Broadway actress, in New York, where he began Let Me Breathe Thunder. Attaway was acting in the
traveling production of Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman’s You Can’t Take It with You when he learned that his
manuscript had been accepted by Doubleday. The critic for the The Saturday Review found fault with Attaway for
“project[ing] too much of his dramatic experience…into his writing,” by creating scenes that “are plainly stagy, seen
as tableaus in terms of groups and gestures, or heard as dramatic speeches with an eye towards effective curtains and
black-outs.” Attaway may have intended the novella to be performed, just as Steinbeck wrote Of Mice and Men
with an eye towards theater adaptation. In a letter to his agents written while he worked on the novella, Steinbeck
explained his experimentation with form that would facilitate the adaptation of the novella into a Broadway play and
three feature films: “The work I am doing now is neither a novel nor a play but it is a kind of playable novel.
Written in novel form but so scened and set that it can be played as it stands.” Laura Browder, Rousing the Nation:
Radical Culture in Depression America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), pp. 11-12; Samuel B.
Garren, “William Attaway,” Dictionary of Literary Biography 76 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1988), pp. 3-7; No
Author, untitled review of Let Me Breathe Thunder by William Attaway The Saturday Review (1 July 1939): 20;
Steinbeck quoted in Susan Shillinglaw, introduction, Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck (New York: Penguin
Books, 1994), pp. xv-xvi.

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writers about American mythology of migration, as well as the social transformations propelled
by the southern diaspora. 5
Both Steinbeck and Attaway imagined the migrant as the consummate social outcast.
They endowed this figure with tragic power by linking it to American mythology: the twentieth
century southern migrant was the antithesis of the frontier hero, and the reincarnation of the
fugitive slave. To different degrees, both writers attempted to address issues of racism and the
experience of African Americans within the larger rubric of the social and economic alienation.
Steinbeck and Attaway wrote during a transitional period in American race relations, between
the “nadir” of the post-Reconstruction period and the emergence of Civil Rights during and after
World War II. 6 In the mid to late 1930s, the Jim Crow code of segregation was firmly
entrenched in the South, and in the North, white workers (many of them southern migrants
themselves) reaped the benefits of racial discrimination in housing and employment. 7 Cast out
of society, divorced from tradition, and uprooted from the land itself, the figure of the migrant
gave Steinbeck and Attaway the opportunity to experiment with interracialism during a time
when real life offered few examples.
These icons of migration in the Depression era—Steinbeck’s Lennie & George and the
Joad family, and Attaway’s Step & Ed and the Moss brothers—refer to American myths in their
quest for the “promised land,” blending the frontier story and the fugitive slave narrative. In
these mythic quests of the Depression era, the migrants do not find the “land of mild and honey”;
Steinbeck and Attaway shatter this optimism in the promise of America. In their efforts to cope
with the failed promises of migration, their characters make tentative steps towards interracial
alliances. While interracialism germinates in the frontier space occupied by migrant workers in
Of Mice and Men and Let Me Breathe Thunder, it deteriorates when the migrants enter society,
marked by the institutions of the family, the labor union, or the government camp. Interracialism
completely disappears from Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, which has a white family at its
5 James Gregory has brought the term “southern diaspora” into wider currency in his study of southern out-migration
in the twentieth century, the first comprehensive social history of both black and white migrations. The Southern
Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (Chapel Hill: The
University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
6 See Philip A. Klinkner and Rogers M. Smith, The Unsteady March: The Rise and Decline of Racial Equality in
America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), chapters 4 and 5.
7 See James N. Gregory, The Southern Diaspora, chapter 3.

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center. 8 In Of Mice and Men, Let Me Breathe Thunder, and Blood On the Forge, we see the
convergence of African American and southern white migrations, patterns of movement that
most contemporary observers and subsequent historians viewed as separate streams. 9 While the
most famous and enduring story of migration during the Depression, The Grapes of Wrath,
diverts those streams once again by focusing on a white family and eliding the racial diversity of
California’s migrant labor force, its reliance on the form of the slave narrative suggests the
inseparability of black and white migration narratives in the late 1930s.
Freedom and Domesticity in Of Mice and Men and Let Me Breath Thunder
While Steinbeck and Attaway’s most famous migration novels feature migrant families,
reflecting the changing image of homelessness in the New Deal era, both writers began with a
another literary figure on the move—the “hobo,” or migrant worker, who was usually, single,
male, and white. While the romantic figure of the working-class wanderer dates back to
Whitman and the “tramp” literature of the nineteenth century, the Industrial Workers of the
World are responsible for creating a highly politicized hobo folklore in the 1910s, referred to as
“hobohemia” by contemporary commentators. 10 Relying heavily on the symbolism of the
frontier, the hobo as folk hero became, as historian Todd DePastino puts it, the “manly white
pioneer of the industrial West.” By the end of World War I, however, the hobo subculture was
8 The final version of this chapter will include an analysis of Blood on the Forge and The Grapes of Wrath. In its
effort to challenge the triumphalist tradition of white migration narratives, particularly the frontier mythology, The
Grapes of Wrath adopts several key genre conventions of the African American Great Migration narrative. Both
Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Attaway’s Blood on the Forge trace their roots to the fugitive slave narrative,
which offers an alternative model to the Anglo-American story of migration, conquest, and ultimate success.
Attaway, on the other hand, revises Steinbeck’s racially-exclusive migration narrative by depicting interracial
friendship in Blood On the Forge. Notably, Attaway’s novel depicts the migration of three brothers rather than an
entire family; interracial friendship is possible in the all-male environments of the bunkhouse and industrial work
place.
9 James Gregory’s The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Changed
America is the first study of migration to cover both races over the entire twentieth century. While recognizing that
the African American and southern white migrations were essentially distinct phenomena, Gregory explores several
key links between them: the pervasive cultural image of the migrant as “maladjusted;” the southern influence on
popular music; the spread of evangelical religion, and the rise of racial liberalism and working-class conservatism in
urban politics. While Gregory’s book emphasizes the contrasts between African American and southern white
experiences, it also illuminates the relationships between them.
10 The term “hobohemia” first appeared in a short story by Sinclair Lewis in The Saturday Evening Post in 1917, and
was popularized by Nels Anderson, a former hobo who launched the study of the culture of transient men at the
University of Chicago in the early 1920s. The term captures the counter-cultural aspects of the hobo lifestyle that
appealed to middle-class observers at the time: the rejection of domesticity and wage labor, the non-acquisitive
ethic, the mutuality of the “hobo jungles,” and the libertine excesses of the “main stem.” Depastino, p. 61.

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in decline, and by the 1930s, migrant families and foreign-born workers had replaced the white,
male hoboes. 11 Writing as the sun was setting on “hobohemia,” Steinbeck and Attaway
employed this stock working-class hero to critique corporate capitalism and social inequalities,
yet struggled to reconcile this figure with new understandings of race and gender. 12 Hardly the
“manly white pioneer[s] of the industrial West,” Steinbeck and Attaway’s hoboes are racialized
social outcasts who cross boundaries of gender and sexuality in their attempts to find nurture and
kinship on their lonely road.
The men who celebrated “hobohemia” in the early decades of the twentieth century, both
popular writers and hoboes themselves, articulated their concepts of freedom through the
language of work and domesticity: living outside of society, hoboes did not abide by middleclass
morality, feminine manners, or the routines of “wage slavery.” These migratory workers
and transient unemployed lived beyond both “spheres” of bourgeois culture, free from the
constraints of the feminine home as well as the masculine workplace. George, the more
masculine of the pair of hoboes in Of Mice and Men, conveys this sense of freedom when he
laments that caring for Lennie deprives him of the freedom of the hobo lifestyle: “God a’mighty,
if I was alone I could live so easy. I could go get a job an’ work, an’ no trouble. No mess at all,
and when the end of the month come I could take my fifty bucks and go into town and get
whatever I want. Why I could stay in a cat house all night. I could eat any place I want, hotel or
any place, and order any damn thing I could thing of” (12). George’s concept of freedom hinges
on mobility, which liberates him from both routine wage labor and family obligations. He can
“go get a job an’ work” whenever he feels the need, and have his choice of women to fulfill
11 For a comprehensive study of hoboes in history and literature, see Todd DePastino, Citizen Hobo: How a Century
of Homelessness Shaped America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Quote p. 97. The term “hobo”
emerged at the turn of the century from itinerant workers themselves, who distinguished themselves from other
homeless types (5).
12 Both writers’ interest in the hobo figure as a vehicle for critiquing bourgeois values stemmed from their
ambivalence about their own middle class status, and both derived the material for their migrant novels from their
youthful experiences “hoboing.” Steinbeck dropped out of Stanford and worked on ranches owned by Spreckles
Sugar as a straw boss, bench chemist, and manual laborer. Between 1920 and 1923, he spent much of his time
hitchhiking, living either alone or in the hobo camps that dotted the California valleys. William Attaway was born
in Greenville, Mississippi in 1911 to a physician and a school teacher. His family migrated to Chicago when
William was ten years old. Attaway had the opportunity to attend an academic high school and university, but chose
to attend a vocational high school, and enrolled in the University of Illinois with reluctance. After the death of his
father, he dropped out of the university and took to the road, hopping freights, working odd jobs, and organizing
labor unions. Attaway’s foray into the hobo lifestyle counters racial exclusiveness of this working-class figure, a
project he would continue in his first novel. Jackson J. Benson, The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer (New
York: The Viking Press, 1984), pp. 40-41, 46-47; Samuel B. Garren, “William Attaway,” Dictionary of Literary
Biography 76 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1988), pp. 3-7.

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sexual and domestic services. Similarly, Ed, the narrator of Let Me Breathe Thunder, identifies
himself and his traveling companion as “just wandering handymen who never thought of work as
long as there was a dollar to throw away in some city” (8). His more masculine partner, Step,
brags about his non-committal relationships with women. To him, “one dame ain’t no more’n
another.…They all was give the same thing by God” (32). Free from factory and domestic
routines, these characters define themselves as consumers of leisure rather than producers of
labor, yet in a manner distinctly oppositional to the bourgeois realm of consumption, which is
located in the home, and in which material goods mark social status. Denied opportunities for
home-ownership or economic stability within a system of industrial agriculture that depended on
a cheap and dispensable labor force, these workers squander their meager wages on drink,
gambling, and commercial sex—pastimes antithetical to bourgeois morality. However, Lennie
& George and Step & Ed are not the carefree “knights of the road” that their boasting suggests;
they recreate family bonds in their relationships with each other, and in Lennie & George’s case,
in their dream of domestic tranquility.
Of necessity, hoboes developed alternatives to the roles ordinarily fulfilled by women.
Prostitutes and female owners of boarding houses provided sexual and domestic services, and
homosexual relations often supplanted heterosexual relations in the all-male environment. The
extent of what sociologists in the 1920s termed “hobosexuality” is unknown, but Chicago
sociologist Nels Anderson, a former hobo himself, insisted that it was widespread. 13
Sociologists and hobo writers described these relationships as occurring between an older
predator and a vulnerable youth, called the “jocker” and the “punk.” Even into the early
twentieth century, manhood was not defined through heterosexual relations, but through
dominance in all-male environments, so these “jockers” were not considered deviant or
“queer.” 14 By the 1930s, however, the increasingly managerial workplace no longer served as an
13 DePastino, pp. 83-85; David T. Courtwright, Violent Land: Single Men and Social Disorder from the Frontier to
the Inner City (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 183. For an extensive analysis of how men revised
gender roles and sexual practices in all-male environment of mining communities in California in the 1850s, see
Susan Lee Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York: W. W. Norton &
Co., 2000).
14 DePastino, p. 90. There is an extensive literature on male love, both sexual and fraternal, in the nineteenth
century and the bifurcation of sexual categories in the twentieth. However, few scholars have recognized the
continuity of homosocial intimacy in the twentieth century, such as is evident in the work of Steinbeck and Attaway.
See: George Chauncy, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940
(New York: Basic Books, 1994); John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality
in America (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1988), pp. 171-235; Kevin White, The First Sexual Revolution:

