Dos Passos, and Damon Runyon (II, 1–5). Ross Wetzsteon devotes a chapter to Powell in his book Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village, the American Bohemia;105 and Alice Sparberg Alexiou, in her 2006 biography of Jane Jacobs, foe of Robert Moses and noted preservationist of city neighborhoods, includes Dawn Powell as a familiar Village “luminary” (22, and passim).
Powell’s name frequently turns up even when one is not expecting to find it: for example, perusing the “About Us” link on the Peccadillo Theater Company’s website, I stumbled upon this item: “Peccadillo concentrates on the era of the well-made play, a period of sparkling wit and sophistication in comedy as well as deepening realism in the drama. It encompasses such diverse and, sad to say, little-known American playwrights as Sidney Howard, Philip Barry, William Inge, Dawn Powell, and many, many more” (1). True to their word, the Peccadillo Theatre Company in March 2001 produced Powell’s 1934 comedy Jig Saw under the direction of Dan Wackerman, and a year later New York’s Sightlines Theatre Company also staged it. For Village Voice theater critic Jessica Winter, the play, this time staged as written, “hardly lacks for whiskey-lubricated one-liners” though it “evokes less the droll chamber music of Powell’s contemporary Noel Coward than the cacophony stirred by the recent revival of The Women.” Powell would detest being compared to Clare Boothe Luce, whom she famously satirized in her 1942 novel A Time to Be Born. But these New York productions were not the first revivals of the play: in 2000, Los Angeles Classical Theatre Ensemble Antaeus staged it in a production directed by John Walcutt, and even before that, in 1997, it had been restaged at Long Island University (Parks, 1).
. . .
The Peccadillo also produced Talk of the Town, an original musical comedy about the Algonquin group; and The Ladies of the Corridor, Dorothy Parker and Arnaud d’Usseau’s weepy 1953 drama (McNulty, 2). I ran across the following mention in a review of Broadway’s 2004 revival of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s comedy Twentieth Century: “Just a footnote: you know, most urban literature of this time—by the likes of John O’Hara, Dawn Powell, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker—was very, very hip. This play, with its snappy dialogue, modern thoughts about sex and adultery and cynicism about show business, could be set in 2004 instead of 1932 and no one would notice” (R. Friedman, “Anne,” 3). It seems as if, in theatre circles at least, Dawn Powell’s name had almost become a household word.
Extracts from Powell’s diaries appear in 2000’s The Assassin’s Cloak: An Anthology of the World’s Greatest Diarists, in Phillip Lopate’s Writing New York, and in Teresa Carpenter’s New York Diaries, 1609–2009. Seeing that Carpenter had included so much of Powell in her 2012 book, I wrote her to ask why. She replied,
I’m sometimes asked to pick my favorite diarists from this collection and I usually demur out of a sense of literary courtesy. But I’ll break ranks with courtesy in this instance to say that Dawn Powell is emphatically top-tier. She was a woman who knew so much sorrow—alcoholic husband, disabled son, personal struggles. . . . Yet in the end it’s her extraordinary resilience and vitality that make her diary entries so compelling. In her personal writings, sorrow is eclipsed by a constant stream of ideas for novels and stories all of which sparkle with wit and insight into the human condition. Her off-the-cuff vignettes of Greenwich Village, which she called her “creative oxygen,” are more vivid than photos, and her often ruthlessly spot-on portraits of New Yorkers are classics of the genre.
Though Powell has been named one of the “extraordinary diarists of our era” (Levinson, 107), more often of course she is acclaimed for her novels. Lewis M. Dabney, in his biography of Edmund Wilson, placed Powell among the ten novelists who “helped define the literary and intellectual life” of this country in the last century (6). The bookseller Powell’s Books, reviewing the Library of America’s issues, called her “a rediscovery of rare importance” (2), while the Library Journal noted that the collection placed her among our finest writers, where she belongs (Rogers, “Dawn Powell Novels,” 160). For New York Times critic A. O. Scott, Dawn Powell is “a writer we can no longer imagine ever having forgotten” (B10).
One can imagine her impatient response, “It’s about time!”—softened with a rueful laugh, of course.
—Margaret Carlin, 1106
By 2000, Powell’s work had begun to appear in a few anthologies and some college course syllabi as well. Not only does Ross Wetzsteon’s Republic of Dreams include her, but she appears as a character in Vidal’s 2000 novel The Golden Age, in which the writer describes her as “a round little woman with squirrel-bright eyes” (284). Vidal called her last published work, The Golden Spur, one of his five favorite postwar novels (“True Gore,” 1–2). A course at the New School, called “Dawn Powell’s New York,” was offered by Professor Theresa Craig in the fall of 2003 (New School, 44); and her work has been included in a course called “Urban Myths and the American City” at Columbia University’s Barnard College. Powell friend and emeritus Professor William Peterson of Southampton College, Long Island University, who once taught at the novelist’s alma mater, together with Tim Page presented a symposium for the centennial of Powell’s birth at Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve University in 1996; and in 2006, the sesquicentennial of the founding of Lake Erie College, all freshman arrivals were given copies of My Home Is Far Away in celebration of its most famous alumna.
. . .
In its premiere performance, Powell’s Women at Four O’Clock, along with Jig Saw, Big Night, and “several dramatic adaptations of Powell’s short stories,” was staged by Sightlines Theatre Company, at the Seventy-Eighth Street Theatre Lab in New York, from January through March 2002 in a festival named “Permanent Visitor: A Festival Celebrating Dawn Powell in New York.” Musical Theatre Works staged an adaptation of Powell’s 1942 novel, A Time to Be Born (Horwitz, 45), written by Suzanne Myers (Redeemable, 1). And Walking down Broadway, another Powell drama never before produced, debuted at New York’s Mint Theatre in late 2005.
Literary tours of Powell’s remaining haunts and residences are conducted from time to time; and her effect on popular American culture has even reached 1980s and 1990s television: Seinfeld, the program once thought to be “too New York” by television audiences and producers alike (Boudreaux, 1), may in fact owe something to Ohio-born Powell. At least three episodes closely echo certain incidents in her Turn, Magic Wheel (71), The Happy Island (121), and The Golden Spur (passim). The novelist has been linked to other television programming: Chicago Tribune writer Mary Schmich calls Powell’s New York novel A Time to Be Born a forerunner of the HBO series Sex and the City107 (4C.1); and Rory, the erstwhile college student in Gilmore Girls, is shown in one episode to be reading Dawn Powell’s collected works, thanks to Tim Page. Radio, too, has recently featured Powell: on January 29, 2005, WOSU radio program Ohio Arts Alive, of Columbus, Ohio, “paid tribute” to the author in a special broadcast featuring radio host Christopher Purdy, Tim Page, and two of Powell’s now-deceased cousins, sister and brother Rita and Jack Sherman. Selections from The Bride’s House, A Time to Be Born, Come Back to Sorrento, and Turn, Magic Wheel; certain Diaries entries; and the first act of Big Night were read (Purdy, “Christopher,” 1). In April 2005, her short story “Can’t We Cry a Little,” a “humorous look at radio’s Golden Age,” was read during the eightieth-anniversary tribute to the New York Public Radio station WNYC (“Women with Attitude,” 1). The story was read again on September 24, 2006, at New York’s Symphony Space and broadcast on National Public Radio Station WBFO, this time in “celebration of the short story” (WBFO, 1–4).
Additionally, discussions about and readings from Powell’s novels and plays have in recent years been held in various New York City locales and elsewhere; writers including Susan Minot, Francine Prose, and Melissa Bank have appeared at bookstores
