The dog ate my homework is an excuse most of us have heard. John Steinbeck had a rather more painful version: his puppy got to the manuscript of Of Mice and Men.

In May 1936, he wrote to his literary agent, Elizabeth Otis, with the bad news. Toby, left alone one night, had chewed up about half of his manuscript book. There was no other draft. Steinbeck estimated that two months of work would have to be done again.

An unexpected critic

Anyone who has lost a piece of writing can imagine the sinking feeling. Today we might search a backup folder or hope that an earlier version has been saved. Steinbeck was facing damaged handwritten pages and the task of rebuilding what was missing.

He was angry, he told Otis. Yet the letter also found a little humour in the disaster: perhaps the puppy had been acting as a critic. It is a wonderfully human glimpse of a famous writer—frustrated by an ordinary household mishap, but still able to make a joke about his own work.

The story survived

Steinbeck returned to the writing. Of Mice and Men appeared in 1937, and Toby's interruption became a small, memorable episode in the life of a much larger book.

A little handwritten fragment of the damaged draft also survived. It appeared in the Bonhams catalog of the Mary Steinbeck Dekker family collection in 2023: a rough-edged scrap linking that domestic disaster to the novel readers know.

There is something comforting about the distance between a finished book and the untidy life behind it. On a shelf, a novel can look inevitable. Before it reaches the shelf, there may be setbacks, lost pages—and a puppy who has no idea what he has interrupted.

The pages had to be rewritten. The book still reached its readers. And Toby earned a place in literary history without writing a word.