VALDOSTA — Two of the 20th century’s best-known characters will amble across the Mathis City Auditorium stage next week.

The Annette Howell Turner Center for the Arts Presenter Series hosts a professional, touring production of John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men.”

Best friends George and Lennie find themselves tested by misunderstanding and destiny, the cruelties of people and fate. While some may not immediately know the story, many will recognize the wily, tough, protective George and the lumbering, childlike giant Lennie.

These are the characters of the book that made Steinbeck famous in the 1930s, leading to subsequent characters and works such as Doc and the boys of “Cannery Row” and “Sweet Thursday,” the Joads of “Grapes of Wrath,” and the other works and people that led to Steinbeck earning the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Steinbeck took the title “Of Mice and Men” from a poem by Scottish poet Robert Burns. The 1785 poem, “To a Mouse, On Turning Her Up In Her Nest With The Plough,” refers to the famed line of “the best-laid plans o’ mice an’ men.”

Steinbeck went out into the world to find inspiration for the characters who peopled his books.

As a college student-writer, Steinbeck often ditched his studies and his writings to travel as a migrant worker, which is how he met the real people who would become his characters like the Joads, Doc, Lennie and George. There were Steinbeck’s many wives. His later-year travelings across America with his dog which became the source for his book, “Travels with Charley.”

“Of Mice and Men” elevated Steinbeck from a new novelist to an important novelist to a desired commodity in Hollywood and on Broadway — both picked up the tragic, matter-of-fact tragedy of Lennie and George and their rough-and-tumble world of day laborers on the farms of the Midwest in the 1930s.

In adapting his book for stage and screen, Steinbeck insisted that he remain true to the coarse language of his novel, because he felt that the language and charged situations of the book captured the character and world of the men he once worked with as a migrant worker. Anything less, any watering down of the language, would compromise the novel’s, and subsequently the play’s, authenticity.

SHOWTIME

Annette Howell Turner Center for the Arts Presenter Series hosts “Of Mice and Men.”

When: 3 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 8.

Where: Mathis City Auditorium, 2300 N. Ashley St.

Ticket: $45.