John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men

 Crooks said gently, "Maybe you can see now.  You got George.  You know he's goin' to come back.  S'pose you didn't have nobody.  S'pose you couldn't come into the bunk house and play rummy 'cause you was black.  S'pose you had to sit out here an' read books.  Sure you could play horseshoes till it got dark, but then you got to read books.  Books ain't no good.  A guy needs somebody -- to be near him."  He whined, "A guy goes nuts if he ain't got nobody.  Don't make no difference who the guy is long as he's with you.  I tell ya," he cried, "I tell ya a guy gets too lonely an' he gets sick."

The deep green pool of the Salinas River was still in the late afternoon.  Already the sun had left the valley to go climbing up the slopes of the Gabilan mountains, and the hill tops were rosy in the sun.  But by the pool among the mottled sycamores, a pleasant shade had fallen.

John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men (Viking, 1937)

On September 5 I wrote about Lewis Milestone's film of Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men; now that I've read the book (a novella of about one hundred pages) I can see how closely the book and the play made from it were followed, at least in terms of the characters and the dialogue.  One thing that was missing in the movie was Steinbeck's constrast between the beauty of the landscape and of nature and the ugliness of human behavior, a contrast that fatally squeezes Lennie and George and their dreams as well as those of the other bindlestiffs (Steinbeck was one himself).