Now in November
by Josephine Winslow Johnson
Summary
A family of five moves onto a mortgaged farm at the start of the Depression, and one of the three daughters tells you, from the November at the far end of it, what ten years there did to them.
The narrator is Marget, the middle sister, watchful and inward. Her father Arnold Haldmarne lost his job and put everything into land he can never quite get ahead of. Her older sister Kerrin is unstable from the first pages and getting worse, and the youngest, Merle, is the strong one. A neighbouring farmer's son, Grant Koven, comes to help with the work, and both Marget and Kerrin want him, and he wants Merle.
Then the drought arrives, the crops fail, the milk cheque shrinks, and the mortgage does what mortgages do. A fire breaks out on the farm and Marget's mother is caught in it, and the long weeks of her dying run alongside the harvest. Kerrin cuts her wrist in the barn, and it is Grant who finds her.
That inventory makes it sound unrelenting, and it is not, quite. Johnson writes in a close, poetic prose that spends as much time on light, weather and fields as on catastrophe, and the love inside the family is drawn as carefully as the pressure on it.
It is short, around two hundred and thirty pages, and reads in a couple of sittings.
Best for readers who want the Depression farm novel five years before The Grapes of Wrath, in a quieter register and from inside a woman's head.
Historical Context & Significance
Now in November won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1935. Josephine Johnson was twenty four, and she remains the youngest winner of the fiction prize, nine decades later.
It was her first book, published in 1934 while the drought it describes was still on the front pages, and readers have noted how far ahead of its moment it reaches: mental illness, farm debt, the position of women and of hired labour, all handled inside what looks like a regional novel.
Johnson never wrote another novel with the same reach, and did not try to. She became an essayist, a pacifist and an environmentalist, and her 1969 book The Inland Island, a month by month account of a year on her wild thirty seven acres in Ohio, became a bestseller and the other pillar of her reputation. Simon and Schuster returned Now in November to print in the 2020s, and it is usually read now alongside the Dust Bowl documents it quietly preceded.