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Dawn Powell (November 28, 1896 – November 14, 1965) was an American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and short story writer. Known for her acerbic prose, "her relative obscurity was likely due to a general distaste for her harsh satiric tone." Nonetheless, Stella Adler and author Clifford Odets appeared in one of her plays. Her work was praised by Robert Benchley in ''
The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. It was founded on February 21, 1925, by Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant, a reporter for ''The New York T ...
'' and in 1939 she was signed as a Scribner author where Maxwell Perkins, famous for his work with many of her contemporaries, including
Ernest Hemingway Ernest Miller Hemingway ( ; July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer and journalist. Known for an economical, understated style that influenced later 20th-century writers, he has been romanticized fo ...
, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe, became her editor. A 1963 nominee for the
National Book Award The National Book Awards (NBA) are a set of annual U.S. literary awards. At the final National Book Awards Ceremony every November, the National Book Foundation presents the National Book Awards and two lifetime achievement awards to authors. ...
, she received an
American Academy of Arts and Letters The American Academy of Arts and Letters is a 300-member honor society whose goal is to "foster, assist, and sustain excellence" in American literature, Music of the United States, music, and Visual art of the United States, art. Its fixed number ...
Marjorie Peabody Waite Award for lifetime achievement in literature the following year. A friend to many literary and arts figures of her day, including author
John Dos Passos John Roderigo Dos Passos (; January 14, 1896 – September 28, 1970) was an American novelist, most notable for his U.S.A. (trilogy), ''U.S.A.'' trilogy. Born in Chicago, Dos Passos graduated from Harvard College in 1916. He traveled widely as a ...
, critic Edmund Wilson, and poet E. E. Cummings, Powell's work received renewed interest after
Gore Vidal Eugene Luther Gore Vidal ( ; born Eugene Louis Vidal, October 3, 1925 – July 31, 2012) was an American writer and public intellectual known for his acerbic epigrammatic wit. His novels and essays interrogated the Social norm, social and sexual ...
praised it in a 1987 editorial for ''
The New York Review of Books ''The New York Review of Books'' (or ''NYREV'' or ''NYRB'') is a semi-monthly magazine with articles on literature, culture, economics, science and current affairs. Published in New York City, it is inspired by the idea that the discussion of ...
''. Since then, the Library of America has published two collections of her novels.


Life and career

Powell was born in Mount Gilead, Ohio, a village 45 miles north of Columbus and the county seat of Morrow County. Powell regularly gave her birth year as 1897 but primary documents support the earlier date. After her mother died when Powell was seven, she lived with a series of relatives around the state. Her father remarried, but his second wife was harsh and abusive toward the children; when her stepmother destroyed her notebooks and diaries, she ran away to live with an aunt, who encouraged her creative work. Powell later gave her childhood fictional form in the novel ''My Home Is Far Away'' (1944). At Lake Erie College in Painesville, Ohio, she wrote stories and plays, acted in college productions, and edited the college newspaper. After graduation, she moved to
Manhattan Manhattan ( ) is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the Boroughs of New York City, five boroughs of New York City. Coextensive with New York County, Manhattan is the County statistics of the United States#Smallest, larg ...
. Most of her subsequent writing would deal either with life in small Midwestern towns, or with the lives of people transplanted to
New York City New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...
from such towns. On November 20, 1920, she married Joseph Gousha, an aspiring poet and advertising copy-writer. In 1921, the couple had their only child, Joseph R. Gousha Jr. ("Jojo"), who would today likely be diagnosed with autism. Her husband abandoned poetry for steadier work in advertising, and the family moved to
Greenwich Village Greenwich Village, or simply the Village, is a neighborhood on the west side of Lower Manhattan in New York City, bounded by 14th Street (Manhattan), 14th Street to the north, Broadway (Manhattan), Broadway to the east, Houston Street to the s ...
, which remained her home base for the rest of her life. The Village served as both inspiration and backdrop for most of her writing; some of the key locations in her fiction remain standing today.


