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Tag: Great depression

  • Of Mice and Men

    George Milton and Lennie Small travel together through California during the Great Depression, picking up work on farms and ranches. George is small, sharp and impatient; Lennie is enormously strong but has an intellectual disability and a childlike love of soft things. They arrive at a ranch near Soledad after trouble forced them out of their last job.

    What keeps them going is a dream they repeat like a bedtime story: a small farm of their own, with a few acres, a vegetable patch and rabbits for Lennie to tend. On the ranch they meet the ageing swamper Candy, the isolated stable hand Crooks, the boss's aggressive son Curley and Curley's restless young wife, each of them lonely in their own way.

    Steinbeck built the short novel almost like a play, with tight scenes, heavy dialogue and few settings, and he later adapted it for the stage. Its power lies in how much it compresses: friendship, loyalty, the precariousness of itinerant labour and the way hope sustains people with little else. It is one of the most widely read books in American schools.

    Book details

    AuthorJohn Steinbeck
    First published1937
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)107
    SettingA ranch near Soledad, Salinas Valley, California, 1930s

    Themes

    • Friendship
    • Loneliness
    • The American Dream
    • Disability
    • Powerlessness

    Who should read it

    Anyone wanting a short, emotionally powerful classic that can be read in an afternoon and remembered for years.

    If you liked this, try

    • The Grapes of Wrath
    • To Kill a Mockingbird
    • Cannery Row

  • The Grapes of Wrath

    When dust storms and the banks push tenant farmers off the land in Oklahoma, the Joad family loads everything onto a battered truck and joins thousands heading west. Tom Joad, newly paroled from prison, returns home just in time to go with them, along with his resilient mother, his grandparents and a former preacher, Jim Casy, who has lost his faith but not his conscience.

    California turns out to be no promised land. Handbills advertising jobs have drawn far more workers than there is work, wages are pushed down, and migrants are herded into squalid camps and treated with suspicion by locals and police. The family's journey is a steady test of endurance and solidarity, and Ma Joad becomes its moral centre.

    Steinbeck alternates the family narrative with short interchapters that zoom out to the wider exodus, the car salesmen, the roadside diners and the tractors flattening farmhouses. The novel caused outrage when it appeared and was banned in places, but it won the Pulitzer Prize and helped shape national awareness of migrant labour, corporate farming and economic injustice.

    Book details

    AuthorJohn Steinbeck
    First published1939
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)464
    SettingOklahoma, Route 66 and California's farm valleys, 1930s
    AwardsPulitzer Prize for the Novel 1940, National Book Award 1939

    Themes

    • Poverty
    • Migration
    • Family
    • Labour exploitation
    • Collective solidarity

    Who should read it

    Readers who want a sweeping social novel about hardship, dignity and the human cost of economic collapse.

    If you liked this, try

    • Of Mice and Men
    • East of Eden
    • The Jungle

  • Think and Grow Rich

    Napoleon Hill claimed that the industrialist Andrew Carnegie encouraged him to study hundreds of successful people and identify the shared philosophy behind their achievements. Published in 1937, in the middle of the Great Depression, the book presents that philosophy as a formula for acquiring wealth and achieving any goal.

    Hill sets out thirteen principles, including desire, faith, autosuggestion, specialised knowledge, imagination, organised planning, decision, persistence and the mastermind group of allies who pool their thinking. He insists that a clearly defined aim, written down and repeated daily, combined with unwavering belief, will lead the subconscious mind to find a path to it. Later chapters discuss fear, indecision and doubt as obstacles.

    Historians have questioned many of Hill's claims about his interviews and his own business record, and the book's mental techniques read as early versions of the positive-thinking and manifestation movements. Even so, it has sold tens of millions of copies and its ideas on goal setting and peer support remain influential in sales and entrepreneurial circles.

    Book details

    AuthorNapoleon Hill
    First published1937
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreSelf-help
    TypeNon-fiction
    Pages (approx.)238

    Themes

    • Goal setting
    • Persistence
    • Belief
    • Wealth creation
    • Mastermind groups

    Who should read it

    Readers curious about the roots of modern success and motivational literature who want its original, unvarnished form.

    If you liked this, try

    • How to Win Friends and Influence People
    • Rich Dad Poor Dad
    • The Power of Positive Thinking