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adequate “proving ground” for manhood, and the massive unemployment rates through
American men into a gender crisis. The fear of homosexuality and “effeminate” boys
escalated. 15 The sentimental appeal of Steinbeck and Attaway’s hoboes lies in the tenderness of
their friendships, yet both pairs struggle to delineate their emotional and physical sexual
boundaries. In these relationships, the “feminine” partner desires more closeness than the
“masculine,” who takes great pains to deflect the other’s affections, and to hide their intimacy
from others. In the first scene of Of Mice and Men, Lennie initiates physical closeness by
crawling “slowly and cautiously around the fire until he was close to George,” but George
reinforces a boundary, pretending “to be unaware of Lennie so close beside him” (13). Similarly,
while waiting for a freight in the cold and rain with a Mexican child they had picked up along the
way, Ed acknowledges that “it would have been better for all of us to have snuggled together in a
heap, but Step and me were funny about things like that” (29). Traveling in intimate pairs yet
disguising their affections for each other, Lennie & George and Step & Ed practice the modified
gender relations of the hobo subculture within the less tolerant context of the 1930s.
Lennie & George and Step & Ed go beyond finding practical alternatives to the
“reproductive labor” typically provided by women within the conventional family structure: they
reconstitute bourgeois gender roles in their own relationships. 16 Each pair has spousal qualities.
Lennie and Ed play the feminine roles, deferring to George and Step in making decisions,
seeking physical intimacy, and nurturing children and animals. Only George and Step seek out
The Emergence of Male Heterosexuality in Modern America (New York: New York University Press, 1993);
Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: The Free Press, 1996); E. Anthony
Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in American Masculinity From the Revolution to the Modern Era
(New York: Basic Books, 1993); Mark C. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1989); Donald Yacovone, “‘Surpassing the Love of Women’: Victorian Manhood and the
Language of Fraternal Love” in A Shared Experience: Men, Women, and the History of Gender edited by Laura
McCall and Donald Yacovone (New York: New York University Press, 1998), pp. 195-221.
15 Kimmel, pp. 192-217; Chauncy, pp. 331-354.
16 The distinction between “productive” and “reproductive” labor comes from feminist thought of the 1970s and 80s,
which attempted to place paid labor and unpaid labor (usually performed by women) on equal footing. This
distinction, however, risks reinforcing the “separation of spheres” that emerged with industrialization, and its
attending categories of public and private, production and consumption, work and home. See Johnson, pp. 101-103,
especially 103n7. The “ideal” marriage shifted significantly in the early decades of the twentieth century, replacing
the Victorian model based on patriarchal authority and the ideology of domesticity with the notion of
“companionate” marriage. While falling short of the egalitarian aims of some feminists, companionate marriage
allowed for greater female sexual expression, the expansion of female activity outside the home, and the expansion
of male contributions within the home. See Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1987), pp. 145-74; Margaret Marsh, “Suburban Men and Masculine Domesticity, 1870-1915” in
Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America edited by Mark C. Carnes and Clyde
Griffin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 111-127.

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sex with women: Lennie stays behind when “the boys” go to the brothel, and Ed joins Step on
“double dates” with reluctance. By feminizing Lennie and Ed, Steinbeck and Attaway transform
these masculine worlds into a domestic realm, making their lifestyles seem to resemble the
marital arrangements of their middle-class readership. 17 In narrating Let Me Breathe Thunder,
Ed uses imagery of the home to describe their life on the road. When the threesome hop a freight
to escape the rain and cold, the empty refrigerator car becomes a domestic tableau:
“Six fellers in a ‘reefer,’ clicking along in the night. We sat shoulder to shoulder, our
damp clothes steaming. It was pleasant to be in out of the weather; it made me drowsy.
The next thing I remember was waking with my head on Step’s shoulder, the kid half
across my lap. Someone had lit the stump of a candle and all eyes were strung to the
flame. The air was thick with human steam and smoke. It all smelled good” (30).
In this passage, Ed transforms the boxcar—emblematic of mobility and masculine freedom—into
a male domestic space. The boxcar provides shelter from the elements, recalling the feminine
home of sentimental novels. The air, “thick with human steam and smoke,” is not rank as one
would imagine, but rather has the coziness and pleasant aroma of a kitchen. Ed renders the
physical arrangement of their bodies into a harmonious triangle, the feminine resting against the
masculine, the child connecting them. While Step celebrates his freedom from domesticity, Ed
reformulates the domestic realm in the boxcar. Similarly, George describes his agrarian idyll
with domestic imagery: “Sure, we’d have a little house an’ a room to ourself. Little iron stove,
an’ in the winter we’d keep a fire goin’ in it” (56-57). Like the boxcar, George and Lennie’s
house provides shelter from the cold: “And when it rains in the winter, we’ll just say the hell
17 Step & Ed’s adoption of a Mexican child and Lennie’s child-like qualities augment this sense of domesticity,
allowing these novellas to operate in the sentimental mode. As John Seelye notes, children in the sentimental novels
of Harte, Dickens, and Stowe elicit feminine sympathy from male characters, which pulls on the heartstrings of
middle-class readers. The rhetorical function of sentimentality, according to Seelye, “is essential to protest fiction,
which is to redeem marginal people by bringing them into the domestic center. John Seelye, “Come Back to the
Boxcar, Leslie Honey: Or, Don’t Cry For Me, Madonna, Just Pass the Milk: Steinbeck and Sentimentality” in
Beyond Boundaries: Rereading John Steinbeck edited by Susan Shillinglaw and Kevin Hearle (Tuscaloosa:
Univeristy of Alabama Press, 2002), pp. 16-17. There is a vast scholarly literature on sentimentalism that focuses
mainly on the nineteenth century. Critics have divided into two camps when it comes the relationship between
sentimentalism and social protest. The first, represented by critics such as Ann Douglas, see sentimentalism as a
“easy out” of political responsibility, allowing readers to ease their conscience through emoting rather than taking
action. Critics more sympathetic to the sentimental mode, such as Jane Tompkins, see sentimentalism as a great
motivator for political action. Tompkins also links the critical distaste for sentimentalism to a literary establishment
that uses an elite, masculine model. See Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American
Fiction 1790-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American
Culture (New York: Knoft, 1977). For an overview of this debate and a selection of key essays on sentimental
literature, see Shirley Samuels (ed.), The Culture of Sentiment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

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with goin’ to work, and we’ll build up a fire in the stove and set around it an’ listen to the rain
comin’ down on the roof…” (16). Lennie & George’s dream, recited as an incantation in the
beginning of the novella, is centered upon the idea of a shared home rather than the “couple of
acres” surrounding it. While pairs of migrants respond to the absence of women creating an
alternative domestic space to the female-centered home, this romantic ideal is more powerful in
Steinbeck’s novella. Moreover, the relationship between Lennie & George has an emotional
power lacking in Step & Ed’s friendship. Lennie & George are committed to each other and to
their dream, as reflected by the sequence of their oft-repeated incantation, which begins with an
affirmation of their friendship and ends with a description of their dream farm. Attaway’s
characters, on the other hand, lack a teleological mindset, and their commitment to each other
also seems “easy come, easy go.”
In order to “masculinize” their relationships, these hobo characters substitute violence for
affection. Step & Ed temper their intimacy with acts of masculine toughness. With Step leaning
against him on the porch steps one evening, Ed nudges him with his knees, and delights when
Step reciprocates this physical gesture by “answering the pressure by a movement of his
shoulders” (73). Although Ed desires physical contact with Step, he must relieve both their
anxieties about masculinity and sexuality through an act of playful violence: “Because I felt like
that and was glad of the pressure against by knees, I leaned down and slapped Step against the
side of the head” (73). In the final scenes of Of Mice and Men, violence is a proxy for affection.
Mentally disabled and enormously strong, Lennie inadvertently kills the boss’s wife while trying
to caress (at her invitation) her golden hair. This affection-turned-violence becomes affectionas-violence
when George kills Lennie to spare him from the lynch mob. Knowing that the posse
is close at hand, George lulls Lennie by reciting their dream of agrarian independence. In the
final moments before Lennie’s death, however, George indicates through hesitation, and through
pronoun usage (“you” rather than “we”), that Lennie will, in death, achieve the dream on his
own:
“Go on, George. When we gonna do it?”
“Gonna do it soon.”
“Me an’ you.”
“You…an’ me. Ever’body gonna be nice to you. Ain’t gonna be no more
trouble. Nobody gonna hurt nobody nor steal from ‘em.
Lennie said, “I though you was mad at me George.”

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“No,” said George. “No, Lennie. I ain’t mad. I never been mad, an’ I ain’t now.
That’s a thing I want ya to know.”
The voices came close now. George raised the gun and listened to the voices
(103).
The novella begins and ends in the same setting, with the same incantation of their dream.
However, in this final scene, the incantation ends with a rite of reconciliation absent in the
opening scene. Rather than seal this reconciliation with a kiss or sign of affection, George
consummates it by shooting his beloved Lennie in the head.
As a single male unattached to family, job, or place, the hobo figure held different
meanings for reformers, writers, artists, and radicals over the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. For some, he was a symptom of the social order breaking down, and for others an
emblem of working-class freedom and proletarian consciousness. 18 Created during a time when
the idea of self-making—epitomized by Gatsby a decade earlier—had lost is relevance,
Steinbeck and Attaway’s hoboes reflect the value of mutualism that was present in nineteenthcentury
ethos of individualism, but which the acquisitiveness of the twentieth century had
overshadowed. Steinbeck, and Attaway to a lesser extent, use the family as a model for this
mutualism, reconfigured for the all-male environment of the boxcar and bunkhouse. The
characters’ search for new kinds of communities, based on this ethic of mutuality, will also foster
experiments with interracialism in the novellas. However, these alternative social arrangements
leave women in the lurch. Coded as bourgeois, women cut against working-class producerism
and masculine freedom. And hyper-sexualized, women lure men across the boundaries of class
and race, and eventually destroy the fragile interracial communities. The following close reading
of Of Mice and Men will focus on race in the novella through the character of Crooks, and
explore these links between social outcasts, interracialism, and gender.
18 Depastino, xx.

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“An’ live off the fatta the lan’”:
The Agrarian Dream and Interracial Friendship in Of Mice and Men
‘Someday—we’re gonna get the jack together and we’re gonna have a little house and a
couple of acres an’ a cow and some pigs and—‘
‘An’ live off the fatta the lan’,’ Lennie shouted. ‘An’ have rabbits. Go on, George!
Tell about what we’re gonna have in the garden and about the rabbits in the cages and
about the rain in the winter and the stove, and how thick the cream is on the milk like you
can hardly cut it. Tell about that, George’ (15).
This passage, so familiar as to be parodied by schoolchildren for generations, taps into an
American mythology whose roots extend into the seventeenth century. The early colonists
imagined the North American continent as a New World where they would regain paradise
through the tillage of an untamed wilderness. Jefferson instilled the emerging identity of the new
republic with image of the yeoman farmer, and this figure achieved mythical status when the
industrialization of the mid-nineteenth century incontrovertibly altered the rural character of the
nation. An emblem of civic virtue, the image of the yeoman farmer inspired the populist
movement of the late nineteenth century. Endorsed by the Populists as the Democratic
presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan glorified “the farmer who goes forth in the
morning and toils all day” in his “Cross of Gold” speech of 1896. The nostalgia for America’s
rural past only intensified in the 1930s, when bread lines swelled in the cities and mass culture
eroded regional identities. Like many cultural productions of the 1930s, Steinbeck’s works
feature “populist outsiders”—farmers, migrant workers, paisanos, and prostitutes—who cut
against middle-class morality and the American mythos of progress and prosperity, yet are
sympathetic characters with whom general readers can identify. 19 Their pursuit of the American
dream usually takes the form of an Edenic quest; none demonstrate this trope better than Lennie
& George and their ritualistic incantation over the dream farm.
However, Steinbeck’s characters never reach the promised land. Of Mice and Men opens
with Lennie & George in a pastoral setting, having fled the trouble into which the mentallydisabled
Lennie inevitably got himself by acting on his impulse to touch soft, pretty things.
According to their ritual, George & Lennie reconcile by affirming their commitment to each
19 The term “populist outsider” comes from Benjamin Filene, “ ‘Our Singing Country’: John and Alan Lomax,
Leadbelly, and the Construction of an American Past,” American Quarterly 43 (December 1991): 611-612. Quoted
in DePastino, p. 211.

