“Now in November I can see our years as a whole. This autumn is like both an end and a beginning to our lives, and those days which seemed confused with the blur of all things too near and too familiar are clear and strange now” (opening lines).

Missouri-born Josephine Winslow Johnson was just 24-years-old when she published her debut novel Now in November. She had recently attended college classes at Washington University in St. Louis as an undergraduate student before dropping out sans a degree in 1931. She then moved into her mother’s house where she began writing fiction. She quickly published several poems in magazines like The Atlantic Monthly in 1931 (“The Quiet Ones,” “The Stranger,” and “His Children”) as well as a short story in The Atlantic Monthly in 1932 (“August Evening”). Amazingly, with only a few published works to her name, she was rapidly pursued by a major publisher. In those days, publishers were considerably more aggressive in seeking new talent, even during the Great Depression when funding was scarce, and thus Clifton Fadiman of Simon & Schuster (who later became a celebrated cultural figure himself) fervently pursued Josephine Johnson, despite the fact that she was a young college dropout who had only published a few pieces here and there, however it was clearly a wise decision. Josephine Johnson was quickly compared to Emily Dickinson and Emily Brontë. The result of her book deal was Now In November, a novel written while living in her mother’s attic in Webster Groves, Missouri. Even more remarkable, it became a run-away spectacular success, selling out its first edition five days before it was published and eventually winning the coveted Pulitzer Prize in 1935. To this day, she remains the youngest novelist to ever win the Pulitzer Prize (at age 24).

Often overshadowed by John Steinbeck’s definitive epic dustbowl saga The Grapes of Wrath (a fellow Pulitzer Prize-winner), Josephine Johnson’s Now In November covers a grueling decade in the life of a Midwestern tenant farming family as they scratch out a meager living during the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and the subsequent drought of the ’30s. It begins during an uncertain November wherein the future starts to seem grim, and it ends ten years later in a harrowing, sorrowful November for the family. This poetic, lyrical novel is narrated by Marget Haldmarne, an introspective middle child of the Haldmarne family, who describes the immense difficulties of her youth. Thus, Marget serves as the most important character in the book –we rely almost exclusively on her memory and framing for the plot to make sense (apparently, Josephine Johnson feared her name “Marget” was too similar to “Margot” who was a character featured in Caroline Miller’s Lamb in his Bosom, a bestseller and Pulitzer Prize-winner the prior year in 1934).

The novel is told in three parts: “Prelude and Spring,” “The Long Drouth,” and “Year’s End.” Now In November begin with a string of Arcadian passages describing beautifully-crafted, warm visions of orchard-lush hillsides lining the Missouri countryside, but as these bucolic somber first-person reflections continue throughout the novel, the tone becomes increasingly bleak and harrowing. Johnson described her prose style as “poetry with its feet on the ground.” We are introduced to a variety of characters through ten-year-old Marget’s eyes –her distant father, her demure but caring mother, and two sisters: the elder Kerrin, who is somewhat erratic, volatile, and even manic (she inherited her father’s temper as well as his red hair), and the younger Merle, who is the more calm and collected of the bunch. Like many distant neighbors, the Haldmarne family resides on a heavily mortgaged farm. When an unforgiving drought strikes land, they struggle mightily with severe poverty and indebtedness. The Haldmarnes are often compared to their neighbors, the Ramseys, a family of black tenant farmers with nine children who are evicted from their home. And the stigma of poverty hands over the Haldmarnes throughout their rural community –they are even forbidden from accepting communion at their church.

At the beginning of the novel, Arnold Haldmarne, the 57 year-old financially strapped patriarch of the Haldmarne family, is celebrating his birthday when his daughter Kerrin, the perennial wild-child of the family, decides to demonstrate her newfound knife-throwing skills which causes a chaotic scuffle leading to the tragic death of the family dog. And this is only the beginning of the family troubles. Soon, a drought hits the Midwest, drying up the land and preventing anything from growing. All the tenant farmers fall deeper into debt, and many begin leaving the region. A nearby ranch-hand named Grant comes to work on the Haldmarne farm and Marget becomes quite smitten with Grant, but he is actually fond of her sister, Merle.

Tragedy after tragedy continues to strike the Haldmarnes. Rain refuses to fall from the sky, the ground crumbles beneath them, a massive fire strikes, and Marget’s mother, Willa, falls severely ill due to burns on her body. She lies suffering in the house and shortly thereafter, we see starving people begin to emerge throughout the dry, cracked land, and Kerrin commits suicide. Grant finds her body in the barn, her wrist slit. Shouldering the burden of such hopelessness, Grant decides to part ways with the Haldmarnes, much to Marget’s sorrow. In the end, Marget’s mother dies and the family is left alone in isolation.

