Pulitzer Book Club Inclusion Guide
"Now in November"
by Josephine Winslow Johnson
INCLUSION MILESTONES
1935
• Wagner Act guarantees rights to organize trade unions, collectively bargain, and strike
• Canned beer available
• Alcoholics Anonymous founded
AUTHOR INSPIRATIONS
Johnson had three sisters and wrote Now in November during the first dust bowl drought. Her uncle had a dairy farm with tenant farmer neighbors who Johnson viewed as people almost without hope.
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Featured Reader Wanted!
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.
Working, waiting, worrying, hoping, emoting as calamities strike Dustbowl farm.
Knife throw and bloodshed at birthday party.
Debut novel of a 24-year old woman – the youngest Pulitzer fiction winner.
Quick read: 231 pages, 5.5 hours
Do the right thing, even if it causes pain to someone you love.
Family slow to identify mental illness; lack of support creates stress, conflict, career failure, tragedy.
Drought hurts all; scale of suffering varies by class.
Clear racism/foreclosure on kind, giving black tenant farmer. White farmer's fate ongoing struggle and debt. Compensation for farmhands/labor meager.
Men make decisions solo. Women pigeonholed. Adolescent girls try to help hungry, struggling man.
Preacher demands family leave a church service because they are not members. Unrequited love abounds.
Pickled peaches (check seal), corn (use coveted last jar) and whatever else survived canning. Finish with time-consuming-to-create yet homely birthday cake that won’t get served, or watch bitterly as someone eats two slices of cake containing last of the molasses.
“The things we felt most are hardest to put into words. Hate is always easier to speak of than love.”
Doomed, minimally furnished farmhouse – think poverty, not Martha Stewart -- but with arresting view.
What do the three farm families tell us about class distinctions, and social mores?
What do the sisters reveal about living in isolation?
What did this novel reveal about parenting?
How does this novel make you feel about fram workers?
Describe the racism in the novel.
How do people interact during/after dire events in the novel?
What were the gender-driven tropes and behaviors?
Talk about expulsion from a church and being fired as a teacher.
How has our country addressed the problems identified in this novel – climate change, racism, social and farmworker justice, mental illness, access to healthcare, the educational system, and animal welfare – since the novel was written? What should be done?
After her win, Johnson became an activist writer/protestor then was dropped by her publisher. Channel your inner Johnson: seek out and participate in a peaceful protest for social justice, perhaps in Missouri where Johnson was born. Johnson was environmentalist who reverted Ohio farmland. Consider going to an environmental preserve; volunteer /spend time noticing nature's beautiful details.
No adaptations uncovered.
Jordanstown (1937), Wildwood (1945), and The Dark Traveler (1963), plus short stories, essays, poetry; non-fiction works include Seven Houses: A Memoir of Time and Places (1973) and The Inland Island (1968) a nature chronicle of seasons at Ohio farm Johnson and husband reverted to wilderness.