Josephine Wilcox Johnson’s life story is rather like one of her novels. The plot is evident, but the complexities take time and patience to unravel.
Becoming one of the youngest recipients of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction might have intimided some authors. Think of Harper Lee coming to a jarring halt after To Kill a Mockingbird or Margaret Mitchell producing just one gigantic, magnificent novel—Gone with the Wind. But Johnson—just twenty-four when she wrote Now in November and twenty-five when she won—was motivated by the recognition her book garnered. She knew she would continue to write, wherever life took her.
Johnson wrote the 1935 prizewinner in the attic of her mother’s farmhouse in Missouri, but it was when she was a writer and parent in Clermont County, Ohio, that her vision matured and broadened. Whether she was writing about the crushing effects of the Great Depression or commenting on the horrors of the Vietnam War, nature was always a major character in her work. She was often lauded as a perceptive and lyrical observer of nature, but catagorizing Josephine Johnson as only a nature writer is like saying the same of Thoreau (to whom she has been compared). She saw the loveliness and pragmatic brutality of nature reflected in people, but she also examined how people respond to both everyday and extraordinary events.
Johnson’s life began ordinarily enough. She was born on June 20, 1910, in Kirkwood, Missouri, a small town near St. Louis. As a child, she often visited her maternal grandmother’s home, where the library was as filled and expansive as the gardens and grounds outdoors. Summers were spent with her three sisters visiting at a family dairy farm.
Josephine Johnson, circa 1936. (Courtesy of Terence Cannon for the Josephine Johnson Estate)
Although she wrote fondly of various family members and experiences in her partial memoir, Seven Houses, she concluded that her childhood was not particularly happy. “It was too full of a morbid and passionate sensitivity to both beauty and pain,” she wrote. That double-edged sensibility would be replayed and examined in her writing as well as in her personal life.
She found her calling at age seven when she wrote her first poem, three lines inspired by a newspaper drawing celebrating the end of the Great War. Her only personal exposure to the war was watching her father go out once a week to train with the National Guard and once being taken to the Kirkwood train station to wave to a group of khakiclad soldiers being sent off to duty. War, however, would be a recurring concern in her later writing.
When she was older, her father gave up a wholesale coffee company he had run for years in St. Louis and moved the family to a small farm near Webster Groves, Missouri. He farmed there for several years while Josephine began to write, as she would later reflect, “enormously, fulsomely” at a rolltop desk in the farmhouse attic.
A tall, handsome, green-eyed brunette, she was Josie—or Jo—to friends and family. She was a serious young woman, shy and rather introverted. But her talent and creativity were boundless; she was always reaching for new forms of expression. She attended art classes at Washington University in St. Louis, and although she did not complete a degree there, drawing and painting were lifelong joys for her.
When her father died of cancer—a devastating loss—her mother kept the farm. Josephine continued to live at home, writing steadily. She wrote in longhand, then sent her work out to be typed—a practice she followed throughout her career. Her short stories began appearing in various publications, including the St. Louis Review, Hound and Horn, Atlantic Monthly, and Vanity Fair. In 1934, she was awarded the first of what would be five O. Henry Awards for her short fiction.
Now in November was also published in 1934. The novel tells the harrowing story of the Haldmarne family trying to survive against nature and the economy on a hardscrabble farm during the Great Depression. The story is often grim, as a husband and wife and their three very different daughters concentrate on just surviving uncontrollable circumstances. Steady deprivation, unending backbreaking work, and mental and physical illness take heavy tolls on the family. Yet halfway through the tale, Marget, the daughter who is the narrator, finds some strength in the cycle of nature: “If anything could fortify me against whatever was to come … it would have to be the small and eternal things—the whippoorwills’ long liquid howling near the cave … the shape of young mules against the ridge, moving lighter than bucks across the pasture … things like the chorus of cicadas, and the ponds stained red in evenings.”
