Crooks is a key character in this book. He is the only black person in the novel and throughout he is continuously abused. John Steinbeck has written about him to show how racism was a norm during that era. Crooks was mostly referred to as a nigger and is isolated from others. Crooks, the Negro buck, had his bunk in the harness room. You can infer that Crooks was openly referred to as Negro. Crooks is an intelligent individual who spends a lot his time reading. Out of his few possessions he has numerous amount of books, gold-rimmed spectacles, a tattered dictionary and a mauled copy of the civil code for 1905. There were battered magazines and a few dirty books on a special shelf of his bunk. Crooks isolated position allows him to oversee the acts of the workers on the ranch this