Dawn Powell

Biography

Powell was born in Mount Gilead, Ohio, a village 45 miles north of Columbus and the county seat of Morrow County. Powell regularly gave her birth year as 1897 but primary documents support the earlier date. 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 (1944).

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 was born mentally impaired and later developed autism. Her husband abandoned poetry for the steady work of 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

She had a prodigious output, producing 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 off. Throughout her life, she supported herself with various jobs, including freelance writer, extra in silent films, Hollywood screenwriter, book reviewer, and radio personality. Her play Walking Down Broadway was filmed as Hello, Sister! (1933), co-written and co-directed by Erich von Stroheim.

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. In 1939, Scribner's became her publisher, where Maxwell Perkins was 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 2006 in New York City.

After the war, Powell's output slowed down, but it included some of her most acclaimed New York novels, including The 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 the Cold War. The novel ends with news of the Bikini Atoll atom-bomb tests.

Two late novels show Powell's interest in the New York art world of the 1950s:

Old age and death

Later in life, Powell did most of her writing in an apartment at 95 Christopher Street.

Powell died slowly and painfully of colon cancer which afflicted her in 1964 and killed her the following year, in the same week as the first great New York blackout. She donated her body to the Cornell Medical Center, which offered to return parts of it five years later for burial. Her executrix, Jacqueline Miller Rice, refused to claim the remains, which were then buried on 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 at the Columbia University Rare Books and Manuscripts Library in her beloved New York.

Powell is referenced in the Gilmore Girls episode "Help Wanted", in which Rory expresses sadness over her relative obscurity. 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 the novelist Alan Furst in his 2014 work 'Midnight in Europe.'

A new book about her by Patricia E. Palermo was published in 2016. Called "The Message of the City: Dawn Powell's NY Novels," it is a brilliant compilation of most of the critical work done on Powell in her day and in ours. It also looks at how the writer turns her everyday life, as discussed in her diaries and letters, into polished fiction.

Awards

Quotes