Josephine Winslow Johnson
American novelist, poet, and essayist who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1935 at age 24 for her first novel, Now in November. Shortly thereafter, she published Winter Orchard, a collection of short stories that had previously appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Vanity Fair, The St. Louis Review, and Hound & Horn. Of these stories, "Dark" won an O. Henry Award in 1934[1], and "John the Six" won an O. Henry Award third prize the following year. Johnson continued writing short stories and won three more O. Henry Awards: for "Alexander to the Park" (1942), "The Glass Pigeon" (1943), and "Night Flight" (1944).
Johnson was bornin Kirkwood, Missouri. She attended Washington University from 1926 to 1931, but did not earn a degree. She wrote her first novel, Now In November, while living in her mother's attic in Webster Groves, Missouri. She remained on her farm in Webster Groves and completed Winter Orchard in 1935. She published four more books before marrying Grant G. Cannon, editor in chief of the Farm Quarterly, in 1942. The couple moved to Iowa City, where she taught at the University of Iowa for the next three years. They moved to Hamilton County, Ohio in 1947, where she published Wildwood.
Johnson had three children. The Cannons continued to move beyond the advancing urban sprawl of Cincinnati, finally settling on the wooded acreage in Clermont County, Ohio, which is the setting of The Inland Island. In 1955, Washington University awarded her an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree.
She published four more books before her death, from pneumonia, on February 27, 1990, in Batavia, Ohio at age 79.[2] (Wiki)
“I cannot believe this is the end. Nor can I believe that death is more than the blindness of those living. And if this is only the consolation of a heart in its necessity, or that easy faith born of despair, it does not matter, since it gives us courage somehow to face the mornings. Which is as much as the heart can ask at times.”
“There must be some reason, I thought, why we should go on year after year, with this lump of debt, scrailing earth down to stone, giving so much and with no return. There must be some reason why I was made quiet and homely and slow, and then given this stone of love to mumble.”
“The earth was overwhelmed with beauty and indifferent to it, and I went with a heart ready to crack for its unbearable loveliness.”
“Lord make me satisfied with small things. Make me content to live on the outside of life. God make me love the rind!”
“What is sanity, after all, except the control of madness?”
“... love and fear increase together with a precision almost mathematical: the greater the love is then the greater the fear is.”
“I like to pretend that the years alter and revalue, but begin to see that time does nothing but enlarge without mutation. You have a chance here--more than a chance, it is thrust upon you--to be alone and still. To look backward and forward and see with clarity. To see the years behind, the essential loneliness, and the likeness of one year to the next. The awful order of cause and effect. Root leading to stem and inevitable growth, and the same sap moving through tissue of different years, marked like the branches with inescapable scars of growth.”