Now in November (Pulitzer Prize 1935)

Franklin Center, Pennsylvania: The Franklin Library, 1976. Reissue. Full-Leather. Near Fine/No Jacket. 0x0x0. Isom, Joseph. Spine faded, otherwise an excellent copy. 1976 Full-Leather. 200 pp. 8vo. Brown full leather, gilt titles and decorations, all edges gilt, silk moire endpapers, ribbon marker bound in. Two-panel illustration preceding title page and full-page illustrations in text by Joseph Isom. 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 women 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.