Dawn Powell Livres

American literature has few writers with the comic flair and vivid character portrayals found in the novels of Dawn Powell. For decades after her death, her work remained out of print, appreciated only by a small group of fans. Recently, however, she has been rediscovered, with Gore Vidal calling her "our best comic novelist" and Edmund Wilson placing her alongside literary giants like Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh. A two-volume set from The Library of America showcases Powell's unique, often humorous, and sometimes poignant fiction. A key figure in literary Greenwich Village from the 1920s to the 1960s, Powell chronicled two contrasting worlds: her melancholic Ohio upbringing and the vibrant Manhattan life she embraced for nearly fifty years. Her Ohio novels exude compassion, while her Manhattan stories are lively and incisive, featuring a colorful array of writers and socialites, all seen through her sharp yet empathetic lens. A masterful satirist and keen observer of human folly, Powell's work is a significant literary rediscovery. "My Home Is Far Away" (1944) reflects her challenging childhood, while "The Locusts Have No King" (1948) explores a scholar's encounter with fame. This is followed by "The Wicked Pavilion" (1954), which critiques illusions of love and success in Greenwich Village, and concludes with "The Golden Spur" (1962), a satire of Manhattan's art scene inspired by her experiences at the Cedar Tavern.

Set in early twentieth century Ohio, the novel follows young Marcia Willard as her family grapples with societal changes, leading her to confront disillusionment, cruelty, and betrayal. Through Marcia's journey, the story explores themes of independence and resilience. Noted for its autobiographical elements, the work contrasts with Powell's previous sophisticated urban narratives, embracing a raw portrayal of rural life. Critics like John Updike have likened Powell to other significant Midwestern writers, highlighting the epic nature of the national transition from rural to urban life.

The “Wicked Pavilion” of the title is the Café Julien, where everybody who is anybody goes to recover from failed love affairs and to pursue new ones, to cadge money, to hatch plots, and to puncture one another’s reputation. Dennis Orphen, the writer from Dawn Powell’s Turn, Magic Wheel , makes an appearance here, as does Andy Callingham, Powell’s thinly disguised Ernest Hemingway. The climax of this mercilessly funny novel comes with a party which, remarked Gore Vidal, “resembles Proust’s last roundup,” and where one of the partygoers observes, “There are some people here who have been dead twenty years.”"For decades Dawn Powell was always just on the verge of ceasing to be a cult and becoming a major religion." - - Gore Vidal

Dawn Powell had a brilliant mind and a keen wit and her humor was never at a finer pitch than in her diaries. And yet her story is a poignant one – a son emotionally and mentally impaired, a household of too much alcohol and never enough money, and an artistic career that, if not a failure, fell far short of the success she craved. All is recorded here – along with working sketches for her novels, and often revealing portraits of her many friends (a literary who’s who of her period) – in her always unique style and without self-delusion.Powell's remarkable Diaries will stand as one of her finest literary achievements.

Set against an atmospheric backdrop of New York City in the months just before America’ s entry into World War II, A Time To Be Born is a scathing and hilarious study of cynical New Yorkers stalking each other for various selfish ends. At the center of the story are a wealthy, self-involved newspaper publisher and his scheming, novelist wife, Amanda Keeler. Powell always denied that Amanda Keeler was based upon the real-life Clare Boothe Luce, until years later when she discovered a memo she’d written to herself in 1939 that said, “Why not do a novel on Clare Luce?” Which prompted Powell to write in her diary “Who can I believe? Me or myself?”

Alternate-cover edition for ISBN ISBN 1883642426 / 9781883642426 is located here: The Locusts Have No King No one has satirized New York society quite like Dawn Powell, and in this classic novel she turns her sharp eye and stinging wit on the literary world, and "identifies every sort of publishing type with the patience of a pathologist removing organs for inspection." Frederick Olliver, an obscure historian and writer, is having an affair with the restively married, beautiful, and hugely successful playwright, Lyle Gaynor. Powell sets a see-saw in motion when Olliver is swept up by the tasteless publishing tycoon, Tyson Bricker, and his new book makes its way onto to the bestseller lists just as Lyle's Broadway career is coming apart.

Dennis Orphen, in writing a novel, has stolen the life story of his friend, Effie Callingham, the former wife of a famous, Hemingway-like novelist, Andrew Callingham. Orphen’s betrayal is not the only one, nor the worst one, in this hilarious satire of the New York literary scene. (Powell personally considered this to be her best New York novel.) Powell takes revenge here on all publishers, and her baffoonish MacTweed is a comic invention worthy of Dickens. And as always in Powell’s New York novels, the city itself becomes a central character: “On the glittering black pavement legs hurried by with umbrella tops, taxis skidded along the curb, their wheels swishing through the puddles, raindrops bounced like dice in the gutter.” Powell’s famous wit was never sharper than here, but Turn, Magic Wheel is also one of the most poignant and heart-wrenching of her novels.

It is sometime after the turn of the century in Lamptown, Ohio, a working-class town filled with factory girls. Every Thursday night at the Casino Dance Hall above Bauer's Chop House and across the street from Elsinore Abbott's Bon Ton Hat Shop and Bill Delaney's Saloon and Billiard Parlor, women and a few men gather to escape their pedestrian lives in fantasy, and sometimes to live out these fantasies. Observing all are the novel's two young protagonists, Morry, who dreams of becoming an architect and developer, and Jen, an unsentimental orphan of fourteen who, abandoned by her mother, dreams of escape.

For decades after her death, Dawn Powell's work was out of print, cherished by a small band of admirers. Only recently has there been renewed awareness of the novelist who was such a vital presence in literary Greenwich Village from the 1920s to the 1960s. With these two volumes, The Library of America presents the best of Powell's quirky, often hilarious, sometimes deeply moving fiction.Dawn Powell was the tirelessly observant chronicler of two very different worlds: the small-town Ohio of her childhood and the sophisticated Manhattan to which she gravitated. If her Ohio novels are more melancholy and compassionate in their depiction of often frustrated lives, her Manhattan novels, with their cast of writers, show people, businessmen, and hustling hangers-on, are more exuberant and incisive. But all show rich characterization and a flair for the gist of social complexities. A playful satirist, an unsentimental observer of failed hopes and misguided longings, Dawn Powell is a literary rediscovery of rare importance.