Now in November, Josephine Johnson
Now in November, Josephine Johnson
2 Rating(s)
List: $18.99 | Sale: $13.29
Club: $9.49

Now in November

Author: Josephine Johnson

Narrator: Carlotta Brentan

Unabridged: 5 hr 24 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 07/19/2022


Synopsis

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.

About Josephine Johnson

Josephine W. Johnson (1910–1990) was a novelist and nature writer who in 1935 became the youngest person to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her first novel, Now in November. She began her studies at Washington University and went on to write eleven books over the course of her life. When it was originally published in 1969, The Inland Island, her lyrical examination of a year on her rambling thirty-seven-acre farm in Ohio, became a beloved and critically acclaimed bestseller.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Michael on September 21, 2021

This book won the 1932 Pulitzer and is sort of a precursor to Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. It deals with a drought in Oregon and how it affects a poor family of settler farmers and their three growing, but all very different, daughters. I found the text was quite beautiful and the protagonists v......more

Goodreads review by Scott on April 13, 2018

Now in November is arguably the most relentlessly tragic novel I've read and, yet, I loved it. Josephine W. Johnson tells the grinding story of a year (and more) in the life of a farming family during the Dust Bowl. In it, she paints a highly detailed picture of the bucolic life that preceded this e......more

Goodreads review by Kingofmusic on November 29, 2023

Poetisch-lyrische Entschleunigung „November ist für mich das Norwegen des Jahres.“ (Emily Dickinson) Allgemein kommt der November ja nicht gut weg, aber allein durch das einleitende Zitat sollte man ins Nachdenken kommen – ganz unrecht hat Frau Dickinson nicht ha ha ha. Und auch die Ich-Erzählerin Marg......more


Quotes

"Brentan’s delivery is warm and intelligent, her Marget full of the courage of youth. We know the rains won’t come in time. Brentan’s Marget doesn’t, which makes her hope heartbreaking."