Clifton Fadiman, editor at Simon & Shuster, wrote the following about Now In November: “If Emily Dickinson had turned to prose sh would have written a book like this. It has that indefinable authority, that aura of hidden reserve, strength, and beauty that strike right at the core of things. It is the most beautiful and moving book I have been fortunate enough to read in years.”

Josephine Winslow Johnson sure knows how to craft some beautifully enduring prose, even as it masks the barren, wintry subject matter of this book. It seems clear that the early Pulitzer Prizes had a penchant for selecting rather despondent books about struggling farmers, though they somehow missed Willa Cather’s best novels (only Willa Cather’s One Of Ours won the Pulitzer Prize —O Pioneers! was published a bit too early too be considered and my My Ántonia was neglected in 1919). Nevertheless, I was fortunate enough to read a first edition copy of Now In November as it sat collecting dust at my local library, waiting for the next brave explorer to come along and venture through the Pulitzer Prize-winners.

In 1934, Edith H. Walton of the The New York Times Book Review wrote a fawning review of Now In November, dubbed “A First Novell of Distinction” –“There is nothing fumbling or tentative about ‘Now In November.’ Firmly wrought, poetic in the best sense, the product of a highly individual mind, it is complete and self-sustaining. To speak of it as ‘promising’ would be gross patronage.”

In closing, author Ash Davidson has published some poignant reflections on Now In November (as shared on LitHub). Here are some key bookended quotations from her memorable essay: “Quiet and surprising, Josephine Johnson’s Now in November is more than a novel about the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. This is a book about thirst—the land’s thirst for rain, yes, but also human thirsts for love, for justice, for the relative security a little money can bring… To absorb the true power and beauty of Now in November, it helps to read the book through to its blazing end and then loop back to the opening chapters. After the smoke has cleared, you can walk alongside Marget again, looking back on the last ten years with the magnifying glass of hindsight, bearing the full weight of the past, as she does.” I humbly recommend that readers seek out Ash Davidson’s wonderful reflections on Now in November –this essay also appears as an introduction to the recent re-issue of the novel (in addition to a re-release of Now in November, Simon & Schuster also recently republished Josephine Johnson’s The Inland Island, a collection of essays Johnson wrote on her Ohio farm covering a wide array of topics, from ecology to the Vietnam War).

---

Notable Quotations:

“We left a world all wrong, confused, and shouting at itself, and came hereto one that was no less hard and no less ready to thwart a man or cast him out, but gave him something, at least, in return” (6-7).

“This is not all behind us now, outgrown and cut away. It is of us and changed only in form. I like to pretend that the years alter and revalue, but begin to see that time does nothing but enlarge without mutation. You have a chance here – more than a chance, it is thrust upon you – to be alone and still. To look backward and forward and see with clarity. To see the years behind, the essential loneliness, and the likeness of one year. to the next. The awful order of cause and effect. Root leading to stem and inevitable growth, and the same sap moving through tissue of different years, marked like the branches with inescapable scars of growth” (69-70).

“By June things were shriveling brown, but not everything dried and ugly yet. It was not so much the heat and dryness then as the fear of what they would do. I could imagine a kind of awful fascination in the very continuousness of this drouth, a wry perfection in its slow murder of all things” (113, the word “drought” is referred to as “drouth”).

“The living itself was easy enough to do when the days were full of thought, and clothes wearing down fast to bone, soaking up dirt like sponges” (127).

“I wondered why the people were here [church] and if God was here, and the doubt and questioning began again -that doubt which had run like a tunneled stream, coming to surface at unforeseen and unwanted times before, and has gone through all the years afterward… what had they come for, and did they believe what they heard, and did they live by it afterward at all?” (136-137).

“…it is almost two months now since her death, and we have gone on living. It is November and the year dying fast in the storms… We have had our mortgage extended, but it does not mean that we are free or that much is really changed. Only a longer time to live, a little longer to fight, fear shoved off into an indefinite future” (225).

“Love and the old faith are gone. Faith gone with Mother. Grant gone. But there is the need and the desire left, and out of these hills may they come again. I cannot believe this is the end. Nor can I believe that death is more than the blindness of those living. And if this is only the consolation of a heart in its necessity, or that easy faith born of despair, it does not matter, since it gives us courage somehow to face the mornings. Which is as much as the heart can ask at times” (231 -closing paragraph of the novel).