Despite tragedy and loss, Marget continues on, with life and with the land. Critics widely praised Now in November for Johnson’s poetic writing style and beautiful use of language, although some later found her style at odds with the gritty subject matter. Sales of the novel, published by Simon & Schuster, were modest, but the positive reviews brought the book to the attention of the Pulitzer Prize fiction jury.
The jury, which consisted of three literary experts, had the job of sorting through dozens of novels to choose contenders. After reviewing their favorite books, they submitted titles to the advisory board for fiction, which chose the winner. Jury members did not always reach a consensus among themselves, and even when they did, the advisory board sometimes ignored their recommendation and rewarded a book of its own choice. That had happened with the 1934 Pulitzer Prize, and those involved were still fuming.
At first, it seemed as though the selection process for the 1935 fiction prize might be equally difficult. The jury could not find a truly outstanding novel, the chairman noted, although his comments about Now in November were the most positive in his report. The jury forwarded eight novels to the advisory board. Of these, perhaps only one title and author would be familiar to today’s readers: So Red the Rose, by Stark Young, was a best-selling story of life following the Civil War.
The board chose Johnson’s novel without any apparent dissent or fanfare. She learned of the prize through a newspaper reporter who called her at the farm. Her family was enormously proud of her, her eldest daughter, Annie Cannon would later report. She didn’t recall her mother ever talking much about the prize, or whether the family celebrated it. As serious-minded as she was, Johnson probably realized that the honor was a double-edged gift. The Pulitzer certainly raised her stock with her publisher, but it would also raise expectations for all her future works and affect how people related to her personally. For the rest of her life—and even after her death—she would never be mentioned in a public context without the words “Pulitzer Prize.” It would be up to her to forge an identity that encompassed more than the efforts of a twenty-four-year-old first-time novelist.
Hard at work on another novel and more short stories, Johnson concentrated on her craft rather than the prize. Ideas and themes that were important to her came bursting out in a variety of genres. Simon & Schuster took advantage of the narrow window of acclaim immediately following the Pulitzer win to publish as much as Johnson could provide. Winter Orchard, a thoughtful group of short stories, came out in 1935. A collection of poems, Year’s End, followed in 1937. Her second novel, Jordanstown, published in 1937, did not receive the critical acclaim of her first work, but it did address one of her passions: social justice and workers’ rights.
That passion was reflected in her life by her choice of first husband, Thurlow Smoot, an attorney for the National Labor Relations Board, whom she married in 1939. The union was relatively brief, and Johnson had little, if any, contact with Smoot afterward. But they did have a baby, a son she named Terence. Impending motherhood may have influenced her to write her first—and, as it turned out, only—children’s book. Paulina: The Story of an Apple-Butter Jar was published in 1939. After Now in November was published, she had talked about wanting to write and illustrate children’s books, “not for children, but a sort of nightmare collection such as has never been published.”
Johnson’s career would take another path, however. For a short time, she lectured on writing at the University of Iowa. She was becoming increasingly concerned with social issues, caring for baby Terry, and wanting to write full-time. It was a busy and exciting life, but there were more changes around the bend.
“Real life” began, Johnson wrote, when she met Grant Cannon, who would become her second husband and bring her to Ohio. Cannon, a Mormon and grandson of a livestock rancher, had grown up in Salt Lake City. He studied anthropology at Brigham Young University but left before earning a degree. Along the way, he separated from the Mormon faith and became involved with workers’ rights. When he and Johnson met, he was working as a field examiner for the National Labor Relations Board, attending a case hearing in St. Louis.
The two young idealists married on Easter Day 1942 at her mother’s home. “It was an extraordinary spring and from that hour I was married to an extraordinary man for thirty years,” Johnson wrote in her memoir. “A man who built himself, faults, talents, wounds and virtues, into a work of amazing art. No, the word is human. Alive and mortal. Human without end.”