Novels

Dawn Powell wrote hundreds of short stories, ten plays, a dozen novels, and an extended diary starting in 1931. Her writings, however, never generated enough money to live off. Throughout her life, she supported herself with various jobs, including being a freelance writer, an extra in silent films, a Hollywood screenwriter, a book reviewer, and a radio personality. Her novel ''Whither'' was published in 1925, but she always described ''She Walks in Beauty'' (1928) as her first. Her favorite of her own novels, '' Dance Night'', came out in 1930. The early work received uneven reviews, and none of it sold well. Her 1936 novel '' Turn, Magic Wheel'', the first work that received both critical acclaim and reasonably good sales, marked a turn to social satire in a New York setting. Her play ''Walking Down Broadway'' was filmed as '' Hello, Sister!'' (1933), co-written and co-directed by Erich von Stroheim. In 1939, Scribner's became her publisher and Maxwell Perkins became her editor. In 1942, Powell published her first commercially successful novel, '' A Time to Be Born'', whose central figure—Amanda Keeler Evans, an egotistical hack writer whose work and media presence are bolstered by the assiduous promotion of her husband, the newspaper magnate Julian Evans—is loosely modelled on Clare Boothe Luce, wife of Henry Luce."In New York, Shows Can Be Slow or Fast in the Making"
Jason Zinoman, ''New York Times'', August 26, 2006. Retrieved July 30, 2011.
A musical adaptation of the novel, written by Tajlei Levis and John Mercurio, was staged in New York City in 2006. After the war, Powell's output slowed down, but it included some of her most acclaimed New York novels, including '' The Locusts Have No King'' (1948), a portrait of the disintegration and eventual rekindling of a love affair against the background of the city and the onset of the
Cold War The Cold War was a period of global Geopolitics, geopolitical rivalry between the United States (US) and the Soviet Union (USSR) and their respective allies, the capitalist Western Bloc and communist Eastern Bloc, which lasted from 1947 unt ...
. The novel ends with news of the
Bikini Atoll Bikini Atoll ( or ; Marshallese language, Marshallese: , , ), known as Eschscholtz Atoll between the 19th century and 1946, is a coral reef in the Marshall Islands consisting of 23 islands surrounding a central lagoon. The atoll is at the no ...
atom-bomb tests. Two late novels show Powell's interest in the New York art world of the 1950s: ''The Wicked Pavilion'' (1954), an ensemble portrait of the characters orbiting around the Cafe Julien (a fictionalized Hotel Brevoort)Library of America essay by Gore Vidal (1987)
and a vanished or deceased painter named Marius; and ''The Golden Spur'' (1962), set in a fictionalized Cedar Tavern, in which a young man's search for the identity and history of his dead father brings him to New York, where he becomes involved with the circle around a charismatic painter, Hugow.


Old age and death

Later in life, Powell did most of her writing in an apartment at 95 Christopher Street. Powell died in 1965 of colon cancer, fourteen days before her 69th birthday. Her executrix, Jacqueline Miller Rice (1931-2004), refused to claim the remains, which were then buried on Hart Island, New York City's potter's field.


Revival

When Powell died, virtually all of her novels were out of print. Her posthumous champions included Matthew Josephson,
Gore Vidal Eugene Luther Gore Vidal ( ; born Eugene Louis Vidal, October 3, 1925 – July 31, 2012) was an American writer and public intellectual known for his acerbic epigrammatic wit. His novels and essays interrogated the Social norm, social and sexual ...
, and especially Tim Page, who joined forces with her family to free her manuscripts, diaries, and copyrights from her original executrix. The result was a revival in the late 1990s, when most of Powell's books were made available once more. Her papers are now in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library of
Columbia University Columbia University in the City of New York, commonly referred to as Columbia University, is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Churc ...
in New York. Powell is referenced in the 2002 '' Gilmore Girls'' episode "Help Wanted", in which Rory expresses sadness over her relative obscurity. That same year Powell was praised by the New York writer Fran Lebowitz on Book TV, in an episode titled The Best American Writer You've Never Heard Of. She is also referenced in the novel '' A Collection of Beauties at the Height of Their Popularity'' by Whitney Otto. She is also referenced by novelist Alan Furst in his 2014 work ''Midnight in Europe.'' She appears as a character in several scenes of Vidal's novel '' The Golden Age''. More recently, she was referenced by novelist Michael Zadoorian in his 2020 book, ''The Narcissism of Small Differences.'' ''The Message of the City: Dawn Powell's New York Novels'' by Patricia E. Palermo was published in 2016. It is a compilation of most of the critical work done on Powell, in her day and in ours, and also looks at how she turned her everyday life, discussed in her diaries and letters, into fiction.


