Books like Of Mice and Men
When the world offers someone vulnerable no safe future, what can love still demand of the person who promised to protect them? These novels approach that question with Steinbeck’s compassion, clarity, and refusal of easy consolation.
If you liked Of Mice and Men, you’ll love these
Not lookalikes — kindred books. Each one shares something essential with Of Mice and Men, and we tell you exactly what.
A young Black man in 1940s Louisiana has been sentenced to death, and Grant Wiggins, a disillusioned schoolteacher, is asked to help him face that fate with dignity. As in Of Mice and Men, the terrible outcome is established early; the suspense lies in what one human being can give another before it arrives.
Gaines writes with Steinbeck-like directness, making ordinary gestures carry enormous moral weight. He is equally alert to crushed aspirations, compromised caretakers, and the stubborn worth of people whom society has dismissed. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, this is a devastating but ultimately enlarging novel—one that asks whether companionship can succeed even when rescue is impossible.
In a worn-down California gym, an aging former boxer recognizes talent in a younger man and urges him into the ring. Gardner is less interested in sporting triumph than in the precarious hopes of people living from one paycheck, harvest, drink, or fight to the next.
Readers who loved Steinbeck’s migrant workers will recognize the unsentimental tenderness: these characters dream not because success is likely, but because imagining another life makes the present bearable. Gardner’s lean dialogue and exact physical detail never romanticize defeat or mock those enduring it. His only novel, published in 1969 and later revived by NYRB Classics, Fat City has acquired the fierce reputation of a neglected masterpiece. It is short, bruising, and nearly impossible to forget.
McCullers builds her novel around John Singer, a quiet man who becomes a confidant to several isolated people in a Southern mill town. Each pours private longings into his attentive silence: ambitions, grievances, visions of justice, and the simple desire to be understood.
The kinship with Of Mice and Men lies in McCullers’s radical sympathy for outsiders—and in her knowledge that closeness does not guarantee true understanding. Her characters can be awkward, selfish, funny, and heartbreaking at once; she never reduces them to symbols of suffering. Published when McCullers was only twenty-three, this astonishing debut became an enduring American classic. Anyone moved by Steinbeck’s tenderness toward lonely, ill-fitted people should not miss its haunting chorus of unheard voices.