Cannon adopted Terry as soon as possible; he was the only father the boy ever knew. Soon after the marriage, World War II separated the newlyweds. Cannon served as a combat intelligence officer with the Army Air Forces in the Pacific. He wrote “lovely” letters to little Terry while he was gone, recalled Annie Cannon. Terry and his mother waited out the war in Webster Groves. Her third novel, Wildwood, was published in 1945. The book examined the loss of idealism in the socialist movement and agnosticism. Its reviews and sales were modest.
After the war ended, Cannon moved his wife, Terry, and daughter Annie to Ohio. He went to work as a writer and photographer for an ambitious new national magazine, Farm Quarterly, published in Cincinnati. The family moved into an 1810 brick house on Round Bottom Road in Newtown in 1947. “And all those years, all those other places, do not seem as real as the Old House in Newtown,” Johnson wrote. “It was the first house that either of us had ever owned.” It was at the Old House that Johnson began to find her literary voice, not in the invention of fictional characters but in her own life and her observations of the world around here. Those experiences would form the second act of Johnson’s writing career.
Motherhood marked the beginning of an almost twenty-year hiatus from book publishing for Johnson. The demands of a young family and the ever-in-need-of-attention Old House took precedence. But judging from the sharp memories and extensive details of her memoir, she must have kept a diary or journal during those years.
The Old House, situated on three acres just a half-mile from a noisy stone quarry, was a naturalist’s dream. Old maple trees, a marshy area, a crumbling icehouse cloaked in ivy, and surrounding farm fields provided rich observation opportunities. The house, sprawling and drafty, was a character in itself. Stories of the Cannons’ lives there over ten years comprise almost half of Seven Houses.
Life in Newtown was demanding, complex, and ever changing. Cannon’s work on the Farm Quarterly figured large in the young family’s life. The magazine was not content to just examine the latest type of fertilizer or seed corn on American farms; its writers approached farming as a science and an industry. Over the years, Cannon traveled as far as India and Pakistan to report on agriculture.
He pursued some of his own ideas at home. He made one cavernous room of the Old House into a laboratory, where he worked at turning corncobs into affordable, nutritious poultry feed. The entire homestead was a lab for Johnson. She watched her children grow, observed the constant cycles of nature, and thought much about the nature of humankind. Motherhood had not given her a rose-colored view of life. If anything, it made her concerns and doubts more urgent as she considered the world her children would inherit.
Cannon dealt with his own doubts by embracing community and looking for ways to remain optimistic about life. Traveling and interviewing people for the magazine, joining professional groups, and attending meetings of the Society of Friends in Cincinnati helped him find balance. “Dad enjoyed people,” Annie Cannon said in a 2013 interview. He once taught a janitor who worked in his office building to read. After the older children left home, he invited a teenager who didn’t have anyplace to work on his car to use the barn on the Cannon property.
Josephine, however, struggled with depression. “Her despair was a heavy burden for her,” Annie said. Her concern over conditions in the world, as well as people’s lack of care for nature, were persistent. At home with the children, she turned inward. In Seven Houses, she said that she had made a “lifelong truce with despair.” Annie “learned to be an optimist just in reaction to gloomy people,” Johnson wrote. That was not always easy, her daughter said. Johnson was not a joiner; she was not social, although she and Cannon were friends with a small group of Cincinnati-area writers.
But if despair was a lifelong acquaintance, so was Johnson’s joy in her children, her husband, and the beauty of nature. Her husband was always coming up with a new project or pursuit. He earned a pilot’s license, become a gourmet cook, made pottery, pursued photography, wrote a play. He also played the flute and sang, and Johnson loved to hear him sing the old hymns and Christmas carols she remembered from childhood.
When their second daughter, Carol, was born one April in the 1940s, Johnson’s delight was immense. “The perfect packaging of a baby is more astounding than even the satin wrappings of the hickory and chestnuts buds,” she wrote. “Carol came firmly packed and plump as a loaf of bread.”
