Literary Fiction · DarkA Missouri farm family in the Depression, told by the middle daughter
Now in November
A small Missouri farm family in the 1930s, remembered by the middle daughter
Now in November was published in 1934 by Simon and Schuster and was Josephine Johnson's first novel. It is set on a small Missouri farm during the 1930s, when financial disaster hit small farmers. The middle daughter of the family narrates, tracing her growing understanding of her sister's illness as the family's private struggles play out against the Depression's economic hardship.
More about this book
Who
The middle daughter of the family, who narrates, and her sister, whose illness she gradually comes to understand.
World
A small Missouri farm in the 1930s, during the Depression.
What makes it different
It won the 1935 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making Johnson, at 24, the youngest person to win it. Encyclopedia.com praises its nature description and its close attention to the narrator's limited point of view, and says it more closely resembles the naturalism of Hardy and Zola than the protest fiction of Sinclair and Steinbeck.
Feel
Elegiac and close to the land.
Page count and cover shown for: Selected edition
Behind the book
Johnson won the Pulitzer Prize at age 24 for her first novel, the youngest person to win the prize for fiction.
Source: Wikipedia, Encyclopedia.com
Further reading
- Now in NovemberWikipedia
- Johnson, Josephine WinslowEncyclopedia.com