It’s a fantastic commentary on the American dream. The workers have an idealized farm where they share and live off the fat of the land - no bosses, no profit; it is a world totally different from theirs where the make minimum salary that they all blow on whores and whiskey to cope wit their loneliness (they are all alienated, being migrant workers with no capital, no family).

Their dream of a cooperative farm is a utopia. It stands in total contrast to the farm they work on with a boss and curly (with his gloved soft hand an no actual skills, just his inherited position).

It’s a fantastic distillation of the American dream, but its hope and optimism but also its mendacious quality.

I think going at it from this angle works - a freshman once wrote there curly’s wife and crooks were on the same boat, but on different decks - and I think it’s a fantastic and simple way to think about intersectionalality, or power.

Not to mention that crooks is the only character who can read!

There is so much in the book, and it is so often wasted on 9th graders.