12
other, and their commitment to their dream of owning “a coupla acres.” This commitment
distinguishes Lennie & George from the other the other workers they encounter the next day,
who blow away their money on drink, cards, and women. Lennie & George meet their doom one
evening, shortly after Lennie expands their dream to include Candy, the aging and crippled
swamper, and Crooks, the black stable hand with a disfigured back. This hopefulness of this
newfound kinship crumbles when Lennie, in his innocence, pets the golden locks of the boss’s
wife, and ends up killing her. To spare his friend from the wrath of the lynch mob, George
shoots him, in the same spot where they had imagined their agrarian idyll in the opening pages.
In showing time and again how these Edenic quests inevitably end in failure, Steinbeck reveals
his social vision, as critic Susan Shillinglaw relates: “For Steinbeck, the saga of continental
conquest in broad sweep is a tale of Edenic expectation and consequent disillusionment; and that
inevitable fall means, in part, that character and (more insistently) reader glimpse what so often
taints the dream: racial and ethnic suppression and violence.” 20 Steinbeck’s doomed dreamers
challenge the American myth of progress and prosperity, and expose the racial and economic
inequalities that this myth obscures. Lennie & George’s dream is not only a futile attempt to
regain a lost paradise, however. Their journey is also a vital search for a new kind of community
free from the barriers of race and class, and free from the dominion of the powerful over the
powerless. 21 Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men gives us a vision of such a community within the
limits of permissible dissent in mainstream American culture. 22
20 Susan Shillinglaw, “Steinbeck and Ethnicity,” in After the Grapes of Wrath: Essays on John Steinbeck edited by
Donald V. Coers, Paul D. Ruffin, and Robert J. DeMott (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1995), p. 43.
21 Many critics have interpreted the friendship between George and Lennie as a validation of the effort to “live
fraternally” or practice a “mutual commitment,” despite the failure of their dream. William Goldhurst, “Of Mice
and Men: John Steinbeck’s Parable of the Curse of Cain” in The Short Novels of John Steinbeck: Critical Essays
with a Checklist to Steinbeck Criticism edited by Jackson J. Benson (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990), p. 59;
Louis Owens, “Of Mice and Men: The Dream of Commitment,” in John Steinbeck: Modern Critical Views, pp. 145-
150, quote p. 147. Owens posits an optimistic reading of the novella based on this friendship: “the influence of
George and Lennie’s mutual commitment, and of their dream, has for an instant made these crippled sons of Cain
their brother’s keepers and broken the grip of loneliness and solitude in which they exist.”
22 Even much more radical writers of the 1930s shied away from racial boundary crossing. James Farrell, for
example, edited out interracial sex in the Studs Lonigan trilogy. Nelson Algren addressed the problem of
institutionalized racism to class protest in Sombody in Boots (1935), but the force of this racism prevented interracial
alliances in the novel. In The Disinherited (1935), however, Jack Conroy offers sympathetic images of black
workers, and a key turning point in the novel is when the white protagonist defends a black worker, initiating
collective action that launches him into leadership in the labor movement. Steinbeck is the only writer who
imagines blacks and whites sharing domestic space. See Ian Peddie, “Poles Apart? Ethnicity, Race, Class, and
Nelson Algren” MFS Modern Fictional Studies 47.1 (2001), pp. 123-24.

13
Of Mice and Men offers a glimpse of an interracial community when Crooks, the crippled
“negro stable buck,” imagines himself as part of Lennie & George’s agrarian dream. 23 However,
as a cultural outsider in physical and racial terms, Crooks initially penetrates the illusion of
Lennie & George’s dream farm. Crooks’ literacy, his experience as a black man, and his
geographic stability give him perspective and clarity of vision, allowing him to see through the
myths that enchant his fellow workers. Crooks “reads a lot,” owning “a tattered dictionary and a
mauled copy of the California civil code for 1905” and other books in his room (20, 66). While
Crooks has a predilection for “dirty books and magazines” like the other ranch hands, the civil
code and dictionary, and the fact that he owns his books, suggests a higher form of literacy than
that found in the bunkhouse where the white workers stay. Through reading, Crooks learns to
recognize the cultural myths behind the workers’ dreams of land ownership. Their dreams are
fed by the providential vision of the nineteenth century romanticism that serves only to
disillusion its twentieth-century beholders:
‘I seen hunderds of men come by on the road an’ on the ranches, with their bindles on
their back an’ that same damn thing in their heads. Hunderds of them. They come, an’
they quit an’ go on; an’ every damn one of ‘em’s got a little piece of land in his head.
An’ never a God damn one of ‘em ever gets it. Just like heaven. Ever’body wants a little
piece of lan’. I read plenty of books out here. Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody
gets no land. It’s jus’ in their head’ (72).
Crooks’ pragmatism derives from two main sources: his outsider perspective deflects the power
of a myth that serves the interests of the dominant society, and his literacy allows him to identify
and dispel cultural myths. A third factor is his geographical stability. A native-born Californian
who lives on the ranch, Crooks has a rootedness lacking in the migrants “with their bindles on
23 While William Goldhurst deems the incorporation of Crooks into the workers’ fraternity as peak of hopefulness in
the novella, few others even mention his presence in the story. In her explication of the novel geared for college
teachers and students, for example, Charlotte Hedella describes the “brotherhood of George, Lennie, and Candy as
they plan for their escape from the ranch the dream farm,” omitting Crooks from this fraternity. Most critics refer to
Lennie & George’s dream, sometimes including Candy, and rarely including Crooks. In a brief socio-political
reading of the novella within a larger article about fascism, Louis Owens claims that Crooks connects capitalism to
the slave-holding economy, but does not examine his character more fully. Goldhurst, p. 54; Hadella, “Steinbeck’s
Of Mice and Men (1937)” in A New Study Guide to Steinbeck’s Major Works, With Critical Explications ed.
Tetsumaro Hayashi (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1993), p. 149; Louis Owens, “Deadly Kids, Stinking
Dogs, and Heroes: The Best Laid Plans in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men,” Western American Literature 37 (3) (Fall
2002), p. 325.

14
their backs” and dreams in their heads. Crooks is a voice of reason at this moment—however
much the audience may root for Lennie & George’s dream.
In dismissing this dream, Crooks exhibits a non-teleological mindset that Steinbeck
advocates in many of his fictional and non-fictional writings. 24 Throughout Steinbeck’s work,
characters who strive towards a dream end up disillusioned, while non-teleological thinkers
either live a carefree existence, such as the paisanos of Tortilla Flat, or become prophetic seers,
such as Jim Casy in The Grapes of Wrath. 25 In this case, Crooks’ non-teleological outlook
allows him to transcend society’s myths and to achieve a true understanding of the world around
him. 26 Crooks’ exalted role as the non-teleological thinker, however, is short-lived. Lured by
the power of the agrarian ideal and by the promise of integration, Crooks departs from his
vantage point and begins to believe in the dream farm. What follows is a glimpse of an
interracial utopia, a “kinship of powerlessness” in which the workers’ shared status as social
outcasts enable them to identify with one another across racial lines. 27 Crooks’ entry into this
fraternity is the high point of the novella. However, that he must abandon his non-teleological
viewpoint in order to do so raises a problem with Steinbeck’s interracial vision. In associating
interracialism with the telos of the dream farm, does the novella imply that the possibility of an
integrated society is illusory and doomed—just another Edenic quest? I would argue,
conversely, that there is a distinction between the illusion of the dream farm and the reality of
friendship. In standing up against Curley’s wife, for example, Candy declares, “we gotta house
and chickens an’ fruit trees an’ a place a hunderd time prettier than this,”—claims that have zero
basis in truth. However, he finishes with a statement of the simple fact: “An’ we got fren’s,
that’s what we got” (77). As critic Louis Owens puts it, the “theme of commitment” endures,
24 See Benson, “John Steinbeck: Novelist as Scientist” in John Steinbeck: Modern Critical Views ed. Harold Bloom
(New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987), pp. 103-123; Benson, True Adventures, p. 242-244; Owens, “Deadly
Kids, Stinking Dogs, and Heroes,” p. 324; Richard Astro, John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts: the Shaping of a
Novelist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1973).
25 Benson, “Novelist as Scientist,” p. 115.
26 Benson makes a similar observation about Mack and the Boys of Cannery Row. These cultural outsiders can see
through society’s myths, yet the “trouble starts when they depart from their disillusionment,” ibid., p. 115. Susan
Shillinglaw observes that “primitive” people often think non-teleologically in Steinbeck’s work, which raises
problems for his treatment of race and ethnicity. However his “primitive” characters are sometimes white.
Shillinglaw, “Steinbeck and Ethnicity,” p. 48.
27 Charlotte Hadella borrows this phrase from Cletus E. Daniels, historian of California’s migrant workers, but her
interpretation does not include Crooks in this fraternity. Charlotte Hadella, “Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1937)”
in A New Study Guide to Steinbeck’s Major Works, With Critical Explications ed. Tetsumaro Hayashi (Metuchen,
NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1993), p. 148. Quote from Daniel, Bitter Harvest: A History of California Farmworkers
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. 64.

15
giving a silver lining to the dark cloud of the novella’s ending. 28 When Lennie dies, the dream
farm dies with him, but friendship continues on explicitly in George’s new relationship with
Slim, and perhaps, in the newfound alliance between Candy and Crooks. What Steinbeck wants
us to see is that human relationships, flawed as they may be, are as close as we will get to Eden.
The outsider status of Candy, Lennie, and Crooks makes this interracial alliance possible.
When the men go off to “blow their stake” in the brothels and bars of the town, they leave behind
“the weak ones,” as Curley’s wife derisively tags them, “a nigger an’ a dum-dum and a lousy ol’
sheep”: Crooks, crippled and black; Lennie, physically powerful but mentally delayed; and
Candy, aging and missing a hand (75, 77). In several ways, Crooks is Lennie’s double: both are
said to have attained their disabilities by being kicked by horses, and both are inconsequential
participants in the conversations of white men of sound mind:
Crooks laughed again. ‘A guy can talk to you an’ be sure you won’t go
blabbin’….George knows what he’s about. Jus’ talks, an’ you don’t understand nothing.”
He leaned forward excitedly. ‘This is just a nigger talkin’, an’ a busted-back nigger. So
it don’t mean nothing, see? You couldn’t remember it anyways (69).
Crooks recognizes the link between Lennie, who cannot comprehend, and himself, to whom no
one will listen. Both characters live in a communication void. The parallel between Lennie and
Crooks also emerges in the tragic ending of the novella. When Curley’s wife threatens to get
Crooks’ lynched, she relies on the familiar formula of the black rapist and white female victim. 29
The next day, this formula is figuratively enacted, with Lennie standing in for the black rapist,
and his petting standing in for rape. In keeping with the formula, a lynch mob pursues Lennie
(George executes him out of mercy before the mob can reach him). Curley’s wife’s threat to
Crooks, therefore, prefigures the rape-lynching sequence involving Lennie, connecting these
characters through the trope of lynching.
28 In opposition to a cadre of critics who read Of Mice and Men as thoroughly pessimistic, Owens argues that
Steinbeck represents Lennie & George’s friendship as the achievement of the Edenic dream in the real world: “the
influence of George and Lennie’s mutual commitment, and of their dream, has for an instant made these crippled
sons of Cain their brother’s keepers and broken the grip of loneliness and solitude in which they exist.” Owens, “The
Dream of Commitment,” pp. 145-150, quote p. 147.
29 Stories about the taboo against sexual relations between black men and white women permeate African American
oral tradition, and the myth of the purity and sexual vulnerability of southern white women undergirds the brutality
of lynching. Although only 34% of lynchings between 1882 and 1903 were due to rape accusations, most black
writers focus on rape as the impetus for lynching. See Trudier Harris, Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary
Lynching and Burning Rituals (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), pp. 7, 24-28.

