This Week in Literary History: John Steinbeck’s Dog Ate the First Draft of Of Mice and Men

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John Steinbeck’s dog
ate the first draft of
Of Mice and Men

On May 27, 1936, John Steinbeck, then 34 years old and working on the manuscript that would eventually become Of Mice and Men, sent a letter to his agent, Elizabeth Otis. In it, he thanks her for the $94 check, muses on the strangeness of criticism from England, and then reports:

Minor tragedy stalked. I don’t know whether I told you. My setter pup [Toby], left alone one night, made confetti of about half of my [manuscript]. Two months work to do over again. It sets me back. There was no other draft. I was pretty mad, but the poor little fellow may have been acting critically. 

Dog ate your homework? Typical cool kid excuse. Dog had a passionately destructive critical response to your homework? Only a novelist would think of that one. Steinbeck assures Otis that he only gave Toby “an ordinary spanking with his punishment flyswatter,” because he “didn’t want to ruin a good dog for a [manuscript] I’m not sure is good at all.” 

“I should imagine the new little manuscript will be ready in about two months,” he writes in closing. “I hope you won’t be angry at it. I think it has some thing, but can’t tell much yet.”

It did have something, as it turned out. Steinbeck was as good as his word (and Toby either had it wrong, or ate all the bad parts): Of Mice and Men was published the next year, to resounding praise, adapted in just about every medium available (including a celebrated play that he was weird about), and (eventually) canonization on high school reading lists everywhere. Not to mention lots of parodying. (It’s also frequently challenged.) Of course, he would also go on to write Great American Novel contender The Grapes of Wrath (ok, but is it as good as his horror story about a boy being chewed by his own gum?) along with several other iconic American novels (including a werewolf novel?), and set up shop in a hexagonal writing shack named after Sir Lancelot’s castle, accumulating all sorts of fascinating ephemera. And he did it all with a mug like Paul Walker. Bless.

SPONSORED BY THE HISTORY OF LITERATURE

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FOOD FOR THOUGHT

“Ain’t many guys travel around together. I don’t know why. Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared
of each other.”

In other (old)

news this week

Britain’s very first lending library is opened in Edinburgh by poet Allan Ramsay (May 25, 1726) • Anton Chekhov and Olga Knipper, the first actress ever to play Masha in Three Sisters, are married in near-secret (May 25, 1901) • Thomas Mann arrives on the island of Lido, in Venice, where he will be inspired to write Death in Venice (May 26, 1911) • Edith Wharton’s very first published story, “Mrs. Manstey’s View,” is accepted by Scribner’s magazine (May 26, 1891) • Dracula is published (May 26, 1897) • F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is first published in Collier’s magazine (May 27, 1922) • Sojourner Truth delivers a speech entitled “Ain’t I A Woman” at the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron (May 29, 1851) 

HOW I RUINED GOODNIGHT MOON FOR KAREN ON GOODREADS

“One of the things that young people need to know when they go into writing is that they ought to stop writing these stupid books that please people.
They should write as if they might fail at it. To succeed at something mediocre is worse than to fail at something great.” 

–JAMAICA KINCAID

Born this week in 1949

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