Awards

* 2015 — New York State Writers Hall of Fame *1964 — American Academy of Arts and Letters' Marjorie Peabody Waite Award for lifetime achievement in literature *1963 — National Book Award nominee for ''The Golden Spur''


Quotes

*"Satire is people as they are; romanticism, people as they would like to be; realism, people as they seem with their insides left out." * "A novel must be a rich forest known at the start only by instinct." * "A capacity for going overboard is a requisite for a full-grown mind."


Bibliography

* 1925. ''Whither'' (novel). Boston: Small, Maynard. * 1928. ''She Walks in Beauty'' (novel). New York: Brentano's. * 1929. ''The Bride's House'' (novel). New York: Brentano's. * 1930. ''Dance Night'' (novel). New York: Farrar & Rinehart. * 1932. ''The Tenth Moon'' (novel). New York: Farrar & Rinehart. (Reprinted in 2001 by The Library of America as '' Come Back to Sorrento''.) * 1933. ''Big Night'' (play). * 1934. ''Jig Saw: A Comedy'' (play). New York: Farrar & Rinehart * 1934. ''The Story of a Country Boy'' (novel). New York: Farrar & Rinehart. * 1936. ''Turn, Magic Wheel'' (novel). New York: Farrar & Rinehart. * 1938. ''The Happy Island'' (novel). New York: Farrar & Rinehart. * 1940. ''Angels on Toast'' (novel). New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Reprinted in 1956 as ''A Man's Affair''. New York: Fawcett. * 1942. ''A Time to Be Born'' (novel). New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. * 1944. ''My Home Is Far Away'' (novel). New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. * 1948. ''The Locusts Have No King'' (novel). New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. * 1952. ''Sunday, Monday and Always'' (stories). Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Reprint, 1999 (with four additional stories). Ed. Tim Page. South Royalton, Vt.: Steerforth Press. * 1954. ''The Wicked Pavilion'' (novel). Boston: Houghton Mifflin. * 1957. ''A Cage for Lovers'' (novel). Boston: Houghton Mifflin. * 1962. ''The Golden Spur'' (novel). New York: Viking. * 1994. ''Dawn Powell At Her Best'', ed. Tim Page. South Royalton, Vt.: Steerforth Press. * 1995. ''The Diaries of Dawn Powell, 1931–1965'', ed. Tim Page. South Royalton, Vt.: Steerforth Press. * 1999. ''Selected Letters of Dawn Powell, 1913–1965'', ed. Tim Page. New York, NY: Henry Holt & Company. * 1999. ''Four Plays,'' ed. Tim Page and Michael Sexton. South Royalton, Vt.: Steerforth Press. * 2001. ''Novels 1930-1942'', ed. Tim Page. The Library of America. . * 2001. ''Novels 1944-1962'', ed. Tim Page. The Library of America. .


References


Further reading

*


External links


The Library of America Presents Dawn Powell
extensive information on Powell's life and works, along with commentary
Dawn Powell papers
at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York, NY
'The Unmarked Graveyard'
digs into the mysteries surrounding author Dawn Powell. All Things Considered radio Hart Island-series episode.
The Triumphs and Tragedies of Dawn Powell
Central Ohio’s Forgotten Literary Genius. {{DEFAULTSORT:Powell, Dawn 1896 births 1965 deaths 20th-century American novelists American satirists American women novelists Deaths from colorectal cancer in New York (state) People from Mount Gilead, Ohio Novelists from Ohio American women dramatists and playwrights 20th-century American women writers 20th-century American dramatists and playwrights American women satirists American satirical novelists American women non-fiction writers 20th-century American non-fiction writers Burials on Hart Island