16
While these social outcasts lack power, they have a modicum of freedom in living apart
from society. This freedom allows them to defy social boundaries. Steeped in natural
philosophy and biological theory, Steinbeck first focuses on the artificiality of racial and social
prejudice, and then considers the moral implications of these social constructions. In other
words, his anti-racism derives from his scientific world-view, which then informs his sense of
social justice. Steinbeck sees racism and elitism as human constructions that, like teleological
thinking, prevent people from living in harmony with nature and one another. 30 Steinbeck
emphasizes the artificiality of racial and class barriers through the symbolism of thresholds in the
novella. When the boss enters the bunkhouse, the narrator emphasizes his crossing of the
threshold and his markers of class status: “The wooden latch raised again and the door opened.
A little stocky man stood in the open doorway….On his head was a soiled brown Stetson hat,
and he wore high-heeled boots and spurs to prove he was not a laboring man” (21). Framing the
boss and allowing the working-class characters and the reader to observe his clothes, the door
symbolizes class boundaries. The door acts as a framing device when Curley’s wife enters the
bunkhouse. Her entrance catches the men’s attention suddenly, “for the rectangle of sunshine in
the doorway was cut off. A girl was standing there and looking in” (31). Like his father and
wife, Curley enters the bunkhouse suddenly, interrupting the workers’ conversation “at that
moment.” The artificial barrier of the doorway delineates workers’ space from bosses’ space,
and male space from female space.
Similarly, an open doorway also mediates the interactions between Lennie and Crooks.
Just the narrator began the previous chapter by describing the space of the bunkhouse, this
chapter begins with a lengthy description of Crooks’ room, ending with the “open door that let
into the barn” and the “small electric globe” that “threw a meager yellow light,” not unlike the
ray of sunshine illuminating the bunkhouse (66). Seeking companionship with Crooks, “Lennie
appeared in the open doorways and stood there looking in, his big shoulders nearly filling the
opening” (66). Although Crooks attempts to enforce the racial barrier, reminding Lennie that “I
ain’t wanted in the bunk house, and you ain’t wanted in my room,” Lennie cannot comprehend
the social meaning of the doorway. As soon as their conversation resumed, “he advanced a step
into the room, then remembered and backed to the door again” (67). As a symbol of man in his
30 Jackson Benson argues whereas Steinbeck takes comfort in the non-teleological notion that there is no grand
design to nature, nineteenth-century naturalism leads to emptiness, godlessness, and despair. Benson, “Novelist as
Scientist,” p. 121.

17
natural state, Lennie exposes the artificiality of racial distinctions through his complete
incomprehension. When Candy, the maimed “old swamper,” happens upon them, he also “stood
in the doorway,” standing on the threshold not only between black and white, but its inverse in
light and dark, “looking blindly into the lighted room” (73). Cognizant of the code of
segregation, Candy “made no attempt to enter” (73). Eventually crossing the threshold,
however, Candy reflects upon the absurdity of segregation: “ ‘I been here a long time,’ he said.
‘An’ Crooks been here a long time. This is the first time I ever been in his room’” (73). For
Candy, the racial boundary was invisible—taken for granted—until crossed. In representing
racial and class distinctions as artificial barriers that hinders natural harmony, Steinbeck
challenges biological explanations of racial difference. Ironically, his impetus for challenging
racism is itself rooted in scientific theory.
The racial integration of Crook’s room is paramount for understanding why he abandons
his non-teleological view and begins to believe in the dream. The presence of white men in his
room reminds Crooks of his childhood, when “the white kids come to play at our place, an’
sometimes I went to play with them, and some of them was pretty nice” (69). Although Crooks
learned the dangers of racial mixing in his coming of age, he struggled to “conceal his pleasure
with anger” when Lennie and Candy join him in his room (73). While Crooks’ desire for the
company of whites reveals more about Steinbeck’s assumptions about race than it does about
attitudes among black agricultural workers in the 1930s, the context of segregation is important
for understanding this scene in the novella. When Candy discloses to Crooks that they have
money in the bank to purchase land, Crooks’ skepticism diminishes, and he abandons his
position that “you guys is just kiddin’ yourself” (74). Although this sequence may suggest that
Crooks responded pragmatically to Candy’s revelation about the money, Crooks’ ambivalence
about segregation presents an alternative explanation for his change of heart. Ultimately, their
gathering together in his room—the crossing of the racial threshold—allows Crooks to see
himself sharing in this dream, and to seek entry into their community: “…If you…guys would
want a hand to work for nothing—just his keep, why I’d come and lend a hand. I ain’t so
crippled I can’t work like a son-of-a-bitch if I want to” (75). Crooks does not enter into the deal
as an equal, but as a hired hand, calling into question Steinbeck’s ability to imagine an
egalitarian interracial community. While Crooks is a minor character in the novella, his central

18
role in its most hopeful moment is an assault on the color line that seems indelible in American
culture in the 1930s.
Another reason for Crooks’ change of heart is that despite his outsider perspective, he is
not immune to the power of the agrarian myth. Crooks identifies himself as a native westerner,
declaring, “ ‘I ain’t a southern Negro…I was born right here in California’” (72?). This
distinction distances Crooks from the legacy of slavery, sharecropping, and dispossession, and
supplants it with a very different legacy of freedom and abundance. Triggered by the profound
loneliness of living in complete racial isolation, Crooks looks nostalgically back on his agrarian
past:
‘I remember when I was a little kid on my old man’s chicken ranch. Had two brothers.
They was always near me, always there. Used to sleep right in the same room, right in
the same bed—all three. Had a strawberry patch. Had an alfalfa patch. Used to turn the
chickens out in the alfalfa on a sunny morning. My brothers’d set on a fence rail an’
watch ‘em—white chickens they was’ (72).
Crooks’ description weaves together rural and familial images, the ranch and his brothers, the
strawberry and alfalfa patches and their shared bed, the chickens and his brothers on a fence rail.
Crooks’ nostalgic portrait resembles Lennie & George’s utopian dream. His own populist
inclinations make him susceptible to Candy’s “picture” of “a little bit of land, not much. Jus’
som’thin’ that was his. Somethin’ he could live on and there couldn’t nobody throw him off of
it” (74). Candy’s desire for land stems from his own dispossession, and his grievances resemble
the condition of slavery: “I planted crops for damn near ever’body in the state, but they wasn’t
my crops, and when I harvested ‘em, it wasn’t none of my harvest” (74). In contrast to its
manifestations elsewhere, populism is not racially exclusive in this novella. 31 When Candy
31 The tension between democracy and racial exclusion is at the heart of American populism, as well as
historiographical debates about populist movements in the United States. The dominant historiographical view
dismisses 30s populism on both political and aesthetic grounds, claiming that it obscured the proletarian class
struggle and racial conflict with a unified notion of American people, and that it is middle-brow and sentimental.
Warren Susman is a major proponent of this consensus in Culture as History: The Transformation of American
Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), pp. 150-229; See also Lawrence W. Levine,
The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993),
pp. 206-319; Richard H. Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the
Depression Years (New York: Harper and Row, 1973). Covering an earlier period, Steven Hahn argues that
populism and racial equality have been at odds historically in A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in
the Rural South From Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
2003). Scholars such as Michael Kazin and Michael Denning are slightly more sympathetic to the populist tradition
in American politics and culture. Kazin argues that the CIO employed an inclusive populist rhetoric to transform a

19
invokes the language of populism against Curley’s wife, he includes Crooks in his vision of
solidarity and land ownership.
The violent price of the crossing of the color line, however, is made crushingly clear
when Curley’s wife abruptly intrudes upon the threesome during this pivotal moment asking,
“Any you boys seen Curley?” (75). Immediately following Crooks’ halting appeal, her
impertinent question dashes the fragile interracial utopia by calling to mind the harsh reality of
race relations and their gendered dimensions. White Americans had developed an elaborate
justification for racial segregation and the oppression of African Americans that derived its
emotional force through the taboo of interracial sex between black men and white women.
While interracial sex is hardly at issue in Of Mice of Men, the appearance of Curley’s hypersexualized
wife just as the three men envision integration taps into the cruel power of this racial
taboo. Standing “still in the doorway,” her presence reestablishes the social boundaries that the
men had crossed.
Crooks and Candy respond differently to the sudden intrusion of Curley’s wife, yet both
are empowered by the force of the agrarian dream and their newfound friendship. Candy stands
up to Curley’s wife, defending himself and his friends against her insults:
‘I had enough,’ he said angrily. ‘You ain’t wanted here. We told you you ain’t. An’ I
tell ya, you got floozy idears about what us guys amounts to. You ain’t got sense enough
in that chicken head to even see that we ain’t stiffs….You don’t know that we got our
own ranch to go to, an’ our own house. We ain’t got to stay here. We gotta house and
chickens an’ fruit trees an’ a place a hunderd time prettier than this. An’ we got fren’s,
that’s what we got. Maybe there was a time when we was scared of getting’ canned, but
we ain’t no more. We got our own lan’, and it’s ours, an’ we c’n go to it’ (77).
reputedly narrow workers’ interest group to “the core of a grander ‘people’s movement’” that had a remarkably and
ambitious agenda for advancing social-democracy. Similarly, Denning argues that the meaning of “America” was
hardly unified in the 1930s, as critics of thirties populism assume, but rather a battleground for “the trajectory of US
history, the meaning of race, ethnicity, and region in the United States, and the relation between ethnic nationalism,
Americanism, and internationalism.” In other words, while populism in some contexts has tended toward nativism,
Denning shows writers in the 1930s employed populist rhetoric while expanding their definitions of “the people.”
Writers from a wide range of racial, ethnic, and regional backgrounds participated in this debate by writing
migration narratives, which, according to Denning, “stand at the heart of the Popular Front aesthetic.” Denning
recognizes, however, that the intellectual and aesthetic consequences of populism has few defenders, and does not
count himself among them. Denning distinguishes between populist politics and populist rhetoric, claiming that the
Popular Front employed populist rhetoric, but that its politics were not populist. Rather, he argues, its politics were
based on militant industrial unionism, ethnic pluralism, and anit-fascism. With this splitting of hairs, Denning
makes a concession to the historiographical consensus, which is markedly anti-populist. Denning, The Cultural
Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1997), pp. 129-132; Michael
Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 137-38.

20
Candy’s powerfully asserts his selfhood in the statement, “I had enough,” but then turns to his
solidarity with Lennie and Crooks by shifting to the first-person plural, “You ain’t wanted here.
We told you you ain’t,” which he sustains throughout the rest of the passage. Candy’s speech
reveals multiple elements in the radical transformation of his sense of self. Disparaging the
“floozy idears” and “chicken head” of Curley’s wife, Candy affirms his manhood by
characterizing the threatening woman as a stupid sex object. He then intertwines the Edenic
picture of their farm—a wonderful dream that seems just within their grasp—with their right to
mobility: “we ain’t gotta stay here. We gotta house and chickens an’ fruit trees an’ a place a
hundred time prettier than this” (59). Punctuating this declaration of manhood, Candy affirms
his solidarity with Lennie and Crooks: “An’ we got fren’s, that’s what we got.” Candy is willing
to cross the color line in order to resist class hierarchies, using his friendship with Crooks and
Lennie to defend against Curley’s wife’s insults to the “bunch of bindle stiffs” (77). Candy
ends his speech by asserting their ownership of land, repeating the possessive pronouns and
modifiers “our,” “own,” and “ours,” and reiterating their freedom of movement: “an’ we c’n go
to it.” Through this act of defiance, Candy crafts a new sense of self that relies on misogyny,
mobility, friendship, and land ownership.
Lacking Candy’s racial privilege, Crooks has less faith in either the friendship or the
agrarian ideal. In the face of Curley’s wife’s insults, Crooks “had retired into the terrible
protective dignity of the negro,” steeling against her racism and its assault on his identity. He
reverses his retreat, however, in response to Candy’ impassioned affirmation of their friendship
and their shared dream, and in response to his impulse to protect Lennie. When Curley’s wife
makes a pass at the guileless and unsuspecting Lennie—a sexual invitation that put his life in
danger—“Crooks stood up from his bunk and faced her.” With no other recourse, Crooks
mustered the meager defense that segregation provided him: “You got no rights comin’ in a
colored man’s room. You got no rights messing around in here at all. Now you jus’ get out, an’
get out quick” (78). In standing up to the femme fatale, Curley and Crooks derive their strength
from their solidarity and the power of their dream.
Tragically, Curley’s wife gets the upper hand in this argument, annihilating their fragile
opposition by invoking the specter of lynching. In response to Crooks’ assertion of his rights,
Curley’s wife counters with her own racial privilege: “Well, you keep your place then, Nigger. I

