George and Lennie, itinerant workers during the Depression, dream of a little farm where they can live off the fat of the land. Lennie is strong and simple; George is his protector. Steinbeck wrote this as a 'play-novelette,' and its compression gives it the force of Greek tragedy. The ending is inevitable from the first page, which does not make it less devastating. The dream of the farm, repeated like a liturgy, is America's dream of escape from wage labor, from loneliness, from history itself. The dream does not survive.