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 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 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.
The personal reflections of a minor Dorothy Parker who is currently experiencing a mini-revival (Dawn Powell at Her Best, 1994). Powell's (1897-1965) terse early diaries often sound like a Woody Allen parody of the Lost Generation: June 8 [1932]: Drove in with the Lawsons and party at Esther's where Sue and I were great pals but in parting I socked her, also Jack. By 1936, however, entries settle down into longer musings on the daily grind of writing, outlines for novels, snippets of conversation, and send-ups of her nearest and dearest. Edmund Bunny Wilson merits particularly savage treatment - a belated retribution for his unfavorable review in the New Yorker of Powell's 1944 novel My Home Is Far Away: There is no popular opinion he does not share, no unsuccessful artist or writer he does not berate, no Book-Of-The-Month he does not praise. John Dos Passos was another one of her good friends, and she frequently encountered Dorothy Parker. But Powell, unlike Parker, never managed to completely embody her role as sharp-tongued satirist, perhaps because she could not clearly distinguish between satire and reality. She is dismayed by the reaction to one of her plays: Ann says people in play - those gay, charming people - are all so sordid. Powell may have been taken in by the allure of the literary world of which she was a member, but always an insecure and peripheral one. Here she is seen minus her hard outer shell for the sad woman she truly was: plagued throughout her life by ill health and fiscal worries, alternately distraught and elated over the progress of her son, Jojo, who was believed to be retarded. The volume is edited by Washington Post music critic Tim Page, who is writing a biography of Powell. Powell shows the glamour of the New York literary court for what it was: gay and charming on the surface, but deeply sordid underneath. (Kirkus Reviews)