Pulitzer Book Club Inclusion Guide
"Journey in the Dark"
by Martin Flavin
INCLUSION MILESTONES
1944
• GI Rights Bill gets resources for vets to attend college, buy homes and farms
• Supremes require States to make primary election voting accessible to all races
AUTHOR INSPIRATIONS
Young Flavin and his mother moved to Chicago after his father died. Martin Flavin attended U of Chicago, then worked on a newspaper, wrote short stories for magazines, and served in U.S. Army field artillery. For twelve years Flavin worked in the family wallpaper business, progressing from office boy to vice president. Flavin then wrote plays before becoming a novelist.
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Featured Reader
– Share your key take-away about inclusion in this book in a sentence or two.
– Write a paragraph or two (up to 250 words) to describe your thoughts on exclusion/inclusion in the book, why you related or did not connect with the book, and why you think reading, inclusion and dialog about inclusion matter.
– Identify the name and website address of a cause you support with an inclusive mission.
Poor boy’s journey to wealth as a businessman – and loneliness.
As he leaves home, older brother steals then sells bike kid brother worked all summer to buy.
Out of print.
Feels longer than 432 pages
Be a good person. A good person, not a great person.
Contrast:poverty, well-off, elite rich.
People who serve and those in power.
Bigotry:blacks, Irish, Germans, Jewsish, reds/pinks.
Opportunities in small town versus big city.
Labor versus management and child labor abuse.
Loneliness and loveless marriage. War and loss.
Mental illness, physical illness, disfigurement.
Roles, abuse of women. Younger woman/older man.
Expectations/needs of children, tweens, young adults, middle agers, and the aging.
Eat what rich Iowa turn-of-the-century people who lived on the Mississippi served to tweens for lunch: root beer from a bottle, salad, creamed chicken and biscuits, ice cream and cake.
“The hope of the world was in an idea – in an extension of it; in the leveling of frontiers, of nationalistic lines and racial boundaries, to the end that men and women and the products of their toil, might flow freely and unchallenged over all the land and seas.”
Aspirational. Somewhere you wish you belonged or could live someday.
How did youngsters realize their poverty?
Compare networks of the two brothers and their sisters & their influence over time, as well as the siblings' trajectories.
Why was it possible for the young man to rise from poverty and become a successful in business?
Give some examples people in your world who have risen up.
How did what happened in the barn affect the boy and the girl?
What did people do to attempt to fit in and keep others out?
What are your thoughts about reactions to the journalist/ journalism in the novel and the role of journalism today?
Compare bigotry in the novel to today’s climate.
Do motives matter more than actions? What actions were discordant with motives?
Talk about some historic events referenced – such as Titanic, WWI, WW2, stock market crash, labor strikes – and thoughts novel triggered about their effect on people.
Float down the Mississippi to a TBD small town in Iowa where you stay in the cheapest possible accommodation and admire its opposite. Then you’re off to Chicago where you can eat at a sad luncheonette or dine at Palmer House. Visit Driehaus Museum for a view into the Gilded Age, shop for retro wallpaper or a blue star sapphire ring. Visit Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago Money Museum and the American Writers Museum.
No adaptation of Journey in the Dark found. Flavin’s play, The Criminal Code, was made into a film in 1931.
Flavin wrote short stories, Broadway plays, screenplays and two works of non-fiction, as well as the novels Mr. Little John (1940), Corporal Cat (1941), Enchanted (1947), Cameron Hill: The History of a Crime, a Novel (1957).
Novels read in Journey in the Dark: Tom Sawyer,
A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Great Expectations.