21
could get you strung up on a tree so easy it ain’t even funny” (79). Armed with the most abusive
of racial epithets, Curley’s wife’s violent threat is all the more damaging for its pervasiveness—
she has a cruel power over Crooks’ life, and everyone knows it. Ironically, each threat stems
from the character’s subordinate status in relation to white men: while Crooks appropriates the
racist code of segregation for his own uses, Curley’s wife appropriates the sexist code of chivalry
for hers. Unfortunately, the modicum of power that Crooks derives from segregation is no match
for the racial privilege of a woman who doesn’t even have a name of her own. In reaction to her
threat of lynching, “Crooks had reduced himself to nothing. There was no personality, no ego—
nothing to arouse either like or dislike. He said, ‘Yes, ma’am,’ and his voice was toneless” (79).
Her violent power robs Crooks of his very selfhood, revealing the psychological trauma that goes
hand-in-hand with the physical violence of racism. His tone significantly sobered, Candy
attempts to defend Crooks, vowing quietly, “if you was to do that, we’d tell…we’d tell about you
framin’ Crooks” (79). Candy repeats his strategy of tapping into the strength of their interracial
solidarity, but she easily deflates him: “ ‘Tell an’ be damned,’ she cried. ‘Nobody’d listen to
you, an’ you know it. Nobody’d listen to you’” (79). The same voicelessness that brought these
outcasts together, allowing them to cross racial boundaries, makes them vulnerable. Their
solidarity, dignity, and power only exist in a liminal space, free from the rules of society and the
manipulations of the strong.
As a piece of literature that was immensely popular in its own time and continues to be a
staple of high school English curricula, Of Mice and Men deals with race in a way that is
palatable to readers. That it stays within the range of permissible dissent (by reinforcing notions
of black servility and by affirming notions of middle-class domesticity) may actually account for
its canonical status and enduring popularity, unlike the writing of William Attaway. There are
several factors that mitigate the novella’s interracial vision. First, the powerlessness of the
characters, while allowing them to cross racial boundaries in the first place, also eradicates their
social influence. Second, the association between race and disability dampens the radical
potential of interracialism in the novella, as does Crook’s servility: he does not enter into the
community as an equal. Third, the moment of interracial solidarity is so brief in the novella, and
Crooks is such a relatively minor character, that few critics have deemed it worthy of mention.
And finally, the all-male nature of the interracial community avoids issues of interracial sex.
The power of this social taboo becomes clear, however, in the role of Curley’s wife. Steinbeck

22
deals with the thorny issue of interracial sex and heterosexual communities by demonizing the
white female characters. As will be the case in Attaway’s Let Me Breathe Thunder, a white
woman is to blame for both the lynching of men—black and white—and the dissolution of the
interracial communities.
“Being outside of patterns”: Mobility and the Multicultural West in Let Me Breathe Thunder
While Of Mice and Men was a success on Broadway, in Hollywood, and in bookstores
worldwide, William Attaway’s Let Me Breathe Thunder barely made a splash when it first
appeared in 1939. Attaway’s story resembles Steinbeck’s acclaimed novella in its basic concept:
two white migratory workers wander across the Northwest, their commitment to each other
exceptional in the lonely world of hoboes, meeting a tragic end somehow linked to the
indiscretions of a sexy blonde. While Attaway adopted the trope of the migrant worker as
consummate social outcast, he confronted more directly—and dangerously—the issues of race,
sexuality, and social inequality. Let Me Breathe Thunder revolves around three interconnected
plots. First is the story of a makeshift family: Step & Ed pick up a Mexican child in a boxcar,
intending to steal his money. “Hi Boy” grows on them, however; the brutal Step becomes
especially bonded to the child after he stabs himself with a dirty fork to prove his toughness.
The threesome meets an independent apple farmer named Sampson, and they take up his offer to
work on his ranch in the Yakima valley. Hi Boy thrives in this secure environment, speaking
Spanish with Sampson and revealing some of the violent past, which had left him orphaned. The
second plot line involves Step’s “dangerous liaison” with Sampson’s daughter, Anna, a girl of
thirteen. While Anna imagines Step to be like the gallant heroes she reads about in her Lovestory
magazines, Step is a ruthless womanizer. Conscientious and gentle, Ed tries to protect both Hi
Boy and Anna from Step’s brutality, but also remains loyal to his friend. The third plot line
involves Step’s friendship with Mag, the black, female madame who also lives on the outskirts
of town. Mag lives with her partner in business and love, Cooper, an aging black man who used
to be her pimp. This couple mystifies Ed, who has never seen as black female entrepreneur, nor
an older woman who keeps a lover. These plot lines converge at the end of the novella, when
Step & Ed bring Anna and another young woman to Mag’s house for a party. Anna follows Step
into an upstairs bedroom. By the time Ed realizes they are gone, it is too late: he finds Step in a

23
panic and Anna in physical and emotional agony. Nevertheless, Anna stands by the man she
now feels obligated to love, which buys Step & Ed a few days to collect their pay. Devastated
that Step is leaving her, Anna begs him to meet her one more time at Mag’s house, where
inadvertently, she becomes a pawn in a lover’s quarrel between Mag and Cooper. Cooper makes
a pass at Anna in order to make Mag jealous, but the plan works too well—Mag shoots Anna and
is hauled off by the police. Meanwhile, as they are high-tailing it out of town with the kid in
tow, Step & Ed discover a lynch mob forming. To their surprise, the vigilantes are not after
them, but after Mag’s partner, Cooper, for the attempted rape of Anna. As fate would have it,
Step, Ed, Hi Boy and Cooper wind up in the same boxcar. Tragically, Hi Boy’s infected hand
swells and a fever rages, and he dies before they reach Denver. With all their prospects for
family and community dashed, Step & Ed are left where they started, and seem no worse for
wear. The tragedy had failed to elicit a personal transformation, and they can only say, “Where
to now?” (128).
Like Of Mice and Men, the central framework of Let Me Breathe Thunder is the migrant
worker as social outcast. At the center of the novella—and the source of its title—is native
legend told by Sampson, an allegory for migratory laborers and others “who were jolted out of
their patterns by the big depression” (78). According to this creation story, a god created the
world, but did not make a place for himself within it. The god was doomed to roam the earth, for
“being outside of patterns, he had to be a wanderer” (77). When he eventually settles at the foot
of the Cascades so as not to destroy what he had created, “his tormented spirit moans and moans,
and in its misery sometimes breathes thunder” (78). The point is that those who make society
through physical toil must live outside of it, and are reduced to a life of wandering or a life of
sedentary misery. 32 As we have seen, Lennie & George’s search for a new kind of
community—to find a “pattern” to which they belong—extends beyond their friendship and
fosters interracial fellowship. Attaway pushes this search even further. The novel experiments
32 Steinbeck also uses allegory to give his migrant outsiders mythic proportions. Of Mice and Men may be read as
an allegory for Genesis 4—Lennie, George, and their fellow migrants being the sons of Cain, whom God doomed to
a life of wandering. Lennie & George defy God’s curse in their commitment to each other and in their dream of
owning a farm, but these efforts ultimately fail. An allegorical reading of the novella reinforces the connection
between migratory workers and racial “others” in that for centuries, Christian thinkers interpreted the “mark of
Cain” as black skin, using the biblical story to justify racism. In both these legends—the native and the biblical—
the wanderer suffers abject loneliness, yet a settled existence is not a feasible (nor necessarily desirable) alternative.
See William Goldhurst, “Of Mice and Men: John Steinbeck’s Parable of the Curse of Cain” in The Short Novels of
John Steinbeck: Critical Essays with a Checklist to Steinbeck Criticism edited by Jackson J. Benson (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1990), pp. 48-59. Quote pp. 52-53.

24
with interracialism among the bottom rung of society through its explicit racialization of white
characters, its depiction of the West as a multicultural space, and its exploration of the racial and
gender dynamics in three divergent settings: the boxcar, the farm, and the roadhouse.
In both novellas, the outsider status of the white characters is a crucial factor that in the
forging of interracial relationships. While Lennie and Candy in Of Mice and Men are clearly
“other,” they are not as explicitly racialized as Step & Ed, the white protagonists in Let Me
Breathe Thunder. The racial fluidity of these characters was apparent to at least one reviewer
when the novel first appeared. While critics in the mainstream press praised Attaway for proving
“that it is possible for a Negro to write about whites” and touching “only very incidentally on
black-and-white antagonisms,” Ulysses Lee, writing for Opportunity, cautioned that “it would be
unfortunate if Mr. Attaway’s book should come to be known, in the words of the jacket blurb
and the brief prefatory note, as ‘that rare thing, a novel by a Negro about whites.’” 33 Lee
referred to not only the black characters, “who are among the best-realized characters in the
book,” but also the racialization of Step & Ed, who “might as well be Negroes; their experiences
are colored throughout by the same problems that daily confront the Negro or any other member
or a minority group.” 34 Lee’s focus on the “problems” confronting blacks and other minorities
also reflects the influence of sociology on the discourse of race and class in the 1930s. In The
Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed
America, historian James Gregory argues American sociologists shaped perceptions of black and
white migrants through their “maladjustment paradigm,” which viewed them as uprooted,
backward, needy, and even dangerous. Within this pathological rubric, media stories about black
and white migrants began to converge in the 1930s: “In no other period were black and white
moving southerners so likely to be linked.” 35 By racializing Step & Ed, Attaway explores this
link between black and white migrants, testing its possibilities as well as its limits.
Living outdoors and working on farms literally and figuratively darkens Step & Ed.
Accustomed to riding illegally in boxcars, the pair of migrant workers decide to “ride the
cushions” with Hi-boy, paying for their tickets with the money they swindled from the child. In
moving from the illicit space of the boxcar to the legitimate space of the passenger car, they feel
33 Young, “Tough and Tender,” p. BR4; West, p. 271; Ulysses Lee, “On the Road,” Opportunity: Journal of Negro
Life vol. XVII no. 9 (September 1939), p. 283.
34 Lee, “On the Road,” p. 283.
35 Gregory, The Southern Diaspora, p. 78.

25
the anxiety of subordinate social status: “We look like guys what ain’t used to riding the
cushions. Maybe we look like bums on the stem, or something. Maybe we look like guys what
don’t amount to nothing…” (16). Beneath the stares of the other passengers in the dining car, Ed
experiences something akin to racism, which makes him feel literally darker than those around
him:
Everything was so white. The people looked whiter than any I had ever seen before.
Once I was in a restaurant in Detroit and a very black boy had come in walking hard on
his heels. Everybody had looked at him. Now I glanced down at my hands to see if they
hadn’t turned dark. The waiter hadn’t served the black boy” (18)
The racial roles in the dining car are a direct reversal of Ed’s memory: a black waiter serves
white boys who also “walked hard on their heels” (17). Through memory, Ed puts himself in
the black boy’s place and draws a parallel between economic and racial injustice. The analogy
only goes so far, however—presumably Ed’s hands hadn’t changed colors, and even with his
weathered skin he was safe from the humiliation of Jim Crow. Nevertheless, there is fluidity in
Ed’s racial identity—his outsider status allows him to empathize with African-Americans, and,
as his glance at his hands suggests, to see himself as a racial “other.”
Attaway places these social outcasts in a western setting that evokes the frontier
mythology and notions of abundance while distancing the narrative from the history of slavery
and urban ghettos. Traveling from New Mexico to Seattle to the Yakima Valley of central
Washington, Step & Ed experience both geographical and racial diversity. The racial map of
Attaway’s West does not follow axes of black and white, but includes Hispanic, Asian, and
native peoples. 36 The western setting liberates the narrative from the racial antagonisms of the
South, where race relations, in their simple duality of black-and-white, made racism seem natural
and inevitable. Although white supremacy migrated west as well, the complex racial dynamic of
this region complicated the simple formula of black over white. Racial hatreds were not
necessarily rooted in the history of slavery and Jim Crow—they emerged from local histories and
36 Attaway’s West challenges the frontier paradigm so prevalent in the 1930s, which understood the West as a zone
of conflict between “savagery” and “civilization” that crept westward as Anglos settled new territory. The frontier
model assumed an Anglo-eastern point of view, ignored northward and eastward migrations, and considered the
dispossession of native peoples to be inevitable. The West of Let Me Breathe Thunder far more resembles more
recent interpretations of the region as “an important meeting ground, the point where Indian America, Latin
America, Anglo-America, Afro-America, and Asia intersected.” Patricia Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The
Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), p. 27.

