It's always easier to talk about hate than love

With Now, in November —a novel published in 1934 during the Great Depression—, author Josephine Johnson became the youngest winner of the Pulitzer Prize. We read the story narrated by Marget, who tries to piece together her family's life from the time she was ten years old. We learn about the events that unfold from her perspective, and as she grows older, we get a glimpse of the increasing devastation wrought by the circumstances of the time.

When the Haldmarne family leaves the city and arrives at an isolated, decaying farm besieged by drought, Marget and her two sisters (Kerran and Merle) know they are treading on uncertain and treacherous ground: their father warns them that the land has been mortgaged, that the family is. They learn to till and sow the shifting earth, to love it and reap its fruits, to fear drought and fire. The years dissolve into one another. A decade later, they have grown accustomed to the rhythm of the seasons and a life with so few surprises that the arrival of a young farmer forever disrupts the fragile equilibrium of the household. Johnson's choice of a linear narrative heightens the impact on the reader, who, as they turn the pages, suffers alongside these hardworking people affected by the economy and the harshness of nature.

The plot is simple on the surface—a year of rural life marked by internal tensions, frustrations, and a shrinking future—but Johnson imbues it with psychological nuances: the relationship between the three sisters, the constant shadow of the father's depression and frustration, the mother's silent anxiety, her sense of alienation, and her feeling of displacement. The story progresses more through the intensity with which the protagonist perceives the emotional cracks than through action, and this intimate filter allows us to understand how the corroded landscape and material hardship also become a map of her inner world. As the tension mounts, Marget becomes an unrelenting emotional seismograph. Her stark, piercing gaze distills how despair seeps unbidden into every corner of life.

Johnson moves forward with unapologetic prose, oozing dry earth and a kind of brittle lucidity, and her protagonist, Marget, stares at us from a place where time has frozen. There is a persistent tension between the intimate pulse and the devastated landscape, as if every emotion had to pass through the sieve of an exhausted field to gain permission to exist. The narrative rises with a bittersweetness, always on the verge of cracking, and in this fragility lies its strength: what it leaves unsaid weighs as heavily as what explodes on the surface. Johnson unfolds the tragedy with fierce naturalness, without making it theatrical, and succeeds in making loss and despair grip the reader's fingertips. The echo of the rural world, so intimately humanized, becomes an unsettling mirror reflecting the limits of desire and the harshness of a wounded era. And in the end, what lingers is not only the memory of lives shattered, but the stark certainty that beauty—subtle, mineral, almost secret—can also flourish amidst ruin.