Blinkist: Serving curious minds.

One day, when the Scottish poet and farmer Robert Burns was out in the field, he found he’d destroyed a mouse’s nest with his plough. His outpouring of sympathy for the defenseless little creature – his poem “To a Mouse” – contains these famous lines: The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men Gang aft agley, An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, For promis’d joy! Or, in more familiar language, even the best of plans will often go wrong and cause us grief and pain. This is where John Steinbeck found the title for his 1937 novella Of Mice and Men – a brief but profoundly moving book that’s long been a cornerstone of American literature. Burns’s poem casts a long shadow over Steinbeck’s book – not only because the schemes of its two main characters, Lennie and George, are doomed to go awry, but also because of a stranger theme: inadvertent violence. Burns upended the mouse’s life by brute force – but completely by accident. As you’ll see in this Blink, Of Mice and Men repeatedly asks what h

One day, when the Scottish poet and farmer Robert Burns was out in the field, he found he’d destroyed a mouse’s nest with his plough. His outpouring of sympathy for the defenseless little creature – his poem “To a Mouse” – contains these famous lines: The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men Gang aft agley, An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, For promis’d joy! Or, in more familiar language, even the best of plans will often go wrong and cause us grief and pain. This is where John Steinbeck found the title for his 1937 novella Of Mice and Men – a brief but profoundly moving book that’s long be