On The 1935 Pulitzer Prize Decision:

The 1935 Novel Jury was once again composed of returning members: Jefferson B. Fletcher (Chair), Robert M. Lovett, and Albert B. Paine. It was another year of indecision as the jury vacillated between eight novels: Slim by W. W. Haines (the story of a young electrical worker in love with his job), The Folks by Ruth Suckow (which dealt with the fortunes of a middle-class family), Now in November by Josephine Winslow Johnson, Goodbye to the Past by W. R. Burnett, The Foundry by Albert Halper (a proletarian novel about industry and laborers), Land of Plenty by Robert Cantwell, The American by Louis Dodge, and So Red the Rose by Stark Young (a best-selling post-Civil War novel). Chairman Fletcher frankly reported that there was “no outstanding novel” as the jury struggled to select a winner. Eventually the Board simply selected Now In November, perhaps at the behest of Chairman Fletcher.

• Jefferson Butler Fletcher (1865-1946) was born in Chicago, served in the American Field Ambulance Services during World War I, and was educated at Harvard and Bowdoin College. He was a long-serving professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University (from 1904-1939) and was considered a foremost expert on the Italian Renaissance and Dante. In his obituary in The New York Times, it was noted that he served on the Pulitzer Novel Jury for “several years.” Sadly, his son died in an automobile accident in 1926, Fletcher also had a daughter.
• Robert Morss Lovett (1870-1956) was a Bostonian who studied at Harvard. He taught literature at the University of Chicago for many years, he was associate editor of The New Republic, served as governor secretary of the Virgin Islands, and was a political activist –he was accused of being a communist by the Dies Committee which forced him out of his secretary position. He was often on the frontlines of left-leaning picket lines, and helped launch the careers of several young writers, including John Dos Passos. In later years, his wife became a close friend and associate of Jane Addams and the couple lived at Hull House for a spell.
• Albert Bigelow Paine (1861-1937) was born in Bedford, Massachusetts and grew up throughout the Midwest. He worked as a photographer and became a full-time writer living in New York and abroad in Europe. He became friends with Mark Twain and served as Twain’s biographer and also wrote travel books, novels, and children’s stories. In France, he wrote two books abut Joan of Arc which earned him the title of Chevalier from the Legion of Honour.

The biggest change in 1935 was yet another revision of the Pulitzer Prize criteria (the fourth such change in its two decades of existence). The Prize was now to be granted to: “a distinguished novel published during the year by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.”

Who Is Josephine Winslow Johnson?

Josephine Winslow Johnson (1910-1990) was born in Kirkwood, Missouri into a Quaker family. She attended Washington University of St. Louis from 1926-1931, before departing without a degree. After leaving the university, Ms. Johnson moved into her mother’s attic in Webster Groves, Missouri. Here she began writing poetry and her debut novel Now In November (1934) which would later win the Pulitzer Prize. While Now In November is her most widely celebrated novel today, Ms. Johnson also published eleven more books in her lifetime –books of poetry, memoirs, and short story collections as well as novels. She was plucked wholly from obscurity thanks to the tireless efforts of Clifton Fadiman of Simon & Schuster –he initially discovered her writing in The Atlantic Monthly. It was an amazing opportunity for a young college dropout to secure a major book deal! After the publication of Now In November Simon & Schuster released a collection of her early short stories entitled Winter Orchard, which first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Vanity Fair, The St. Louis Review, and Hound & Horn. Of these stories, “Dark” won an O. Henry Award in 1934, and “John the Six” also won an O. Henry Award (third prize) the following year. Johnson continued writing short stories and won three more O. Henry Awards during her lifetime (for “Alexander in the Park” in 1942, “The Glass Pigeon” in 1943, and “Night Flight” in 1944).

Johnson was also a devoted social activist, advocating on behalf of the poor, disadvantaged, and dispossessed –she was arrested in 1936 on suspicion of encouraging cotton field workers to strike in Arkansas. She also co-founded a school with fellow author, Fanny Cook, in Copperville, St. Louis, an area populated mainly with African-American sharecroppers. With the rise of economic turmoil during the Great Depression, Johnson became more friendly toward progressive economic policies in the United States (she published a letter in Pictorial Review in 1935 wherein she announced the urgent need to reform the economic system). Her activism was often met with ire from her publisher and in the press, threatening her successful career amidst the backdrop of the Great Depression. By June 1935, Clifton Fadiman’s career had quickly grown beyond his editorial role at Simon & Schuster (by now, he was simply listed as a “literary advisor,” and left Josephine Johnson’s relationship at Simon & Schuster with editors Maria Leiper and Quincy Howe).

