Now In November By Josephine Winslow Johnson

Now in November

Now in November

A lost gem of twentieth-century literature, Josephine Johnson’s 1934 Pulitzer Prize–winning “exquisite…heartbreakingly real” (The New York Times Book Review) novel follows a year in the life of a family struggling to survive the Dust Bowl. Published when Josephine Johnson was only twenty-four years old, Now in November made Johnson the youngest ever winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1935. It is a beautifully told account of one farming family’s challenges to scrape by and earn a living from mortgaged land over the course of a single year, narrated by one of three sisters—the introspective and thoughtful Margaret. As the household is ravaged by Depression-era hardship and the environmental blights of the Dust Bowl, the family’s unique vulnerabilities are pushed to a breaking point. In a style typical of Johnson’s body of work, Now in November is strikingly ahead of its time, grappling with questions of mental health, worker’s rights, as well as gender, race, and class and is ready to be rediscovered by a new generation of readers.

Now in November

Poetic, evocative, and savage, this Pulitzer Prize-winning first novel (1934) depicts a white, middle-class urban family that becomes dirt-poor farmers as a result of the Depression and the great drought of the 1930s. The novel moves through the seasons of a single year--and at the same time, a decade of years--from the spring arrival of the family to winter ten years later, when they have faced the ravages of drought, fire, and personal anguish. Like Ethan Frome, the story evokes the torment possible among people isolated and driven by powerful--but unexpressed--feelings of love and hate.