tracking down and sending me some elusive information on the Shore Club, where Powell worked as a teenager; to Kathleen Conry, theater actress and director who resided at New York’s Rehearsal Club in 1966, for much vital information; to Muriel Keyes, assistant editor of the Antioch Review, for tracking down Gore Vidal’s first published mention of Dawn Powell in an editorial by Robert S. Fogarty; and to Peter L. Skolnik, lawyer for the Powell estate, for all estate permissions and for letting me know about the rights to Powell’s final novel, The Golden Spur, which Lee Adams and Charles Strouse said back in 2008 they may yet one day turn into a musical, though time is passing and the project at this date seems unlikely (an unfinished version of it, from 1962–64, is held at Columbia University Library); to Author’s Guild attorney Michael Gross, for his tireless correspondence, astute eye, and indispensable lawyerly advice; to Arthur Vanderbilt, for putting me in touch with the Author’s Guild in the first place; to Jeffrey Edmond Lawson, son of John Howard Lawson and his second wife, Sue Edmond Lawson, for generously recounting for me his fond and vivid memories of Powell; to Peter Reznikoff, actor and very young friend of Powell’s—his parents were the photographer Genevieve Naylor and the artist Misha Reznikoff—for granting me permission to reproduce a rarely seen portrait of Powell taken at her beloved Café Lafayette by his mother; to Tricia Gesner of AP Images for her invaluable, prompt, reliable, cheerful, and tireless help, even on weekends; to brilliant and hardworking photographer William “Bill” Wittkop, without whom I could not have provided illustrations for this book; to David Johnson, for allowing me to reproduce his outstanding caricature of Dawn; to Jonathan Bank of the Mint Theater, New York, for giving me a digital image and permission to reproduce the theater’s flier for their production of Walking down Broadway; to John Dos Passos Coggin, John Dos Passos’s only grandson, for sharing information his mother, Lucy Dos Passos Coggin, remembers about Dawn; and especially to Allie Mulholland, founder and director of the ReGroup Theatre, which puts on plays that the Group Theatre first staged many decades ago, for his endless generosity in sharing so much with me and for being not only a Dawn Powell scholar and fan but also a dear friend.
Another delighted thank-you goes to David Earle, associate professor of the University of West Florida, who has located many if not all of Powell’s early stories from the pulp magazines of the 1920s and ’30s and who most graciously shared two of them with me, even giving me permission “to quote away” from them.
Thanks also go to Christine A. Lutz, staff member of the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library at Princeton University, for her unflagging work on my behalf in trying to identify a rare wartime photograph of Dawn Powell, Bennett Cerf, Ludwig Bemelmans, and others. I must also thank my departed feline friend Mr. “Buncie” Benchley (namesake of the more famous Mr. Robert Benchley, friend and admirer of Powell’s) for sitting on this keyboard and rarely leaving my side throughout the many years I have spent on this project.
I owe much gratitude to Dr. Nina Rulon-Miller for her unfailing support, advice, and invaluable editorial and pictorial assistance; to Dr. Gerry Smith Wright and Kathie Brown for their unflinching belief in me over these many years; to Dr. Sloane Drayson Knigge for her considerable encouragement and assistance in procuring interlibrary-loan and other materials; to Joyce Ann Goldberg and Jeana Taylor Schorr for their never-tiring corresponding with me and for becoming true Dawn Powell aficionados in their own right; to valued friend and champion Dr. Bob Thayer; and to Jessica Levee and Rebecca Mull for their unflagging friendship.
I would of course be remiss not to mention the fine folks at Ohio University Press, among them the first there to encourage me in this work: the attentive and thoughtful David Sanders, formerly of the Press; Director Gillian Berchowitz, for her empathy, understanding, patience, and encouragement; Rick Huard, also of the Press, who gently, tirelessly, and always promptly guided me through the daunting maze of attaining copyrights and permissions; Beth Pratt, cheerful director of production there; and Nancy Basmajian, for her prompt and reliable editorial assistance.
I owe much also to M. George Stevenson, former literary agent and beneficent legal adviser, for generously giving me so much time and attention; to Elsa Dorfman, for granting me permission to include her photograph of Hannah Green; and to the intelligent and always kind Katherine Degn of New York’s Kraushaar Galleries for her friendship, for reliably prompt responses to my queries, and for granting me permission to reproduce drawings by Peggy Bacon of Powell, their cats, and Powell’s close friend, Coburn Gilman.
Finally I wish to thank my dear friend, the late Regina Crimmins, one of two persons who upon our first meeting had already read Powell, for her inspired and inspiring idea that we celebrate the completion of this project in Greenwich Village, Dawn Powell’s favorite home. It was a grand affair, one that even Tim Page attended.
ABBREVIATIONS
| Bio | Dawn Powell: A Biography, by Tim Page (New York: Henry Holt, 1998) |
| Diaries | The Diaries of Dawn Powell, 1931–1965, edited by Tim Page (South Royalton, VT: Steerforth Press, 1995) |
| Letters | Selected Letters of Dawn Powell, 1913–1965, edited by Tim Page (New York: Henry Holt, 1999) |
CHAPTER ONE
“ALLOW ME TO INTRODUCE YOU”
If you are asking yourself, “Who is Dawn Powell?” allow me to introduce you to one of the great American novelists of [the twentieth] century.
—Carleen M. Loper, “Discovering Dawn Powell,” 2
Ohio-born writer Dawn Powell, who lived from 18961 to 1965, was always prolific, writing fifteen novels;2 more than a hundred short stories; a dozen or so plays; countless book reviews; several radio, television, and film scripts; volumes of letters and diary entries; even poetry.3 So productive was she that, following one spate of housecleaning, she wrote to her editor at Scribner’s, Max Perkins, “I was appalled by the mountains of writing I had piled up in closets and file cases and trunks. . . . It struck me with terrific force that I just wrote too goddam much. Worse, I couldn’t seem to stop” (Letters, 134). Weighing her literary output against that of some of her contemporaries, Powell joked to her close friend, writer and literary critic Edmund Wilson, “If I don’t write for five years I may make quite a name for myself and if I can stop for ten I may give Katherine Anne [Porter] and Dorothy Parker a run for their money” (129). If in her lifetime Powell never did make either the name for herself or the money she had hoped, she did enjoy certain successes. In the year before her death, she was awarded the American Institute of Arts and Letters’ Marjorie Peabody Waite Award for lifetime achievement; a few years before that, she was granted an honorary doctorate from her alma mater, Lake Erie College for Women. In 1963 her last novel, The Golden Spur, was nominated for the National Book Award; she appeared in a television interview with Harry Reasoner to discuss the novel, though it did not win. So far as I know, that interview is unavailable.
After she moved from Ohio to Manhattan in 1918 and began writing the many works that today are divided into the Ohio and the New York novels (with the exceptions of Angels on Toast, sometimes called a Chicago novel, and A Cage for Lovers, set in Paris), Malcolm Cowley hailed her as “the cleverest and wittiest writer in New York”; Diana Trilling called her “one of the wittiest women around”; and J. B. Priestley openly supported her work, as we shall see below. Other friends and admirers included Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Matthew Josephson, the afore-mentioned Edmund Wilson, and many more. Some of her books sold adequately, many less than adequately; none were blockbusters by any means, and virtually all were out of print by the time of her death in 1965.
Thanks
