Today, dear reader, we wind the dial back to 1937, a year when the world was still clawing its way out of the Great Depression’s chokehold. On May 28, John Steinbeck—that raw, unflinching scribe of the human struggle—dropped a literary bombshell with Of Mice and Men, first published as a novella in The American Mercury magazine before it landed on bookshelves later that year.  The book was a deep dive into the shattered dreams of two drifters, George and Lennie, chasing the American Dream in a world that’s nothing but dust and broken promises.

Steinbeck was not one to mess around. His lean, razor-sharp prose slices through the page like my switchblade, laying bare the brutal loneliness and fragile hope of an era where survival was a daily gamble. You can feel the weight of the time in every line—the desperation, the fleeting glimmers of something better, always just out of reach. It’s storytelling that doesn’t hold your hand or whisper sweet nothings; it grabs you by the collar and forces you to stare into the abyss of a society on its knees. And even now, nearly a century later, its legacy burns through American literature, a haunting reminder of what happens when you dare to look away from the underbelly of the human condition.

N.P.: “Are They Real or Not – Special Version” – Boys Don’t Cry