26
a regional context. Cooper, a black man who nearly gets lynched at the end of the novella,
marvels at ubiquity of racism and its local character: “ ‘It don’t make no difference where you
go,’ said Cooper, ‘they always hating somebody somewhere. All along from Texas through New
Mexico they hate Mexes worse’n a snake; down in lower California they get like mad dogs if
you mention Japs; I ain’t never been far east, but they say that out there everybody hates
everybody else’” (58). Observing the variations of racism prompts Attaway’s characters to
consider its causes, and to wonder “why those snakes out that way hate Mexes like that” or to
ask “what you reckon makes people like that” (83, 58). Featuring blacks and whites who drink
saki together, a Mexican orphan, and an Indian legend, Let Me Breathe Thunder envisions the
American West as a site of racial conflict and interracial exchange.
Let Me Breathe Thunder explores interracial relationships in several settings, each with
varying ratios of freedom and social order. In a brief yet thematically significant boxcar scene,
interracial friendship achieves its most utopian character and most closely resembles the
interracialism of Of Mice and Men in that it takes place in an all-male, liminal space. This
boxcar scene recreates the legend of the wanderer to the contemporary context—although the
parallel hardly needs reinforcement, Ed flashes back to the boxcar as Sampson tells the tale.
Like the Indian god, the hoboes are wanderers by nature, yet they yearn for something more than
their rootless existence. The scene rather heavy-handedly depicts the human cost of extreme
individualism—loneliness, isolation, the madness induced by perpetual motion.
When Step, Ed, and Hi-Boy hop a freight headed toward Sampson’s farm in Yakima,
they join a motley crew of hoboes who share their musings about mobility while “clicking
along” in a boxcar (30). The form of their conversation highlights their sense of isolation: it
proceeds in circular fashion, replicating the rhythm of the train, each one continuing his private
thought in loose association with the others—a sequence of monologues that passes for dialogue.
The narrator does not give names to these rootless men, but rather tags them according to their
unique facial features—“Wizened Face,” “Shify Eyes,” “Black Face,” etc. In their conversation,
the men establish a strict dichotomy between mobility on the one hand, and domesticity on the
other, defined by both marriage and steady work. While most of them contend that they’ll
“always be moving” or “always catch myself moving on,” they also consider getting a job and
marrying, or less drastically, settling in a city and going on relief. These musings about settling
down, however, are steeped in ambivalence. After proclaiming “I ain’t gonna knock around

27
from job to job till I get to be a million years old,” Step distances himself from the supposed
inevitability of settling down by vowing to marry only “after I seen the whole world and every
dame in it” (32). Black Face triple qualifies his statement: “maybe I might write that Alabama
gal one of these days when I settles down” (33, my emphasis). Wizened Face views the city as a
middle ground between domesticity and life on the road, prostitution as an alternative to
marriage, and relief as an alternative to wage work, but “never can seem to get settled on what
city” (31). Destined to wander forever, these hoboes enjoy great independence, but, the
narrative asks, at what cost? The conversation ends when one of the older men makes a sexual
pass at the Mexican child, revealing a darker side to this alternative community.
For the black hobo, however, the freedom of the road has a racial dimension, liberating
him from Jim Crow and the more implicit racial codes of the urban north. Like Huck and Jim,
the white hoboes and the black hobo seek the freedom of the road (or raft) for different reasons.
For Black Face, the boxcar is a safe space of masculine, interracial harmony since “Guys on the
road ain’t got prejudice like other folks” (32). The black hobo asserts his racial equality in
sexual terms. By bragging about his sexual encounter with a white woman, he demonstrates his
triumph over the racial taboo that served as whites’ most powerful justification for Jim Crow:
‘Why, I was coming into Chi from Wichita last year or last month, or something,’
continued Black Face. ‘There was a yeller-haired girl in the empty with a bunch of us.
Some of them gave her money. She let me love her up all the way in to Chi for a piece of
cake….Yessir, all the way in to Chi. Black or white, it’s all the same on the road’ (32).
By participating in the reciprocal relationship between hoboes and prostitutes, in which they
exchange money and protection for sexual services, the African-American migrant joins the
boxcar fraternity as an equal. His racial equality is predicated on the commodification of
women’s bodies—he asserts his equality with the other hoboes by buying sex with a white
woman. The fact that he bartered for sex with a piece of cake (albeit metaphorically, perhaps)
while the other hoboes used money only augments his sense of the boxcar as an democratic
space—his access to a white woman did not come at a higher price. In light of the Scottsboro
case, which brought hoboes, prostitutes, and American racism into the national and international

28
spotlight between 1931 and 1937, the black hobo’s testimony becomes a utopian alternative to
the harsh reality of racial violence on the rails. 37
Upon reaching Yakima, Step & Ed head off to Sampson’s apple farm, to take their
generous acquaintance up on a promise of work. In contrast to the ambivalent representation of
the freedom of the road, Sampson’s farm is an agrarian idyll in the novella, a place where the
characters experience a brief period of tranquility, community, and connection with the land.
There is a price to be paid, of course, for the social benefits of civilized life, but these are not
immediately apparent. Ed narrates his first impressions of the farm in pastoral language, waking
up to the sound of a lark whistling “in the early morning when everything is fresh and cool.”
The whistle of the lark reminds Ed of “the chorus of a cowboy song,” calling to mind the
romantic hero of the West and his legendary masculinity, individualism, and loneliness. Strewn
with abundant apple orchards and the setting of a young woman’s fall from grace, the farm (quite
obviously) symbolizes an American Eden. It is Lennie & George’s dream farm come true,
marred only by the presence of the femme fatale in the guise of Sampson’s daughter, Anna.
Sampson responds emotionally to the presence of Step, Ed, and Hi Boy on the farm, feeling as if
it were “like old times to have some boys around the place” (45). Having lost four sons during
World War I, Sampson desires to reconstitute his family. The more submissive of the two, Ed
adapts to this filial role more easily than Step. For a brief time at the ranch, Sampson, Anna,
Step, Ed, and Hi-Boy function as a family unit, the three “boys” filling the roles of Sampson’s
sons.
Sampson’s position of power is obscured by the populist ethos that surrounds him.
Rather than a capitalist landowner operating a “factory in the field,” Sampson’s character
harkens back to the yeoman farmer whose relationship with his workers is familial, not
transactional. 38 Attaway does not define Sampson by class, as Marxist ideology would urge him
to do. Instead, Attaway includes this small land owner in the “producerist” tradition,” which,
37 The utopian nature of this scene is clear, and black hobo undermines his narrative in a couple of ways. The black
hobo’s attempt to transfer the race-relations of the boxcar to society requires a contradiction of logic: being settled
and being “on the road” are antithetical states of being. Second, the indeterminacy of the time frame when he tells
of having sex with the white woman “last year or last month, or something,” sheds doubt on its veracity. Did this
event really happen, or is he inventing it in order to reassure himself of the rewards of his wandering lifestyle, or to
assert his equality to his listeners?
38 The term “factory in the field” refers to Carey McWilliams’s book Factories in the Field (1939), which offered a
sharp critique of California’s agricultural industry and is often viewed as the factual counterpart to Steinbeck’s The
Grapes of Wrath, published in the same year. Carey McWilliams, Factories in the Field: the Story of Migratory
Farm Labor in California (Santa Barbara: Peregrine Smith, Inc., 1971) [1939].

29
according to historian of populism Michael Kazin, is a moral distinction that crosses class. 39 In
other words, although Sampson owns land and hires laborers to work it, he also labors himself.
A worker as well as an owner, Sampson’s “face was reddened and crinkled,” a sign to Ed that
“wind and shine must have been in his face for many a long morning before breakfast” (18). In
claiming that Ed would reconsider his desire to live in the city “if [he] owned a little piece of
land,” Sampson echoes the agrarian values of Lennie & George in Of Mice and Men (45). Even
though the farm is not profitable, Sampson avows “there is something about growing things that
gets you,” imbuing farming with moral and spiritual dimensions (45). Sampson also positions
himself in the radical democratic tradition of the populists when he warns, “an apple sure is a
beautiful thing. Makes a man think about guns and revolutions when he sees them rotting on the
ground” (45). Sampson and his apple farm appeal to a powerful nostalgia towards America’s
agrarian past, a “sentimental attachment to rural living” that historian Richard Hofstadter has
dubbed the “agrarian myth.” 40 The moral dimensions of Sampson’s character are enscapsulated
in Hofstadter’s ironic formulation of the mythic hero:
Its hero was the yeoman farmer, its central conception the nation that he is the ideal man
and the ideal citizen….The yeoman, who owned a small farm and worked it with the aid
of his family, was the incarnation of the simple, honest, independent, healthy, happy
human being. Because he lived in close communion with beneficent nature, his life was
believed to have a wholesomeness and integrity impossible for the depraved populations
of its cities. His well-being was not merely physical, it was moral; it was not merely
personal, it was the central source of civic virtue; it was not merely secular but religious,
for God had made the land and called man to cultivate it. 41
While Attaway’s does not invoke the agrarian myth as dismissively as Hofstadter, who wrote in
the mid-fifties when American populism had taken a conservative turn, the African American
author does not reproduce this myth unquestioningly. 42 While Steinbeck employs a mythical
framework to demonstrate the futility of Edenic quests, Attaway asks what happens to these
American myths when confronted with the complexities of race and class. Attaway avoids a
facile characterization of the yeoman farmer as a racist and an elitist, however, suggesting that
39 Kazin identifies “producerism” as a fundamental element in the language of populism, but argues that African
Americans rejected this ethic, privileging racial justice to economic justice. Kazin, pp. 14-15.
40 Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Knopf, 1974) [1955], pp. 24-25.
41 Ibid.
42 See Kazin, chapter 7.

30
perhaps there is something worth keeping in this American mythology, and in American
populism in particular. However, the novella shows how racial and economic barriers bring
about the downfall of the American Eden.
Despite its agrarian goodness, sense of community, and populist ethos, and Edenic
allusions, Sampson’s farm fails to provide an alternative community for Step & Ed. If the
boxcar is a site of interracialism, freedom, and equality, then Sampson’s farm is just the
opposite: a site of segregation, social order, and paternalism. In telling Step & Ed the legend of
the wanderer, Sampson relates allegorically what he fails to tell them explicitly: the reason “why
I never let Anna mix with the usual run of pickers that come along this way” (79). Dwelling
outside the patterns of society and tormented by the prospect of settling down, migrant workers
and other “relatives” of this wandering god are incompatible with the domesticity proscribed for
Anna. Step, in particular, bridles under Sampson’s regime, resenting the grueling work and
flirting dangerously with the forbidden daughter.
The fatal relationship between Step and Anna comes to pass in the third key setting of
interracialism in the novel—the roadhouse owned by Mag, a black woman who is a close friend
of Step’s. Like the boxcar, Mag’s place also sharply contrasts Sampson’s farm: it is a site of
leisure, illicit sex, violence, and racial mixing as opposed to work, family, nurture, and
segregation. Despite these stark oppositions, Mag is Sampson’s counterpart in the twentieth
century version of the frontier myth: the self-made entrepreneur who, along with the yeoman
farmer, defends the republic against the excesses of Capitalism. Mag is a self-made woman in
the populist vein, a hard-working proprietor of a small business enterprise, rather than a cog in
the managerial system and corporate economy. 43 In giving this role to a black woman, Attaway
expands an American origin myth to include women and people of color. Having heard Step
sing Mag’s praises, Ed assumes she is white, and “was knocked off my feet” when he discovers
otherwise (34). Ed made this assumption because Step did not identify her race as the essence of
her character, but rather her business acumen:
I had heard about Mag before. Step admired her a whole lot. It seemed that she had
been just a two-bit whore until she had come to Yakima many years before. She had not
gone the way most women like her go. She had saved her money and put it into real
43 On the distinction between populist and progressive strains in the frontier myth see Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, p.
22; on the the roles of the farmer and entrepreneur, ibid., p. 155.

