John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men’ is an emotive novel which was written in the 1930’s in the midst of the Great Depression. It is about two main characters George and his simple-minded friend Lennie and the struggle the struggle they go through in order to gain the subsistence of life. In this story John Steinbeck introduces minor characters that help describe who help describe what was going and they help build an idea of the context in the readers mind. In this essay I will explore how John Steinbeck presents theses minor characters. I will write about how these characters are introduced and their importance to the novel. The two characters I will be looking at are Crooks and Curley’s wife.

Crooks is a key character in this book. He is the only black person in the novel and throughout he is continuously abused. John Steinbeck has written about him to show how racism was a norm during that era. Crooks was mostly referred to as a nigger and is isolated from others. Crooks, the Negro buck, had his bunk in the harness room. You can infer that Crooks was openly referred to as Negro. Crooks is an intelligent individual who spends a lot his time reading. Out of his few possessions he has numerous amount of books, gold-rimmed spectacles, a tattered dictionary and a mauled copy of the civil code for 1905. There were battered magazines and a few dirty books on a special shelf of his bunk. Crooks isolated position allows him to oversee the acts of the workers on the ranch this