After Winter Orchard, she published Jordanstown (1937), the story of a young Midwesterner who edits a newspaper during the Depression while striving to become a voice for workers, and Year’s End (1937), a volume of poetry. In the former work, Johnson’s friendliness toward socialism was apparent, and the editing process led to some tension over Johnson’s political affiliation, while the novel was released to mixed reviews. Around this time, Josephine Johnson seems to have retreated from writing, as her meteoric literary career screeched to an abrupt halt in the late 1930s. Apparently records in her archive at Washington University in St. Louis (as discovered by Dr. Laura Rattray) reveal a box containing four surviving chapters of an unfinished novel in 1939 that was rejected outright by Simon & Schuster along with an attached note offering her the advice to “take a break” from writing altogether. The protagonist of the unpublished novel was a man named Buck Wrynne who spoke with an angry tone, in a quasi-stream-of-conscious style on the state of the world and its injustices (other characters include his brother Tom, wife Elizabeth, the family doctor Mac, and children Josie and Martin). No doubt, wounded by the criticism from her publisher, Johnson took a prolonged hiatus from her writing career, directing her energies elsewhere to other concerns, such as politics, activism, unions, mural painting, government rehabilitation farms, environmentalism, marriage and children. She published a children’s book Paulina: The Story of an Applebutter Tinpot (1939), which had been written several years beforehand, and a lone novella Wildwood (1946), about a frustrated young girl’s upbringing. Following this book, Johnson took an extended two-decade respite from writing.

Questions still linger as to what exactly happened to the once-promising career of Josephine Johnson –What caused her to stop publishing for a couple decades? Why did Simon & Schuster advise her to “take a break” from writing? Was there some sort of falling out between Johnson and Clifton Fadiman? Was Simon & Schuster disappointed with reviews/sales of her later works after Now In November? Were they upset about her political activism? Or did she simply decide to focus on other things besides writing (family, farm, activism and so on)? The truth eludes us, however Dr. Laura Rattray has written a wonderful essay entitled “Editing the 1930s: The Lost Work of Josephine Johnson” (I was fortunate enough to exchange messages with Dr. Rattray on this essay and I can highly recommend her work). Amidst a rising cultural fear of “godless communism” in the United States, it seems reasonable to suppose that Simon & Schuster no longer wished to boost an author that seemed openly friendly with socialism. Likewise, it is also reasonable to suppose that Josephine Johnson, recently married and a new mother, found meaning in her life elsewhere outside her writing career.

In 1942, Johnson had married Grant G. Cannon, editor in chief of the Farm Quarterly. They moved to Iowa City where she taught at the University of Iowa for several years, before relocating to Hamilton County, Ohio. Here, they settled on a farm outside Cincinnati. The couple had three children together (Terence, Ann, and Carol) and Johnson later returned to publishing with The Dark Traveler (1963), a story about the rehabilitation of a schizophrenic young man; and The Sorcerer’s Son (1965), another collection of stories. Lastly, she published The Inland Island (1969), a series of essays about nature and life on her farm in Ohio, which also features her thoughts on environmentalism as well as a polemic against the Vietnam War; this was followed by her slim memoir Seven Houses (1973), subtitled “A Memoir of Time and Places,” which used all the houses she lived in as a framework for self-reflection. Her final book was The Circle of Seasons (1974) with Dennis Stock, a collection of photography.

Sadly, much of Johnson’s writing has fallen out of print today and what remains of her corpus often sits upon dusty library shelves, mostly neglected and forgotten. Ms. Johnson died of pneumonia in 1990 at the age of 79. Her papers have since been preserved in an archive at Washington University in St. Louis.

---

Film Adaptation:

None.

---

Literary Context in 1934-1935:

• Nobel Prize for Literature: Not awarded.
• Per Publishers Weekly, the #1 bestselling novel in 1934 was Anthony Adverse by Hervey Allen. Other notable bestsellers that year included Lamb in His Bosom by Caroline Miller (the prior year’s Pulitzer Prize-winner).
• Ulysses by James Joyce was finally published in the United States following a lengthy trial.
• A performance of Coriolanus in Paris inspired the “February 6 Riots” which, in turn, were followed by a right-wing, pro-fascist series of publications.
• Tender Is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final completed novel, was published.
• A medieval manuscript of Le Morte d’Arthur used by Caxton was identified in the Fellows’ Library of Winchester College by the bibliophile Walter Fraser Oakeshott.
• Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller was published.
• The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain was published.
• Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie was published.
• I, Claudius by Robert Graves was published.
• Jonah’s Gourd Vine: A Novel by Zora Neale Hurston was published (her debut novel).
• Appointment in Samarra by John O’Hara was published (his debut novel).

---

Did The Right Book Win?

Primed for a renewed critical reappraisal –a Josephine Johnson renaissance if you will– Now In November offers a powerful outcry against poverty and injustice in America. In my view, it is an eminently defensible choice for the Pulitzer Prize in 1935. However, if compelled to offer secondary selections, I would likely consider Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald or Appointment in Samarra by John O’Hara.

---

Johnson, Josephine Winslow. Now In November. New York, Simon & Schuster, 1934.

With grateful acknowledgement to Dr. Laura Rattray.

Click here to return to my survey of the Pulitzer Prize Winners.