31
estate and houses. Now, at fifty-three years of age, she owned a sizable stretch of land
facing the tracks, a roadhouse and several houses. She had something on the ball, Step
had said (34).
Mag’s “rags-to-riches” story combines the plucky “up-by-the-bootstraps” youngster of Horatio
Alger stories with Bret Harte’s “whore-with-a-heart-of-gold.” While subsequent events reveal
the novella’s disturbing misogyny, Mag’s character makes room for women and blacks in the
mythic West and the populist tradition.
Step & Ed visit Mag and Cooper, her former pimp and current business manager and life
partner, several times in the course of the novella. Step & Ed’s mobility and economic
marginality free them from social constraints, allowing them to cross racial boundaries and to
engage in disreputable behavior, particularly drinking and sex. Due to the mixing of genders, the
interracialism at Mag’s place is more complicated than the interracial male friendships in the
barn scene in Of Mice and Men and the boxcar scene in Let Me Breathe Thunder. First, Step and
Mag’s friendship emerged out of a commercial context in which black women provided sexual
services to white men. These transactional origins reduce the radical potential of the friendship,
especially within a society that accepts interracialism in terms white men’s sexual access to black
women and in the context of entertainment. Second, their friendship resulted from Step’s choice
to reject racial and class alliances in order to save Mag from a lynch mob comprised of other
white customers like himself, yet this act introduces an element of indebtedness that diminishes
the equality of their relationship. By Mag’s standards “nothing was too good” for Step, the “only
one man enough to save me from being rid out of town on a rail…or worse” (57). Finally, the
presence of white women at Mag’s place puts the interracial community to the test—one that
their friendship ultimately fails.
The novella reaches a climax in a brutal, incredibly unsympathetic rape scene. The fates
of all the characters—Step, Ed, Anna, Sampson, Mag, Cooper, and even Hi Boy—hinge upon
this moment of sexual violence. The underlying misogyny of the scene is disturbing. Women
are to blame not only for the lynching of black and white men and for the collapse of the
interracial community, but also for the violence inflicted upon them. When Ed, Step, and Anna
go to Mag’s house after a movie, Ed neglects his duty as chaperone, which he took upon himself
out of sympathy for Sampson, to a disastrous end. Anna flirts with Step and follows him
upstairs, deluded by mass culture and convinced “that Step will just kiss her hand and neck her in

32
some garden like they do in the magazines” (52). In a sense, Ed blames Anna for her own
ruination, which, he implies, resulted from the sentimental, romantic world-view she imbibed
from mass media. 44 Consistent with his prediction that “she’d be all done for before she knew
what was happening” (52), Ed finds Anna lying in the bed, “her moans ma[king] little clicking
noises as they were forced up through her spittle” (60). Stifled by sobs, Anna has no voice in
this scene. The other characters do not recognize this event as a rape, and long before the
concept of “date rape,” it is not clear whether its original audience would have. 45 The closest
anyone comes to identifying Step’s actions as rape is Cooper, the only black man in the scene.
Cooper warns Step that “they can put you under the jailhouse for rape,” since Anna was under
age (62). Whether Anna consented is irrelevant; what matters is whether Sampson—or the
law—will find out that Step “spoiled” his young daughter. The women in the scene are
particularly dismissive of Anna’s condition. Mag refuses to call a doctor “just because a damn
little virgin got treated too rough” (61). As a businesswoman, Mag feels no compunction for her
complicity in sexual violence against women, declaring there “ain’t nothing wrong with her that
I ain’t fixed up before” (61). Similarly, Ed’s date, Belle, minimizes the situation, advising the
others to “quit worrying; it probably ain’t much” (61). Claiming flippantly that she “seen the
same thing happen before when a dumb guy tires to mix drinks and virgins,” she reduces Anna to
a party favor. As if to add a final misogynistic touch on this rape scene, Anna continues to
pursue Step romantically; she feels she is now obliged to love him. Her feelings for him only
intensify after he sexually violates her. 46
In having sexual relations with Anna (whether rape, statutory rape, or consensual), Step
crosses social boundaries serious enough to risk getting himself killed. In the initial panic, Ed
reminds Step that “we’ll both get shot up” if they get a doctor for Anna (60). In light of the
dining car scene, which depicts Step & Ed as racialized characters, Step and Anna’s sexual
encounter may be read not only as a violation of class boundaries, but also as a violation of Jim
44 Andreas Huyssen discusses the equation of women with mass culture, and men and art, in “Mass Culture as
Woman” in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, and Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1986).
45 It is clear to the present-day reader that Step raped Anna, however, given her physical injuries and emotional
hysteria. None of the contemporary reviews mention rape.
46 Both female characters in the novella, Anna and Mag, love the men who hurt them. Cooper explains that they
way to win over a “sportin’ woman” is to “call her every low-down thing that comes to your mind and slap hell out
of her while you’re cussing” (113). After abusing Mag, he “was her man for as long as [he] could make it good”
(112). Mag and Anna feel a sense of entitlement after getting beaten, as if violence is a proxy for the bond of
marriage.

33
Crow. Step’s literal whiteness would have made this figurative act of interracial sex palatable to
a general audience in 1939. This ugly scene in Let Me Breathe Thunder reinforces in the most
extreme sense the parallel between racial and economic oppression. Sampson’s agrarian idyll
only functions when Step & Ed fulfill the role of children rather than equals. As with slavery,
this paternalist system requires them to relinquish their parental role with Hi-Boy, and to respect
the sexual unavailability of Anna, the farmer’s daughter. In raping Anna and escaping with Hi-
Boy, Step & Ed reject this paternalist system and become boxcar fugitives, not unlike Bigger
Thomas in Richard Wright’s Native Son. 47 This parallel, however, only goes so far, and cannot
be sustained through the end of the novella. Attaway broadcasts the vast difference between
racism and class-based prejudice when it comes to sexual relations between black men white
women.
A few days after the rape incident—just enough time to collect their pay—Step & Ed
hitch a freight out of the Yakima Valley. To their surprise, they find in the boxcar another
fugitive migrant: Cooper who is also on the run for his alleged attempt to rape Sampson’s
daughter. It turns out that Anna planned to meet Step at Mag’s place for one last tryst before
they left town, only to be caught in a lover’s quarrel between Cooper and Mag. The events soon
spiraled out of control: Cooper made a pass at Anna to make Mag jealous, Mag shot at Anna in a
jealous rage, and the whole town ignited into a uproar over what they perceived to be the rape of
a white woman by a black man. Step’s friendship with Mag and Cooper was forged in the
context of lynching, and it would be destroyed in the context of lynching. When Step learns that
the rape charge, though exaggerated, was not entirely fabricated, he explodes into a violent rage,
pummeling Cooper to the floor of the boxcar. Ironically, it is Step who is the real rapist and
admitted womanizer. Ed intervenes before Step can kill Cooper, but warns him to tell the whole
story because “I ain’t going to protect no raper” (111). Ed conveniently forgets that he protected
Step a few days earlier by refusing to get a doctor for Anna. In Step & Ed’s view, however, a
man’s race—rather than a woman’s consent—determines the difference between rape and “a
dumb guy” mixing “drinks and virgins” (61). Step draws a distinction between himself and
Cooper, even though he is also an outsider who does not have sexual access to Anna, whose
father “never let[s] Anna mix with the usual run of pickers” (79). While Step also faces a social
47 In Canaan Bound: The African-American Great Migration Novel, Lawrence Rodgers argues that Attaway relies
on narrative strategies and images borrowed from slave narratives in his novel Blood on the Forge. Rodgers, p. 110.

34
barrier in his sexual access to Anna, the barrier is different—it is more permeable and negotiable.
Step’s violent reaction to Cooper reveals his hypocrisy and the limits of his racial egalitarianism.
In fact, in both Let Me Breathe Thunder and Of Mice and Men, the possibilities of interracial
relationships reach an abrupt end when faced with the phenomenon of lynching.
Policing the Boundaries of Race and Class:
Lynching in Of Mice and Men and Let Me Breathe Thunder
Both Let Me Breathe Thunder and Of Mice and Men portray black and white men as
victims of lynching, once again pointing to their shared condition as social outcasts. At the start
of Of Mice and Men, Lennie & George arrive at their campsite having fled a lynch mob; Curley’s
wife threatens Crooks with lynching; and the novella ends with the George’s mercy killing of
Lennie as another lynch mob advances upon him. In Let Me Breathe Thunder, Step & Ed fear
Sampson’s violent retribution, just as Mag and Cooper anxiously await the inevitable time when
the townspeople “get a spell of cleaning up” and try to “run us out of town” (58). 48 However,
while lynching powerfully illustrates the shared vulnerability of black and white characters, it
also exposes the limits of this common ground, and by extension, the cultural barriers to an
integrated society forged from the “bottom up.” Steinbeck and Attaway offer a similar critique
of lynching by subverting the stereotype of the “rapist.” However, the trope of lynching also
exposes the how pernicious American racism is; these nascent interracial communities cannot
defend against it. Racism, in these novellas, is a psychological phenomenon, so deeply ingrained
that it takes on the qualities of sacred ritual. Influenced by notions of “mass psychology” that
linked the irrational “herd behavior” of humans to authoritarian social and political regimes,
Steinbeck and Attaway depicted lynching as a powerful primal force that pulverizes the fragile
interracialism that gets in its way. 49 In both novellas, interracialism is a potential endpoint to the
hoboes’ incessant migration; lynching propels them yet again into a life of wandering.
48 Farah Griffin argues that lynching is a common trope African American migration narratives, often providing the
migrant’s final impetus for leaving the South. In contrast, letters and other historical documents rarely mention
lynching, but rather cite economic reasons for migration. Farrah Griffin, “Who set you flowin’?”: The African-
American Migration Narrative (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 17-18.
49 Sigmund Freud, Mass Psychology and Other Writings, trans. Jim Underwood (New York: Penguin Books, 2004);
William Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (New York: Orgone Institute Press, 1946). I have barely glanced
the surface of my research into the connections between the depiction of lynching and mass psychology and fascism.

35
When Steinbeck and Attaway were writing their novellas, lynching was becoming a
greater priority in public policy discourse. The NAACP and other civil rights advocates ramped
up their campaign in 1933, encouraged by signs of support for civil rights by New Deal policymakers.
However, the Roosevelt administration failed to endorse either the anti-lynching bill or
the anti-poll tax bill, which were the flagships of civil rights legislation. While several antilynching
bills passed the House, they were defeated in the Senate due to the power of southern
conservatives. Attaway and Steinbeck undermine the power of the lynching formula, in which a
fiendish black man rapes innocent white woman, that accounts, in part, for the reluctance of the
federal government to enact anti-lynching legislation. Both novellas alter this formula by
defying its stereotypes and by lending a sense of masquerade to the rape-lynching sequence.
Neither Cooper nor Lennie fit the stereotype of the rapist. While old age renders Cooper
impotent, Lennie has the mental capacity of a toddler, and his sensual urges are equally childlike.
Cooper’s identity is tied to his virility, and his pride depends on Mag’s recognition of his
sexual prowess and physical dominance. Once he realized he had begun to “break down” and
“couldn’t do nothing anymore,” he “couldn’t tell her [Mag] what the matter was—I got my
pride” (113). Convinced that leaving Mag would betray his weakness, Cooper decides that he’s
“either got to leave with another woman or get throwed out ‘cause of one” (113). Unlike the
formulaic black rapist who lusts for white women, Cooper is an impotent old man who pretends
to rape a white woman so that he could leave a black woman with his pride intact. Cooper’s pass
at Anna was not an attempted rape, but rather an elaborate masquerade designed to hide his
impotence and preserve his pride. Interestingly, Cooper is oblivious to the racial dynamics of his
ploy, claiming “it ain’t never “crossed my mind that the little gal would holler when I grabbed
her” (114). He viewed Anna as Mag’s rival due to her youth and sexual availability, not her
whiteness.
Similarly, the death of Curley’s wife in Of Mice and Men plays upon the rape-lynching
formula by featuring a child-like man who merely wants to pet a woman’s hair, then accidentally
kills her when she resists. At the beginning of the scene, Curley’s wife says Lennie is “jus’ like
a big baby,” and like a baby, George recounts in an earlier scene, Lennie “wants to touch
ever’thing he likes” (88, 41). Starved for companionship, Curley’s wife invites him to touch her
hair. The language of the interaction makes it a figurative rape: “Lennie said, ‘Oh! That’s nice’
and he stroked harder. ‘Oh, that’s nice.’ ‘Look out now, you’ll muss it.’ And then she cried

