The Ruin of “Best-Laid Plans”: Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and Yates’s Revolutionary Road

Abstract:In the centuries since the United States became a nation, much has been written about the American Dream, which is often defined by a longing for home, independence, and security. Some works of John Steinbeck, however, encapsulate the antithesis of this national Dream in portraying the denial or collapse of hoped-for success and happiness. His Of Mice and Men (1937), to illustrate, speaks to failed American aspirations that range from the longing for home, independence, and equal rights, to the need for humane treatment of all. Twenty-four years later, Richard Yates also wrote an acclaimed work depicting the anti–American Dream, his novel Revolutionary Road (1961). These two novels share commonalities that may be analyzed in terms of characterization, themes, and their representation of the sources of the Dream’s oppressors. In Steinbeck’s last work, the nonfiction America and Americans (1966), he describes an America that eerily matches the United States that Yates portrays in his fictional Revolutionary Road. In essence, these two significant novels, Of Mice and Men and Revolutionary Road, written twenty-four years apart and each representative of its times, serve as parallels for capturing the antithesis of the American Dream—an antithesis still prevalent in literature and life.