Dawn Powell | |
|---|---|
 Dawn Powell, c. 1914. | |
| Born | November 28, 1896 |
| Died | November 14, 1965 (age 68) |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Genre | Satirical fiction |
| Notable works |
|
| Notable awards | 1963 National Book Award nominee, 1964 American Academy of Arts and Letters presents her with the Marjorie Peabody Waite Award for lifetime achievement in literature |
| Spouse | Joseph Gousha |
| Children | Joseph R. Gousha Jr. |
Dawn Powell (November 28, 1896 – November 14, 1965) was an American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and short story writer.[1] Known for her acerbic prose, "her relative obscurity was likely due to a general distaste for her harsh satiric tone."[2] Nonetheless,Stella Adler and authorClifford Odets appeared in one of her plays. Her work was praised byRobert Benchley inThe New Yorker and in 1939 she was signed as aScribner author whereMaxwell Perkins, famous for his work with many of her contemporaries, includingErnest Hemingway,F. Scott Fitzgerald andThomas Wolfe, became her editor.[1] A 1963 nominee for theNational Book Award, she received anAmerican Academy of Arts and Letters Marjorie Peabody Waite Award for lifetime achievement in literature the following year. A friend to many literary and arts figures of her day, including authorJohn Dos Passos, criticEdmund Wilson, and poetE. E. Cummings,[2] Powell's work received renewed interest afterGore Vidal praised it in a 1987 editorial forThe New York Review of Books. Since then, theLibrary of America has published two collections of her novels.[2]
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Powell was born inMount Gilead, Ohio, a village 45 miles north ofColumbus and the county seat ofMorrow County. Powell regularly gave her birth year as 1897 but primary documents support the earlier date.[3] 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 novelMy Home Is Far Away (1944).
AtLake Erie College inPainesville, Ohio, she wrote stories and plays, acted in college productions, and edited the college newspaper. After graduation, she moved toManhattan. Most of her subsequent writing would deal either with life in smallMidwestern towns, or with the lives of people transplanted toNew 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 toGreenwich 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.[4]
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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, aHollywood screenwriter, a book reviewer, and a radio personality.
Her novelWhither was published in 1925, but she always describedShe 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 novelTurn, 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 playWalking Down Broadway was filmed asHello, Sister! (1933), co-written and co-directed byErich von Stroheim.
In 1939,Scribner's became her publisher andMaxwell 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 onClare Boothe Luce, wife ofHenry Luce.[5] A musical adaptation of the novel, written by Tajlei Levis and John Mercurio, was staged in New York City in 2006.[5]
After the war, Powell's output slowed down, but it included some of her most acclaimed New York novels, includingThe Locusts Have No King (1948), a portrait of the disintegration and eventual rekindling of a love affair against the background of the city and the onset of theCold War. The novel ends with news of theBikini Atoll atom-bomb tests.
Two late novels show Powell's interest in the New York art world of the 1950s:The Wicked Pavilion (1954), an ensemble portrait of the characters orbiting around the Cafe Julien (a fictionalizedHotel Brevoort)[6] and a vanished or deceased painter named Marius; andThe Golden Spur (1962), set in a fictionalizedCedar Tavern,[6] in which a young man's search for the identity and history of his dead father brings him to New York, where he becomes involved with the circle around a charismatic painter, Hugow.
Later in life, Powell did most of her writing in an apartment at 95Christopher Street.[7]
Powell died in 1965 ofcolon cancer, fourteen days before her 69th birthday.[6] Her executrix, Jacqueline Miller Rice (1931-2004),[8] refused to claim the remains, which were then buried inHart Island, New York City'spotter's field.[9]
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When Powell died, virtually all of her novels were out of print. Her posthumous champions includedMatthew Josephson,Gore Vidal,[10] and especiallyTim 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 ofColumbia University in New York.
Powell is referenced in the 2002Gilmore Girls episode"Help Wanted", in which Rory expresses sadness over her relative obscurity. That same year Powell was praised by the New York writerFran Lebowitz onBook TV, in an episode titled The Best American Writer You've Never Heard Of.[11] She is also referenced in the novelA Collection of Beauties at the Height of Their Popularity byWhitney Otto. She is also referenced by novelist Alan Furst in his 2014 workMidnight in Europe. She appears as a character in several scenes of Vidal's novelThe Golden Age. More recently, she was referenced by novelistMichael 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.
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