36
angrily, ‘You stop it now, you’ll mess it all up’” (88). Lennie’s rhythmic stroking and
monosyllabic utterances are suggestive of sexual intercourse, while Curley’s wife’s protests
indicate rape. As in Let Me Breathe Thunder, this scene alters the rape-lynching formula
through the portrayal of the rapist as weak, and by representing rape in a non-literal way.
Whereas Attaway masks rape through dissemblance, Steinbeck masks it through the use of
figurative language.
Both novellas depict black and white characters as victims of lynching; both imagine
interracial alliances that defend against lynching; and both offer a critique of lynching by
undermining the rape-lynching formula. The white and black characters in each novella initially
unite to defend against lynching. However, the specter of lynching overpowers these fragile
interracial communities. As illustrated earlier, the interracial community in Of Mice and Men is
too weak to defend itself against Curley’s wife threat to get Crooks lynched. There is a sense of
equality in their powerlessness, but the novella elides the issue of interracial sex. Since the rape
charge is fabricated, Crooks is emasculated due his physical disability, and their interracial
utopia is entirely male, Lennie and Candy never have to deal with the possibility of Crooks
having sex with a white woman. Let Me Breathe Thunder, however, confronts this larger barrier
to interracialism. Step & Ed are unable to rise above the racism of their culture when it comes to
black men’s sexual relations with white women.
Not only does Step succumb to the racist ideology of his culture in his reaction to
Cooper, but Ed also falls under the sway of the psychological appeal of the lynching ritual. The
“spirit of the crowd” intoxicates Ed, easily persuading him to abandon his loyalties to Mag (102).
Participating in the lynching frenzy gives him a sense of power: “There was a glorious feeling of
being strong as God Almighty in the very air…of having a thousand hands and feet. I laughed
crazily and tried to push my way to the steps of Mag’s house…” (103). With “a thousand hands
and feet,” Ed becomes one with the crowd. Surrendering his individual identity to the collective,
Ed feels omnipotent and God-like, sensations that counter the loneliness and powerlessness of
his ordinary life. However, literary tradition reaching back to the Hebrew scriptures and ancient
myth tells us that it is dangerous to play God. Ed’s emotional surge borders on insanity. He
agrees to participate in a senseless murder, fueled by racial hatred, in order to feel part of
something, and to exercise the great power engendered by this collective experience.

37
In this lynching scene, Step & Ed’s search for a new community comes abruptly to an
end. They lose both the nurturing community at Sampson’s farm where Hi Boy thrived, and the
unconventional community at Mag’s place where blacks and whites could share the same table.
Lynching propels them once again into movement; Step & Ed continue their journey in a boxcar,
where they suffer through Hi Boy’s painful death, helpless in an environment unfit for a child.
In the end, they remain unchanged, reverting back to their perennial question, “Where to now?”
(128).
Steinbeck depicts the psychology of the lynch mob in a very similar manner. Although
George precludes the lynch mob’s awful errand in Of Mice and Men, Steinbeck explores the
social and psychological function of the lynching of a black man in his short story, “The
Vigilante.” 50 The emotions of the crowd are agents in the opening lines of the story, serving as
the subjects of the first and third sentences, followed by active verbs: “The great surge of
emotion, the milling and shouting of the people fell gradually;” “A tired quiet settled” (133).
Just as Ed feels like an all-powerful being, Mike “hardly felt it” when “a driving line of forty
men deep had crashed Mike against the door like the head of a ram” (135). As an organic part of
a larger animal, Mike’s individual body is impervious to pain. On the contrary, his integration
into the lynch mob fills him with vitality, making his chest “so full that he had found he was
crying” (134). Mike’s euphoria dissipates as he resumes his individuality, for “the moment he
left the outskirts of the mob a cold loneliness fell upon him” (134). The words “loneliness” or
“alone” appear five times after he leaves the lynching scene, augmented by a melancholy setting:
“the wide street was deserted, empty, as unreal as the park had been” (135) and “the city was
silent” (139). In addressing mob psychology, Attaway and Steinbeck raise a crucial challenge to
social reform: how can people change society when, as in the case of the lynch mob, individuals
lack free will?
Biological theory informs Steinbeck’s depiction of the lynch mob. This scene represents
his “Argument of the Phalanx,” which posits that people behave in groups as if they constituted a
single organism. According to Steinbeck, this theory explains “migrations, the desertion of
localities, the sudden diseases which wiped races out, the sudden running amok of groups.” 51
Viewing the lynch mob as a group animal suddenly “running amok,” Steinbeck understands
50 John Steinbeck, “The Vigilante” in The Long Valley (New York: The Viking Press, 1938), pp. 133-141.
51 Steinbeck, A Life in Letters, ed. Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten (New York: The Viking Press, 1975), p.
77. Quoted in Benson, “John Steinbeck and Farm Labor Organization,” p. 197.

38
social behavior through the lens of biology. When the lynching comes to an end at the beginning
of the story, the group animal begins to separate into its constituent parts, as “some members of
the mob began to sneak away…” (139). The story is about what happens to one of these “parts”
after the dissolution of the phalanx. The narrative picks up when Mike must resume his
individual existence and its attendant guilt, loneliness, and disconnectedness.
Critics have also read Of Mice and Men as evidence of Steinbeck’s faith in biological
determinism. There is a profusion of deaths or threats of death in the novella: Lennie
accidentally kills a mouse, a puppy, and Curley’s wife; Slim drowns four puppies to allow more
milk for the others; Carlson euthanizes Candy’s dog; Candy wishes someone would shoot him
when he gets too old to work; Curley’s wife threatens to lynch Crooks; and George shoots
Lennie—the third reference to euthanasia—to save him from getting lynched. The original title
of the story suggests that Lennie’s death is “Something That Happened”—a blameless act of
nature, no different from the bird killing a snake earlier in the scene. 52 Like the naturalist mode
itself, this non-teleological framework neutralizes the morality of the text. 53 In applying the
“Argument of the Phalanx” to lynching, Steinbeck runs the risk of undermining the nascent
progressive racial ideology of Of Mice and Men, as well as stifling any reform impulse that the
story may engender in its readers. Understood as a biological phenomenon, lynching would be
amoral, its participants no more deserving of blame than the “sudden diseases” that bring death
to innocent victims. A Darwinian reading of Of Mice and Men, in which lynching, euthanasia,
and accidental death are matters of natural selection, challenges the notion that the novella plants
a seed, however small, of racial progress. 54
However, alternative readings are possible in which euthanasia and lynching are not
examples of, in the words of one critic, “things work[ing] themselves out as they must according
to their nature,” but rather, as Owens suggests, acts of social engineering that prevent humans
52 Owens, “Deadly Kids, Stinking Dogs, and Heroes,” p. 324. John Seelye also discusses this element of “chance”
in Steinbeck’s writings, which he argues, neutralizes their sentimentalism. John Seelye, “Come Back to the Boxcar,
Leslie Honey: Or, Don’t Cry For Me, Madonna, Just Pass the Milk: Steinbeck and Sentimentality” in Beyond
Boundaries: Rereading John Steinbeck edited by Susan Shillinglaw and Kevin Hearle (Tuscaloosa: Univeristy of
Alabama Press, 2002), p. 19.
53 Critic Warren French argues that Steinbeck’s labor novels of 1930s move away from strict naturalism as their
characters gain more consciousness, culminating in the transcendent vision of The Grapes of Wrath. Warren
French, “John Steinbeck: A Usable Concept of Naturalism,” in John Steinbeck: Modern Critical Views ed. Harold
Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987), pp. 67, 74-75.
54 Benson, for example, argues that “the Darwinism of The Red Pony is brought from the conflict of animals to the
conflict between men in Of Mice and Men.” Benson, “Novelist as Scientist,” p. 112.

39
from living in harmony with each other and the environment. 55 Owens goes as far as to suggest
that the pattern of senseless deaths in the novel is a critique of fascism. 56 Although Owens may
exaggerate the significance of the German-made gun in the story, Steinbeck did criticize the
inhumanity of German totalitarianism, noting “it is interesting to watch the German efficiency,
which, from the logic of the machine is efficient but which (I suspect) from the mechanics of the
human species is suicidal.” 57 As Owens’s reading exemplifies, there are elements in the story
that encourage the reader to reject its Darwinian world, particularly the sympathy for its weaker
characters, the victims of euthanasia. However, Of Mice and Men does not offer the
transcendent vision that will emerge in Steinbeck’s more overt work of social protest, The
Grapes of Wrath. Therefore, an acute tension remains in the novella between the desire for
human equality and a scientific worldview that sees disparities in power as part of the natural
order. On the first day of 1941, after having won the Pulitzer for The Grapes of Wrath,
Steinbeck ruminated on this very paradox: the impossibility of human progress and existence of
evil, alongside the endurance of human goodness, resistance, and change:
So we go into this happy new year, knowing that our species had learned nothing, can, as
a race, learn nothing—that the experience of ten thousand years has made no impression
on the instincts of the million years that preceded. Maybe you can find some vague
theology that will give you hope. Not that I have lost any hope. All the goodness and the
heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up. It isn’t that the evil thing
wins—it never will—but that it doesn’t die. I don’t know why we should expect it to. It
seems fairly obvious that two sides of a mirror are required before one has a mirror, that
two forces are necessary in man before he is a man. 58
While Steinbeck renounces the idea of progress, he champions the struggle. In emphasizing
instinct, however, Steinbeck veers toward biological determinism and questions the utility of the
very reform movements he helped to inspire. Whether as an intoxicating ritual fed by racial
55 Benson, “Novelist as Scientist,” p. 113.
56 Owens argues that Of Mice and Men is “a cautionary tale” about the fascist implications of social Darwinism and
eugenics. Owens bases his reading on the five references to Carlson’s “Luger,” the gun used to execute Lennie.
This kind of gun, which would have been impractical for a farm hand, associates the events in the novel with
Germany. The multiple deaths in the novel—the drowning of the puppies, the shooting of Candy’s dog, and the
murder of Lennie—are not as inevitable as they seem, but rather acts of social engineering. The mercy killing of
Lennie is not an isolated incident, therefore, but part of a pattern of behavior that is connected to the mounting
global crisis. Owens, “Deadly Kids, Stinking Dogs, and Heroes,” 331-32.
57 John Steinbeck to Pascal Covici, 1 January 1941, quoted in Benson, True Adventures, p. 456.
58 Ibid.

40
bigotry, or a biological phenomenon that preys upon the weak, lynching extinguishes the pale
light of interracial community in Let Me Breathe Thunder and Of Mice and Men.
In 1940, John Steinbeck had reached the pinnacle of his career, while William Attaway
was working on the last novel he would ever write. Capitalizing on Steinbeck’s cachet as an
authority on migration and rural poverty, producer and director Herbert Kline asked him to write
the script for a documentary film in Mexico. Eager to return to the country that was the
inspiration for so much of his work, Steinbeck agreed to do the project. Twenty years later,
rumor had it that Kline was working on another project in Mexico: the film adaptation of
William Attaway’s Let Me Breathe Thunder. 59 The film was never made. While Steinbeck’s Of
Mice and Men enjoys enduring popularity as novel, play, and film, Attaway’s novella has slipped
into obscurity. Though they met different fates in the American literary establishment, Steinbeck
and Attaway converge in their projection of the migrant as a powerful symbol in the Depression
era. Long a racially exclusive figure, the hobo expanded in the writings of Steinbeck and
Attaway to include racial “others.” When this framework failed—collapsing under the heavy
weight of American racism and Capitalism—they blamed women. Richard Slotkin’s frontier
trilogy explores this national mythology in every nook and cranny of American culture, yet does
not examine how non-dominant peoples refuted, revised, or appropriated this myth. A
comparison of Of Mice and Men and Let Me Breathe Thunder widens this scope, showing how
William Attaway latched on to Steinbeck’s cultural critique and pushed it in new directions.
59 A. H. Weiler, “ ‘Man’s Castle,’ ‘Fiona’ to Be Made By Sy Bartlett – Other Matters,” New York Times, 30 October
1960, p. X7.