Sunday, Monday, and Always: Stories by Dawn Powell

In addition to the novels and the diaries that have won her posthumous acclaim, Dawn Powell wrote hundreds of short stories over the course of half a century. Sunday, Monday and Always, initially published in 1952, was the author's own personal selection of her best work in the form. This new, expanded edition of Sunday, Monday, and Always includes four additional short pieces written after the original collection was printed.

"What Are You Doing in my Dreams?" is an uncommonly moving autobiographical sketch that may serve as a pocket sketch for all of Powell's art. All the familiar elements are here - life and death; Ohio and New York; the awkward, hungry country girl and the city sophisticate; romantic yearning and realist self-deprecation - brought together one last time at the close of a half-century of meditation.

The haunting vignette entitled "The Elopers," is based on the author's own experiences with her much loved, much troubled son. An early gem from The New Yorker, "Can't We Cry A Little?" has never before been reprinted, and "Dinner on the Rocks," a typically riotous send-up of Manhattan manners, was one of Powell's last stories.

Sunday, Monday, and Always promises to introduce Powell's many admirers to a new facet of her extraordinary talent.

This latest edition of the story collection first published in 1952 includes four fresh stories: "Can't We Cry a Little?, " "The Elopers, " "Dinner on the Rocks, " and "What Are You Doing in My Dreams?"

Ten years after Steerforth launched the Dawn Powell revival, her five best-selling novels are being reissued in newly designed Zoland Books editions with Reading Group Guides inside.

Late in life, out of luck and fashion, Henry James predicted a day when all of his neglected novels would kick off their headstones, one after another. As the twentieth century came to an end, the works of Dawn Powell managed the same magnificent task.

When 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! Twelve of Powells novels have now been reissued, along with editions of her plays, diaries, letters, 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 in The 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 Powells sudden popularity: “We are catching up to her.”

Tim Page, Powells biographer, from his new foreword to My Home Is Far Away,

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 Americas great novelists, and yet when she died in 1965 she was buried in an unmarked grave in New Yorks Potters Field.

Her books live, and with these newly designed editions, with their reading group guides inside, more people than ever before will be able to hear Dawns distinctive voice.

Part I. You should have brought your mink — The comeback — Feet on the ground — Cheerio — Artist's live — Part II. Audition — Such a pretty day — The grand march — Here today, gone tomorrow — Deenie — The pilgrim — Part III. Every day is ladies' day — The glads — Adam — Day after tomorrow — Ideal home — Blue hyacinths — The roof — Addenda. Dinner on the rocks — Can't we cry a little? — The elopers — What are you doing in my dreams?