When Dawn Powell died in 1965, virtually all her books were out of
print. Not a single historical survey of American literature
mentioned her, even in passing. And so she slept, seemingly
destined to be forgotten – or, to put it more exactly, never to be
remembered.
How things have changed! Numerous novels by Dawn Powell are
currently available, along with her diaries and short stories. She
has joined the Library of America, admitted to the illustrious
company of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Adams, Frederick Douglass,
and Edith Wharton. She is taught in college and read with delight
on vacation. For the contemporary poet and novelist Lisa Zeidner,
writing inThe New York Times Book Review, Powell “is wittier than
Dorothy Parker, dissects the rich better than F. Scott Fitzgerald,
is more plaintive than Willa Cather in her evocation of the
heartland, and has a more supple control of satirical voice than
Evelyn Waugh.” For his part, Gore Vidal offered a simple reason for
Powell’s sudden popularity in the early Twentieth Century: “We are
catching up to her.”
Dawn Powell was born in Mt. Gilead, Ohio, on November 28, 1896, the
second of three daughters. Her father was a traveling salesman, and
her mother died a few days after Dawn turned seven. After enduring
great cruelty at the hands of her stepmother, Dawn ran away at the
age of thirteen and eventually arrived at the home of her maternal
aunt, who served hot meals to travelers emerging from the train
station across the street. Dawn worked her way through college and
made it to New York. There she married a young advertising
executive and had one child, a boy who suffered from autism, then
an unknown condition.
Powell referred to herself as a “permanent visitor” in her adopted
Manhattan and brought to her writing a perspective gained from her
upbringing in Middle America. She knew many of the great writers of
her time, and Diana Trilling famously said it was Dawn “who really
says the funny things for which Dorothy Parker gets credit.” Ernest
Hemingway called her his “favorite living writer.” She was one of
America’ s great novelists, and yet when she died in 1965 she was
buried in an unmarked grave in New York’s Potter’s Field.
“A gleaming, brittle and slightly brutal New York novel . . . each
chapter slips us into the consciousness and conversations of a
group of New Yorkers and keeps them afloat on the sounds and
sensations, the dash, squalor and ugly beauty of the city.” –
Margo Jefferson, The New York Times (1994)
“Give us your lonely, your misunderstood, your sexually malcontent,
your stubborn provincial dreams: responding to this siren call,
Dawn Powell stayed loyal to New York with an ardor beside which
that of celebrants like Scott Fitzgerald and E. B. White appear
fickle.” – John Updike, The New Yorker (1995)
|
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
