num_pages: 288
description: Brilliant, evocative, poetic, savage, this Pulitzer Prize-winning first novel (1934) written when Josephine Winslow Johnson was only 24, depicts a white, middle-class urban family that is turned into dirt-poor farmers by the Depression and the great drought of the thirties. The novel moves through a single year and, at the same time, a decade of years, from the spring arrival of the family at their mortgaged farm to the winter 10 years later, when the ravages of drought, fire, and personal anguish have led to the deaths of two of the five. Like Ethan Frome, the relatively brief, intense story evokes the torment possible among people isolated and driven by strong feelings of love and hate that, unexpressed, lead inevitably to doom. Reviewers in the thirties praised the novel, calling its prose "profoundly moving music," expressing incredulity "that this mature style and this mature point of view are those of a young woman in her twenties," comparing the book to "the luminous work of Willa Cather," and, with prescience, suggesting that it "has that rare quality of timelessness which is the mark of first-rate fiction."
language: English
title: Now in November
titlecomplete: Now in November
genres: Classics, American, Historical, Novels, Historical Fiction, 20th Century, Literature, Literary Fiction, Fiction, Americana
ratings_count: 1757
places: The United States of America
awards: awardedAt: -1104508800000
name: Pulitzer Prize
category: Novel
publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY