have given readings of Powell’s works at the Algonquin Hotel, an irony which surely would not be lost on our novelist, who sniffed that that crowd did little more than “spend their lives preventing each other from working” (Diaries, 209). America’s great stage actress Irene Worth (1916–2002) read from Powell’s novels on at least two occasions in New York, once at Joe’s Pub in Greenwich Village; Professor William Peterson has since the 1990s presented public lectures on Long Island about the novelist (Finalborgo, 9); and Tim Page has spoken on her at such locales as the Museum of the City of New York, New York University, and in numerous Greenwich Village bookstores. John Strausbaugh’s 2013 publication, The Village: 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues, mentions Powell throughout.
Today, interest in Powell is climbing again. In 2010 the ReGroup Theatre Company helmed by Allie Mulholland staged a reading of Big Night at St. Luke’s Theatre in New York and presented a talk on her work and that of other Group playwrights at Symphony Space in 2011; in November and December 2012, they produced the comedy off-Broadway, also in Powell’s original version. Jig Saw was recently restaged at the Riverside Arts Center in Ypsilanti, Michigan, in December 2013, by Nan Bauer; Tim Page and Carol Warstler were on hand to introduce the play. Page remarked that ““Dawn Powell’s fizzy, dizzy Jig-Saw comes to brilliant and exhilarating life in [this] production!” In late 2012 Page offered her original diaries for sale, prompting much attention in such publications as the New York Times and the New Yorker and in social media sites. A short while later Columbia University purchased the volumes, to much media notice, including a piece by John Williams in the New York Times which stated, quite rightfully, that “Page has done more than anyone [else] to champion her work.” Powell was featured in a 2011 discussion of Group Theatre playwrights at New York City’s Symphony Space; her friend and portraitist, Peggy Bacon, was in 2012 featured in an art exhibit at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC; and her novel A Time to Be Born was not only chosen that same year as a selection of the New York Times’ “Big City Book Club” but a few months later named by literary blogger Nathaniel Rich as one of the finest novels of World War II; he stated that “it doesn’t have a single gun” in it yet it “captures the viciousness and madness of the homefront.” Contemporary writer Whitney Otto, perhaps most famous for her novel and the film adaptation of How to Make an American Quilt, told me in a 2013 e-mail that her 2002 novel A Collection of Beauties at the Height of Their Popularity had been partially influenced by The Wicked Pavilion and that she did not fail to speak of the Powell novel while on publicity tours. Her 2012 book, Eight Girls Taking Pictures, similarly contains a sly nod to Powell (289), who also receives much attention in Playing Smart: New York Women Writers and Modern Magazine Culture, Catherine Keyser’s 2011 publication. Historian John Joseph delivered a well-attended speech on Powell on December 11, 2014, entitled “Dawn Powell: An Often Overlooked Literary Great,” under the auspices of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation. Most prominently, perhaps, on June 2, 2015, Powell was presented a prestigious award from Rocco Staino and the Empire State Center for the Book. In October of the same year, David Earle, amasser of Powell’s earliest short publications, wrote “Dawn Powell, Flapper Stories, and the Pulps”; and Terry Teachout published an essay, “Little Miss Wolfsbane,” on October 13, 2015, in response to David Pomerantz’s, Robert Nedelkoff’s, and Tim Page’s Facebook announcement that a previously unknown recording of Powell’s voice on a radio show of October 9, 1939, had surfaced. In April 2016, R. Scott Evans, Senior Vice President of Lake Erie College’s Institutional Advancement and Chief of the President’s Staff, along with Lake Erie College English professors Jennifer Swartz-Levine and Adam Stier, hosted a celebration of Dawn Powell scholarship at her alma mater at which Marcy Smith and I spoke. The activity continues.
Yet despite all this praise, despite all this activity, I have still encountered few readers who have heard of Dawn Powell. Perhaps this work will help to shine a little more of the spotlight squarely on Powell; perhaps it will help bring her out of the “perpetual dusk” in which she has too long languished (Wolcott, 42). For novelist Lorrie Moore, it seems not at all unusual that yet another revival might be required for the author to receive her due, for “during [Powell’s] own lifetime, her struggling though productive career seems to have been in constant semi-revival” (1). As we have noted, some activity around Powell is beginning again. Perhaps now the time is finally ripe for Dawn Powell.
CHAPTER THREE
“EVERY ARTIST WRITES HIS OWN AUTOBIOGRAPHY”
The Diaries, Letters, Short Stories, and Criticism
As for New York City, it’s the only place where people with nothing behind them but their wits can be and do everything.
—Letters, 75–761
Because all of Powell’s novels are to some extent autobiographical, those studying her would do well to acquaint themselves with the biography as they approach her fiction. For that reason, among others, it is fortunate that she left us the great many letters and diaries she did, for they help to inform our understanding of what she was attempting to accomplish in each novel, assist us in measuring what she thought she had achieved against what critics then and now believe she did in fact achieve, and shed light on the ways in which certain autobiographical events as they appear in letter or diary are transformed into fiction. Edited by Tim Page, both diary and letter collections have met with praise: Gerald Howard, an editor at Doubleday, calls The Diaries of Dawn Powell, 1931–1965 “one of the finest interior portraits of the novelist’s art and temper in our literature” (10); and of the Selected Letters of Dawn Powell, 1913–1965, novelist Lorrie Moore says, “So current and alive is Powell’s epistolary voice, even in the earliest letters, that one is tempted to suggest that what we think of as the contemporary American voice—in journalism and the arts—is none other than hers: ironic, triumphant, mocking and game; the voice of a smart, chipper, small-town Ohio girl newly settled in New York” (2). As soon as Powell arrived, she cheerfully settled in. A 1931 letter from her to her cousin Jack Sherman praises the city breathlessly (Letters, 75): for the writer, it was a place where anything was possible, where humble beginnings did not matter, where a young poverty-stricken nobody from a tiny midwestern town had every opportunity to make her dreams come true.2
The Diaries, according to critic Bill Buford, revealed that “Powell had a brilliant mind and a keen wit, and [that] 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.” This evaluation of Powell’s diaries, in so few words, is as spot-on an assessment of this edition of her diaries as any to date.
With the publication of Tim Page’s biography of Powell, and with all of her best works now back in print, it would appear that Dawn Powell has clearly “arrived” and taken her deserved place in American letters. Her remarkable Diaries will stand as one of her finest literary achievements; indeed, they are among the finest achievements of the genre.
Of course, Tim Page’s Dawn Powell: A Biography also assists readers in this undertaking. Praised as “meticulously researched, well written, and sympathetic,” the biography does “a superb job of establishing [Powell’s] right to an honored place in the pantheon of American letters” (Bing, 61). Today’s readers and students of the author are fortunate to have these three sources available to them. They have proven indispensable in providing a window into the working mind of the author.
THE DIARIES OF DAWN POWELL, 1931–1965
The thrills of a writer’s