As the children grew, so did the couple’s desire for more space and an even closer relationship with nature. In 1947 they moved to an abandoned farm of thirty-seven acres on Klatte Road, still in Clermont County but further removed from neighbors, with no stone quarries nearby. It was about twenty miles east of Cincinnati. They resolved to let the place revert to a more natural state, with the goal of making it a nature preserve. Creeks, ridges, a meadow, and a pond provided rich habitats for multitudes of flora and fauna. Johnson came to think of the farm as her “inland island.” But if the property separated her more from others, it brought her thoughts closer to the printed page. She began writing extensively in the early 1960s, working on a new novel.
It is significant that Simon & Schuster, who had published her first novel, came forward to publish the new one now, in 1963. Although none of Johnson’s books had been best-sellers, the publishers must have believed in her talent and recognized that she was capable of writing thoughtful, meaningful fiction. She began working with Michael Korda, who would be that publisher’s editor-in-chief for forty years as well as a best-selling author.
The Dark Traveler tells the story of a loving family of five who take in a troubled nephew, to whom the title refers. Paul is emotionally and psychologically unstable. His bullying, obnoxious father is a major source of his distress. That Paul’s favored brother has been killed in the war strengthens his father’s hatred for his surviving son. Although Johnson does not name the war or give it much prominence, it’s reasonable to assume she is writing about Vietnam. At the time she would have been working on novel, American troops were beginning to be sent into the conflict. In some ways, The Dark Traveler is reminiscent of Now in November. Both stories focus on strong, yet troubled, families faced with personal conflicts. Nature is an important part of each—Paul’s kindly uncle is a conservationist, as opposed to his father, a greedy developer. Societal problems—a war and the Depression—affect each family.
But the influence of a loving husband and children over the years tempers some of the harshness of the 1934 novel. The uncle in The Dark Traveler is described as a man with many of Cannon’s characteristics. He is passionately concerned with the welfare of his family. He recognizes the evil in the world, but his decency and steadfastness bolster his loved ones, in particular his wife, who is more prone to melancholy.
Like her first novel, the book was praised for its poetic qualities. The book editor for the Cincinnati Enquirer, for instance, waxed poetic himself as he described Johnson. She was, he wrote, “a rare creature whose muse hovers with dark compassion and trembling.” While the book received praise for taking on a familiar problem in an eloquent manner, sales remained modest.
While The Dark Traveler marked Johnson’s return to the novel, she had never really been out of print. Numerous short stories she wrote in the 1940s and 1950s for Harper’s Bazaar magazine and periodicals were reprinted regularly in anthologies. Many of the stories echo events or motifs from her life. “The Rented Room,” written shortly after Cannon left for war, is a study of a woman and her young son waiting out her solider husband’s orders in a boardinghouse occupied by other war wives and their children. “Penelope’s Web” concerns a young mother living in a home much like the Old House. Throughout the day, the endless household work and her somewhat morbid thoughts wear her down. The arrival of her children from school cheers her and puts life into perspective. A demanding old country house much like the New-town place also figures prominently in “The Glass Mountain,” one of Johnson’s more lighthearted stories. A young man desperate to court his dream girl is enlisted into helping her father make numerous repairs to the property.
Simon & Schuster reprinted many of her previously published stories, as well as a few new ones. The Sorcerer’s Son and Other Stories remains an excellent primer to Johnson’s themes and writing style. While the short-story collection was making its way into the world, Johnson was hard at work on what would become the most notable book of the second half of her career.
The 1960s would be the defining period in the lives of the immediate post–World War II generation in America. Political assassinations, the violation of the environment, and the horrors of the Vietnam War deeply affected people. To Johnson and her Quaker-influenced husband, the war was purely evil. Their children shared their beliefs as well as the philosophy that the individual must act on those beliefs. Terry became a conscientious objector. While living in San Francisco, he attended an antiwar demonstration that got out of hand. He ended up in jail with some of the protestors, where he wrote that police officers brutalized him and another man while in custody.
Johnson’s own meditations on the war were included in her first non-fiction book, The Inland Island, which Simon & Schuster published in 1969. Her move from fiction was prompted by reading a book written under the New Journalism heading, where authors including Norman Mailer and Truman Capote injected personal opinion and conjecture into their factual nonfiction books.
