Study Questions
1. Why has Crooks been able to accumulate more personal items than the other ranch hands?

2. What reason does Crooks first give for Lennie not being welcome in his room?

3. According to Crooks, why does a person need a companion?

4. What is Crooks’s initial response to Candy’s account of the dream farm and what evidence is there that his attitude changes?

5. According to Curley’s wife, why are the men afraid to talk to her when there is more than one present?

6. Why doesn’t Curley’s wife like talking to her husband?

7. What reason does Candy give when he says that they are no longer afraid that Curley’s wife will get them fired?

8. What makes Crooks so bold as to confront Curley’s wife and tell her to leave his room?

9. How does Candy finally make Curley’s wife leave the barn?

10. What does George say about Candy and Lennie visiting with Crooks?

Answers
1. Because of the type of job he has and because Crooks is crippled, he is more permanent than the other men, so he can accumulate personal items without having to worry about how he will carry them with him to the next job.

2. Crooks says at first that Lennie is not welcome in his room because Crooks is not welcome in the bunkhouse.

3. Crooks says that a person who stays alone too long goes “nuts.”

4. Crooks says that the dream will never materialize. He says he has seen hundreds of men chasing the same dream and never catching it. But when he hears that they have the money for the farm in the bank, he becomes more convinced and even offers to work for free if they will let him come with them.

5. Curley’s wife says that the men are “scared of each other... scared the rest is goin’ to get something on you.”

6. Curley’s wife doesn’t like talking to her husband because all he ever wants to talk about is beating up people.

7. Candy explains that they are no longer afraid because they now have somewhere else to go—their own farm.

8. He forgets his own limitations as a black man of the 1930s because Lennie and Candy have come in and treated him as an equal. For a moment, he later explains, he forgot how powerless he really is there.

9. Candy gets Curley’s wife to leave the barn by telling her that he has heard the other men returning from town.

10. George tells them that they should not be in Crooks’s room and that they should not have told him about the farm.