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Four Freedoms (novel)Four Freedoms is a 2009 historical novel by American writer John Crowley. It follows the adventures of several characters centring on a fictional aircraft manufacturing plant near Ponca City, Oklahoma during World War II, specifically from 1942 to 1945. The plant chiefly produces the fictional B-30 Pax bomber. It is Crowley's first novel after the completion of his �gypt Sequence, and marks a turning in his style from the historically speculative series to historical realism.

The novel deals with the manufacturing and war industries during World War II, but rather than dealing with the most able-bodied during this period, the novel takes up the story of minority groups, the disabled, and many others still awaiting rights of full citizenship taking an active role in America. In his Afterword, Crowley explicitly theorizes that the period would strongly influence later civil movements in the United States:

For most of them, and for many of the African American men and women, Hispanics, Native Americans, and people with disabilities who also served, the end of the war meant returning to the status quo ante: but things could never be restored just as they had been, and the war years contained the seeds of change that would eventually grow again.

Plot
While drafting plans for building an aeronautics plant, brothers Henry and Jules Van Damme are unable to justify removing workers from agrarian or armaments assembly support efforts for the War in Europe. A vice president at their company jokingly suggests "making do, with women, the coloreds, the oldsters, the defectives, the handicaps. Henry enthusiastically agrees telling his recruitment services, "Go out into the highways and the byways, bring in the lame, the halt, and the blind". Realizing that the planes will be completed after the end of the war, the brothers suggest instead of paying employees limited salaries due to the war effort, a city be built, Henryville, to accommodate every need of workers in the factory.

Prosper and Pancho shortly afterwards meet, Pancho deliberately seeking a pacifism in avoiding the draft, and Prosper recently having left the home of his aunts, May and Bea, to seek independence and avoid condescension of the disabled from his employers. Eventually Prosper meets Vi, whom he later unintentionally spurns with his relationship with Connie. The plant temporarily shuts down to commemorate the death of Roosevelt, and shortly after his death the Vice President of Labor announces that in making the transition to non-war industries, the first layoffs at plants like the one at Ponca will be the old, the women, and the disabled. Henryville begins to dissolve, and abandoned when ultimately destroyed by a tornado, resulting in no related casualties. The novel's ending depicts a somewhat prosperous Ponca City near the bulldozed remains of Henryville, with a few rusting B-30 Pax Bombers left in the fields nearby.

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