“Mother was so excited by this,” Annie Cannon remembered. “‘He just wrote what he wanted to say,’ she told my father.” Grant encouraged his wife to do the same. She respected his opinions about writing and publishing. The couple sometimes read and edited each other’s work, including Cannon’s magnum opus, Great Men of Modern Agriculture, which Macmillan published in 1967.
The New Journalism approach was a liberating one for Johnson. She decided to write about what she knew: the natural life of the family’s “island” on Klatte Road over twelve months and her feelings over the turmoil of the time. In The Inland Island Johnson writes exquisite, unflinching descriptions of nature and her interactions with it. But those experiences suddenly give way to her outrage over the war, racial injustice, and apathy in her fellow citizens.
Johnson turned fifty-seven as she was writing The Inland Island. She had lived through more than fifty years of war, uneasy peace, and rumors of war. Her loved ones of her mother’s and grandmother’s generations were gone. Most devastating of all, she learned her husband had cancer—still considered a death sentence in the 1960s. All the beauty of nature could not smooth over those deaths and the losses still to come. Chapter after chapter, her anger erupts sporadically—unexpectedly.
In one chapter, Johnson writes about coming face to face with a vixen guarding her three cubs on a quiet June evening. At first sight, the mother fox is “very beautiful … grey-red fur running down into red below and the plumed tail fringed in white.” As author and fox engage in a staring contest, Johnson begins to notice more details: the vixen is plagued by gnats and ticks and one ravaged ear. Compelled to hunt for the cubs’ food, she finally breaks her gaze and runs off.
“In the long looking,” Johnson writes, “I had seen her as she really was—small, thin, harried, heavily burdened—not really free at all. Bound around by instinct, as I am bound by custom and concern.” The following winter hunters killed off all the foxes for miles around. The fox tale soon gives way to discourse about the war. “Every woman of my generation is sick of war,” she wrote, noting that it had touched each generation of her family since her childhood. “We who are opposed to war know what all the frustrated of the world must feel… . The opposition, the monolithic opposition, the misinterpretation, the prison sentences, and the silence… . And this is what the young black men feel, a thousand times over. This is where the fire and the gasoline bombs come from. The broken glass and the burning.”
The year ends in conflict: she is intensely bitter about the stupidity of war, yet her heart instinctively gladdens when she feels the sun falling on her shoulders, causing “a curious hollow that is happiness.” The book ends not with the dying year but with the dawn of a new one, beginning with “awesome clarity.”
Johnson was able to step out of the role of fiction writer to share directly the personal philosophy she had been writing since the 1930s. “She was able to be herself in nonfiction,” Annie Cannon said. The result was ragged, intimate, and beautiful. The Inland Island was perhaps the best-reviewed book of her career. “An awakening book for the quiet mind and insurgent spirit,” was Edward Weeks’s verdict in the Atlantic. He wrote that the book’s principal strength came from Johnson injecting her abhorrence of the war amid her artistlike descriptions of nature.
“Her anger is noble, beautiful, pure,” Edward Abbey wrote in the New York Times Book Review. He found her writing poetic in the contemporary sense: “terse and tense and starkly clear, the point of view tough, honest.” When Now in November came out, some reviewers thought Johnson’s lyrical writing masked a lack of substance. That was not the case with the new book. “There is hardly a prosaic line or a smoggy thought in the whole book,” Abbey wrote.
The Inland Island reflects Johnson’s whole life—living through wars, raising a family with a loving spouse, struggling with issues that concern us all. Things she had believed in and been moved by in her twenties were now experiences she had lived through or was going through as she wrote the book. In the Saturday Review, Granville Hicks compared her writing to that of Charles Dickens, William Wordsworth, and John Ruskin, all advocates of the importance of the individual and of a more humane society. Her writing was not merely beautiful, it was instructional: if society cannot stop itself from going to war, humanity will be destroyed, as will the natural world.
