of Books, which later appeared in the reissue of Powell’s final novel, The Golden Spur. It is in this seminal essay that Vidal referred to Powell as “our best comic novelist” (L). He went on to say:
But despite the work of such cultists as Edmund Wilson and Matthew Josephson, John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway, Dawn Powell never became the popular writer that she ought to have been.97 . . . In her lifetime she should have been as widely read as, say, Hemingway or the early Fitzgerald or the mid O’Hara or even the late, far too late, Katherine Anne Porter. (1–2)
James Wolcott tells of busily rescuing long-neglected Powell volumes from dusty shelves and mouse-infested back rooms just before Vidal wrote his essay, Wolcott’s aim being to “write a piece that would place Powell in her proper berth” (42). But then the Vidal piece appeared, and Wolcott, not having yet finished amassing his collection, knew that he had been trumped. In 1989 David Streitfeld of the Washington Post credited Vidal with almost single-handedly bringing Powell to our notice (before Tim Page came along), saying that, “if there’s no Dawn Powell revival soon, you won’t be able to blame Gore Vidal. He’s done everything except hawk her books on street corners” (X15). The Vidal essay aroused enough interest in Powell that by the early 1990s New York’s Yarrow Press had reissued the first of the two Powell novels it would release. Vintage Books, a division of Random House, in 1989 published three works in a Quality Paperback Book Club edition, Three by Dawn Powell, introduced by Vidal. He admitted that he felt “incredibly smug” and “proprietary” (“Queen,” 17) about these releases. One only wishes that he had written about Powell earlier; if he had, perhaps he would have rescued her all the sooner from her long existence as “a secret handshake among the chosen few” (Boston Globe, “Dawn Powell Has Arrived,” 3).
Though Powell’s reissued novels received fine notices upon their re-release, this first “revival” soon lost steam. According to Philip Hensher, writing in the Spectator in 2002, “Many of the best American writers,” among whom he includes Dawn Powell, “somehow ‘don’t count’” (“Groping,” 30). And for British reviewer Nick Rennison, the novelist “may well be the best-kept secret in twentieth-century American literature and the one most worth unlocking” (II, 1).
. . .
By the mid-1990s, the second revival had begun, this time thanks to Tim Page, who has not only sung Powell’s praises in many a locale, but who wrote the only published biography of the author, brought out a collection of her well-received diaries, and edited and issued her remarkable letters. Even before all this activity, Page was responsible for the 1994 collection Dawn Powell at Her Best, a hardcover volume of two of her novels,98 several short stories, and an essay, along with a useful introduction. Page, as a newsman, knew that for this first reissue to receive any serious critical attention, it would have to be published in hardcover. The collection received so much favorable notice that at Page’s urging Vermont’s Steerforth Press later reissued twelve of Powell’s novels, a collection of her short stories, and four of her plays, all in paperback editions and all to much critical notice.
Terry Teachout, writing in 1995, summed up this next revival: “Every decade or so, somebody writes an essay about Dawn Powell, and a few hundred more people discover her work, and are grateful. And that’s it. Few American novelists have been so lavishly praised by so many high-powered critics to so little effect” (“Far,” 3). He added that Powell “remains today what she was a half-century ago: a fine and important writer adored by a handful of lucky readers and ignored by everyone else” (3). “If there is any justice,” he continued, “she will soon receive her due” (6).
A few years later, in a 1999 essay entitled “Big Lights, Big City: Dawn Powell and the Glory of Revival,” Heather Joslyn found Powell’s works noteworthy not only because of their sheer volume but because they were “both of and far ahead of her time.” She wrote:
Her body of novels form a continuing social history of the American Century’s first half, depicting how restless searchers left their flyspeck rural hometowns and flooded into their country’s big cities, how they reinvented themselves there, and how they inevitably re-created the gossipy insularity of the villages they’d escaped inside the foreboding concrete canyons of their new frontier. (“Bright”)
Following the Steerforth reissues, Page saw to it that The Library of America release nine of Powell’s novels in two volumes.99 Lauren Weiner of the New Criterion, originally hesitant to believe that another “full-fledged Powell revival [was] in progress,” came by 1999 to see “the evidence piling up” and finally to “accept the idea,” adding that two of Powell’s novels, A Time to Be Born and The Locusts Have No King, “deserve to be on a short list of the best comic novels in American literature” (“Fruits,” 23). In a lengthy 2002 essay praising the novelist, Alice Tufel noted that this second revival “is a dream come true too late” (155).
But the revivals, short-lived or no, have made something of a lasting imprint. Today Powell’s reissued books are readily available in bookstores and on online auction sites, though most of the first editions, which once were to be found in used book stacks for as little as a quarter apiece,100 have now been snatched up by collectors and are being offered at steep prices. Some of Powell’s novels may in fact be brought to the movie screen: filmmaker David Mamet is said to have purchased the film rights to two of them (Loper, 4), and award-winning filmmakers Ivy Meeropol and Mark Campbell completed a screenplay of The Happy Island, which they were in recent years said to be shopping around (“Ivy”).101 A decade ago Angelica Huston was working on bringing out a film based on a Powell book, and Julia Roberts has been said to have had some interest, but nothing has come of any of it.
To Charles McNulty, it seems that she “has been ‘rediscovered’ so many times that nearly every age tries to claim Powell as a contemporary” (2), while Michael Rogers calls her “the comeback kid” (“Golden,” 160). The Christian Science Monitor notes that the “compassionate and sharp-eyed” Powell “keeps turning up on the lists of the underrated” (“Great Reads”); and Erica Jong, who polled “250 or so distinguished writers and critics” to put together a women’s fiction list, found Powell ranked in the top 100 (35). The novelist is included in 2002’s Invisible Giants: 50 Americans Who Shaped the Nation but Missed the History Books, and Terry Teachout’s well-received 2004 collection of essays leads off with “Far from Ohio” in her praise.102 She is sometimes mentioned in the Sunday New York Times Book Review: to name a few occasions, in 2005 she appeared in Randy Cohen’s article “We’ll Map Manhattan” and in its follow-up article a month later. In the same publication, Thomas Mallon in 2008 regretfully referred to Powell and fellow New York writer Helene Hanff103 as “sharp, gallant characters . . . women clinging to New York literary life, or its fringes, by their talented fingernails” (15). In a 2004 review of a new book—Boomtown, by Greg Williams—Chris Lehmann noted that, when Williams makes a certain point about New York City, readers “can almost see Dawn Powell nodding faintly in assent” (C.04), a comment placing Powell in the position of novel-writing authority on New York; another book reviewer called Gloria Emerson, the author of Loving Graham Greene, “a delicious cross between Dawn Powell and Martha Gellhorn”104 (Russo, Review). A Maryland bookstore owner recently told me that late cartoonist and award-winning American Splendor screenwriter Harvey Pekar was an ardent Powell fan and collector. An article celebrating the 180th birthday of Ninth Street headlines Powell over all the other artists who have lived there, including such notables as Marianne Moore, Elinor Wylie, S. J. Perelman, Bret Harte, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and many others (Loschiavo, 2). In another recent New York Times Book Review, Morris Dickstein called Powell the Village’s “wittiest chronicler” (9), while for the Village Voice’s Toni Schlesinger, the very words “Greenwich Village” make her “think of Dawn Powell throwing one back” (2). Nick Dennison includes Powell’s A Time to Be Born in his two-part article, “Reading the City:
