Dawn Powell

Dawn Powell (born November 28, 1896, Mount Gilead, Ohio, U.S.—died November 15, 1965, New York, New York) was an American novelist, playwright, and short-story writer known for her biting social satires. Although she gained critical success in her lifetime, her work was not commercially successful until well after her death.

Powell endured a difficult childhood. Her mother died in 1903 of what was officially recorded as pneumonia but may have been a botched abortion. Powell spent her childhood and adolescent years moving throughout rural Ohio with her father and sisters, and she was treated badly by her stepmother. When she was 13 years old, she managed to run away from home and find safe haven with an aunt in Shelby, Ohio. There she attended high school and was able to continue her education at Lake Erie College for Women in Painesville, Ohio, where she was a fiction and poetry contributor and then an editor of the college quarterly. She graduated in 1918. When she settled in New York City later that year, her literary career began to gain ground. She became a freelance writer while working at a variety of jobs. She married in 1920 and the following year gave birth to a son who was severely disabled (probably with what would later be recognized as severe autism). She worked hard to support her child as well as her husband, who struggled with alcoholism. In 1924 she moved with her family to Greenwich Village and immersed herself in its bohemian culture, a social landscape that provided endless material for her writing. Powell published Whither, her first novel, in 1925. It is an early example of a story of a Midwestern transplant in New York City. Once it was published, however, she refused to acknowledge it and always referred to her next book, She Walks in Beauty (1928), as her first. She Walks in Beauty was set in pre-World War I Ohio. Other novels from this period include The Bride’s House (1929), Dance Night (1930), The Tenth Moon (1932), and The Story of a Country Boy (1934), the last of the books considered to be of her “Ohio cycle”—those set in Ohio. In about 1931 Powell began keeping a journal, from which most of her biography has been reconstructed since her death. During those years she also wrote plays, among them Big Night (1933) and Jig Saw: A Comedy (1934).

With the publication of the novel Turn, Magic Wheel (1936), Powell mastered her sharp comical writing style that satirized the Greenwich Village literary café culture, the scene in which she herself was a permanent fixture along with writers John Dos Passos and E.E. Cummings and critic Edmund Wilson, among others. Turn, Magic Wheel was well received among critics and is considered the first of her “New York cycle” books—those in which she writes from the outsider’s perspective, using her insider knowledge of New York. She published her last novel, The Golden Spur, in 1962.

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Though she was prolific (she wrote 16 novels, 10 plays, and some 100 short stories), Powell never became as well known as her contemporaries. She was admired by many critics (most notably Wilson and J.B. Priestley) and other writers, however, and was the recipient of the Marjorie Peabody Waite Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1964. Although she gained some admirers in the United States and England, her relative obscurity was likely due to a general distaste for her harsh satiric tone. It was only through an editorial in The New York Review of Books by Gore Vidal in 1987 that her work was rediscovered and put back into print. Since the 1990s, novels, short stories, and plays by Powell have been reissued, and her letters and diaries were newly published. The Library of America has published two volumes of her work (nine novels in all), Novels 1930–1942 and Novels 1944–1962.