Although The Inland Island’s reception was warm, Johnson’s heart was heavy. Cannon—the person she loved most in the world and who had most shaped her adulthood—died in February 1969 at age fifty-eight. His death brought perhaps the most difficult transition she had to make. Terry and Annie were young adults, off on their own, and she knew that Carol would soon be leaving too.
It’s not surprising, then, that her next book should be a memoir, a “long looking” of her own at the places and loved ones who had shaped her life. Simon & Schuster published Seven Houses: A Memoir of Time and Places in 1973. Johnson wrote evocatively, sometimes sadly, about the houses and relatives of her youth. The book included old family photographs, among them some of her as a child. For an admittedly private person, it was quite personal. But still she did not share everything with the reader. Her growing-up years on the family’s farm in Webster Groves were too painful to write about, even in middle age. “Growing up is a terrible time,” she wrote. “A person lives with such intensity you wonder there is anything left to go with when it’s over.”
Her appreciation of nature is readily apparent in the book, as is her sense of humor—something that did not surface often in her writing. Describing her grandparents’ vast library, she remembers seeing multiple copies of Victorian poet Robert Browning’s works. She rhetorically asks her readers if they have read Browning recently, then notes, “The man’s extraordinary. Full of dark horrendous scenes and tortures. I wonder what those ladies of the Browning Clubs were really up to.”
The last quarter of the book, however, shows where Johnson’s heart really was in those days. It chronicles—rather sketchily—Cannon’s arrival in her life and the life they made together with Terry, Annie, and Carol at the Old House in Clermont County. She saw her husband as the center of the family’s universe: “Sunlight streamed from Grant. We thought things were as they appeared to be. We had a past and a present and a future—all five of us. It was the high noon and the summer of our lives. Of all our five lives together.”
Johnson dedicated Seven Houses to Cannon.
The publisher tried to market the book as a kind of companion piece to The Inland Island, by emphasizing its beautiful, attentive descriptions of nature. Sales were modest. It would be the last book she would publish with Simon & Schuster.
In 1974, Viking published The Circle of Seasons, which played off The Inland Island’s format of examining nature throughout the year. Johnson wrote the text, which was complemented by photographs by Dennis Stock.
The transition from fiction to nonfiction, which her husband had encouraged, gave Johnson an outlet that she might not have had otherwise. In the 1980s, she turned to magazine writing. Only this time, instead of short stories, she wrote essays, mostly centered on her life on the “island.” Ohio magazine began publishing her work semiregularly. John Fleischman, a Cincinnati writer and associate editor at Ohio, became her editor, and—very slowly—her friend.
He tried for a long time to convince Johnson to let him write about her—an idea she strongly resisted. Finally, in the spring of 1985, by which time Johnson was in her mid-seventies, she relented. Fleischman made several visits to the “island” that spring and summer. Johnson was sometimes lonely, still tangling with depression and upkeep of the property.
The children were living on either coast, all engaged in careers rooted in a Johnson-Cannon upbringing. Terence was writing political nonfiction, which later gave way to short stories. Carol was immersed in work related to anthropology. Annie was illustrating children’s books and would eventually write the texts for them as well. Johnson never appeared to consider leaving Klatte Road to live with a child, move into a retirement community, or return to Missouri. “The land sustained her,” Annie said. “That was more important to her than living near relatives.”
Five years before Fleischman’s visit, the county sewer district invaded her property to install a large concrete wastewater conduit next to the creek. In the installing of the line, work crews had opened up wooded areas, which then made the land accessible to trespassers and their vehicles, and occasional acts of vandalism. Still, Johnson persisted.
She remained on her inland island until just days before her death in 1990 at age seventy-nine. Her obituary in the New York Times noted that her writings were credited with helping to popularize ecological concerns. “I’ve never done anything too scientific,” Johnson told Fleischman while looking over some plants during his 1985 visit. “I just watch.”
And she wrote. And reminded the world of how nature and humanity are intertwined and why that matters so much.
