Dawn Powell

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 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, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe, became her editor. 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.

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. 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 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, 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 from. 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. A musical adaptation of the novel, written by Tajlei Levis and John Mercurio, was staged in New York City in 2006. and a vanished or deceased painter named Marius; and The Golden Spur (1962), set in a fictionalized Cedar Tavern,

Powell died in 1965 of colon cancer, fourteen days before her 69th birthday. refused to claim the remains, which were then buried in 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, 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 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."