Synopses & Reviews
American literature has known few writers capable of the comic élan and full-bodied portraiture that abound in the novels of Dawn Powell. Yet for decades after her death, Powell's work was out of print, cherished by a small band of admirers. Only recently has there been a rediscovery of the writer Gore Vidal calls "our best comic novelist," and whom Edmund Wilson considered to be "on a level with Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh, and Muriel Spark." With these two volumes, The Library of America presents the best of Powell's quirky, often hilarious, sometimes deeply moving fiction.
Dawn Powell a vital part of literary Greenwich Village from the 1920s through the 1960s was the tirelessly observant chronicler of two very different worlds: the small-town Ohio where she grew up and the sophisticated Manhattan to which she gravitated. If her Ohio novels are more melancholy and compassionate, her Manhattan novels, exuberant and incisive, sparkle with a cast of writers, show people, businessmen, and hustling hangers-on. All show rich characterization and a flair for the gist of complex social situations. A playful satirist, an unsentimental observer of failed hopes and misguided longings, Dawn Powell is a literary rediscovery of rare importance.
The second of two volumes published by the Library of America, this volume opens with My Home Is Far Away (1944), a fictionalized memoir of Powell's difficult childhood. The Locusts Have No King (1948), The Wicked Pavilion (1954), and The Golden Spur (1962) are brilliant comedies that extend her dissection of the follies and longings of a sophisticated cast of characters.
Tim Page, the volumes' editor, is the author of Dawn Powell: A Biography and the editor of The Diaries of Dawn Powell and Selected Letters of Dawn Powells. He won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1997, and is a culture critic at The Washington Post.
Review
"No human affections survive Dawn Powell's rueful, sympathetic analysis: in this she suggests Proust. It's a hard world, and from an inventory of its frustrations and disillusions one could hardly imagine why Dawn Powell is considered a comic novelist. But such an inventory leaves out her animated grasp of mundane details, and the driving vitality of her characters' rapt, wily, self-serving talk." John Updike
Review
"Wittier than Dorothy Parker, dissects the rich better than F. Scott Fitzgerald, is more plaintive than Willa Cather in her evocation of the heartland and has a more supple control of satirical voice than Evelyn Waugh, the writer to whom she's most often compared." Lisa Zeidner, The New York Times
Review
"[H]er prose is still as fresh and tonic as it was when she wrote it....She was the unrivaled observer of her piece of New York turf. Opinion-makers thrust her aside to make room for worse writers, but she didn't fizzle out or lose control of her bumpy life, or surrender her belief in the dignity of her own work."
Daniel Aaron, New Republic
Review
"[The Golden Spur] is probably the New York novel...and wildly funny, funny with a true wit's wildness." Gore Vidal, Salon
About the Author
For decades after her death, Dawn Powell's work was out of print, cherished by a small band of admirers. Only recently has there been renewed awareness of the novelist who was such a vital presence in literary Greenwich Village from the 1920s to the 1960s.
Dawn Powell was the tirelessly observant chronicler of two very different worlds: the small-town Ohio of her childhood and the sophisticated Manhattan to which she gravitated. If her Ohio novels are more melancholy and compassionate in their depiction of often-frustrated lives, her Manhattan novels, with their cast of writers, show people, businessmen, and hustling hangers-on, are more exuberant and incisive. But all show rich characterization and a flair for the gist of social complexities. A playful satirist, an unsentimental observer of failed hopes and misguided longings, Dawn Powell is a literary rediscovery of rare importance.
Table of Contents
My home is far away -- The locusts have no home -- The wicked pavilion -- The golden spur.