Now In November by Josephine W. Johnson

"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. It has been a long year, longer and more full of meaning than all those ten years that went before it. There were nights when I felt that we were moving toward some awful and hopeless hour, but when that hour came it was broken up and confused because we were too near, and I did not even quite realize that it had come.

In 1935 Josephine W. Johnson was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her novel Now In November.  I had never heard of this novel or author but the plot, a family trying to survive on a farm during the Great Depression, interested me.  It's an era I have always been curious about and maybe overly romanticized with images of people finding inventive ways of cooking and saving and the lessons that can help us today.  But reading Now In November is an eye opener as to what life was really like during the Great Depression and there was nothing romantic about it.

Now in November is set on a farm in the Midwest in which the Haldmarne family: father, mother and their three daughters, Kerrin, Marget and Merle try to survive a season of drought. The daughters are very different.  Kerrin the eldest has a fiery temper.  The youngest daughter Merle in comparison has an inner peace that Marget admires.  Marget the middle daughter is the worrier and also a thoughtful and observant narrator:

"And then it came to me as it did at times when the woods seemed all answer and healing and more than enough to live for, that maybe they wouldn’t be always ours—that a drouth or a too-wet year or even a year over-good when everyone else had too much to sell—could snatch them away from us, and a scratch on a piece of paper could cancel a hundred acres and all our lives" 

Now In November encompasses one fateful year in the life of this family and what they go though which is considerable.  I had so many passages underlined that it was hard to know what to share.  Marget has so much to tell us not only about farm life but about the toll that looming poverty can tale on a family or on anyone.  Is it safer therefore to live without too much hope.  Marget wrestles with these questions which are just as relevant today.

The Pulitzer comittee knew what they were doing in 1935 when they awarded Josephine Winslow Johnson their highest honor.  Now in November is not a light read. There is tragedy and heartbreak in this novel but alot to reflect upon as well.