Synopses & Reviews
Dawn Powell a vital part of literary Greenwich Village from the 1920s through the 1960s was the tirelessly observant chronicler of two very different worlds: the small-town Ohio where she grew up and the sophisticated Manhattan to which she gravitated. If her Ohio novels are more melancholy and compassionate, her Manhattan novels, exuberant and incisive, sparkle with a cast of writers, show people, businessmen, and hustling hangers-on. All show rich characterization and a flair for the gist of complex social situations. A playful satirist, an unsentimental observer of failed hopes and misguided longings, Dawn Powell is a literary rediscovery of rare importance. In this, one of two volumes collecting nine novels, The Library of America presents the best of Powell's fiction.
Dance Night (1930), Powell's own favorite among her works, is a surprisingly frank treatment of obsessive longing set in an Ohio factory town during the 1920s. Come Back to Sorrento (1932; originally published as The Tenth Moon), a compelling study of frustrated aspirations, tells the story of a woman whose friendship with a music teacher awakens her sense of her life's wasted potential.
With Turn, Magic, Wheel (1936), a whirlwind tour of Manhattan's literary world, Powell reinvented herself as a satirical writer. Her treatment of the "city of perpetual distraction" captures the allure of Manhattan with a lightness and wit to be found in all her New York novels. Angels on Toast (1940), whose farcical pace recalls screwball comedy, is a shrewd portrait of the adulterous misadventures of two salesmen. In A Time To Be Born (1942), set during the months before America's entry into World War II, Powell portrays the monstrously egotistical Amanda Keeler Evans one of her most wickedly barbed creations.
Review
"Powell is a supremely deserving candidate for admission to The Library of America, a writer of consistent and startling pleasure, cruelty, and ingenuity. Next to her the celebrated wits of the Algonquin look self-conscious and willful, their exercises in pathos whiny and thin." Atlantic Monthly
Review
"Several of her works deserve to be on the short list of the best comic novels in American literature. For her to enter the Library of America pantheon in 2001 is more than Dawn Powell ever would have expected, but it is no more than she deserves." The Washington Times
Review
"Like it or not, this shiny new two-volume set of tartly observant satire will be the beginning of a literary romance for readers of all classes." New York Magazine
Review
"Not only is Powell one of our best women writers, she's one of our best writers, period." Library Journal
Review
"Few novelists writing in English have been able to create satire with quite so fine and sure a touch as Dawn Powell." Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Review
"Anyone seeking to discover one of the most twinkling wits and deftest satirists of 20th century America can find her here." BookPage.com
About the Author
When asked about the characters in her novels and plays, Dawn Powell said, "I give them their heads. They furnish their own nooses." Powell's wicked sense of humor, keen ear for dialogue and human sense of pathos pervade her barbed, shrewd fiction about mid-century Americans in Manhattan and Ohio. "Always sharp, never cranky, and with a pagan's delight in the pleasures of this world, Powell's work elaborates the human comedy with a vigor matched only by its unpretentious wisdom," wrote one of her critics.
Born in Mount Gilead, Ohio in 1896, Dawn Powell ran away from an abusive stepmother when she was thirteen and settled with her unconventional aunt in nearby Shelby, Ohio. "Auntie May," a divorcée, owned a home near the railroad depot, made lively by Powell's cousins, Auntie's lover, and passing strangers who stopped for meals. Encouraged by her aunt to further her education, Powell begged a scholarship to Lake Erie College for Women. There she wrote and performed in plays and edited the Lake Erie Record, a campus quarterly, which often contained her playful yet pessimistic stories.
In 1918, Powell moved to New York City. There she worked briefly for the Butterick Company, the U. S. Navy, and the Red Cross while writing freelance articles and stories. She married Joseph Gousha, Jr., a Pennsylvania-born poet turned ad man, and the couple had a son, Jojo. They settled in Greenwich Village. Powell loved her bohemian neighborhood and the Manhattan nightlife she spent alongside friends John Dos Passos, Edmund Wilson, E. E. Cummings, and others from the literary scene. "There is really one city for everyone just as there is one major love," she wrote.
Powell tried her hand at writing plays, particularly when the family felt pinched financially, and several were produced, but she came to consider her primary work the creation of novels. Powell set her fiction in the small Ohio towns of her youth and later, most successfully, in familiar New York neighborhoods and cafés. Though dogged by Gousha's drinking, Jojo's probable autism, financial strain, and her own struggles with alcohol, illness, and depression, Dawn Powell managed to write sixteen novels, nine plays, and numerous short stories and reviews. She died in 1965. Her remarkable diaries, published in 1995, were hailed by the New York Times as "one of the outstanding literary finds of the last quarter century."
Table of Contents
Dance Night
Come Back to Sorrento
Turn, Magic Wheel
Angels on Toast
A Time To Be Born