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 ...
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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. In this, one of two volumes collecting nine novels, The Library of America presents the best of Powell's fiction. Dance Night (1930), Powell's own favorite among her works, is a surprisingly frank treatment of obsessive longing set in an Ohio factory town during the 1920s. Come Back to Sorrento (1932; originally published as The Tenth Moon ), a compelling study of frustrated aspirations, tells the story of a woman whose friendship with a music teacher awakens her sense of her life's wasted potential. With Turn, Magic, Wheel (1936), a whirlwind tour of Manhattan's literary world, Powell reinvented herself as a satirical writer. Her treatment of the "city of perpetual distraction" captures the allure of Manhattan with a lightness and wit to be found in all her New York novels. Angels on Toast (1940), whose farcical pace recalls screwball comedy, is a shrewd portrait of the adulterous misadventures of two salesmen. In A Time To Be Born (1942), set during the months before America's entry into World War II, Powell portrays the monstrously egotistical Amanda Keeler Evans--one of her most wickedly barbed creations. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
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Dawn Powell (1896-1965) wrote 15 novels which received little notice during her lifetime. Powell was born in rural Ohio. After college, she moved to Greenwich Village in New York City where she lived most of her life. Her novels have a strong element of autobiography. She wrote novels of her early experience in Ohio and novels of her life in New York City and often contrasted the different paces and values of life in the Midwest and in New York. Her later books are sharply satirical and often cynical. She wrote of love and of affairs and of loss in unconventional situations.
In the 1990s, many people discovered Powell's works, sparked largely by the biography and other writings on Powell by Tim Page. In 2001, the Library of America published a two volumes of Dawn Powell, with notes by Tim Page, including 9 of her novels. The LOA is a wonderful and ambitious project which aims to capture the best in American writing, novels, poetry, history, philosophy. It is a record of American thought and of the American experience.
This volume consists of five novels that Powell wrote between 1930 and 1952. The first two books center upon life in the Midwest while the latter three books are satires of urban life.
The first novel in the book, Dance Night (1930), was Powell's fourth published novel and her own favorite of her works. It is a coming-of-age novel set in the fictitious town of Lamptown, Ohio. It deals with the restlessness of adolescence in a small town and with sexual frustration. The book points the way for its hero to leave Lamptown on a train bound, presumably, to seek his chance in New York City.
"Come Back to Sorrento", Powell's next novel was written in 1932 and sold poorly. But the novel is a gem. It is set in a small midwestern town and its two main characters are a woman, trapped in an unhappy marriage who had dreamed in her youth of becoming a singer, and the town music teacher who had aspired to become a concert pianist and who is likely homosexual. The book is on the whole subdued and understated and centers upon the frustrating relationship between the two protagonists.
The next book in the collection, "Turn, Magic Wheel" (1936), is the first of Powell's novels satirizing life in New York City. Its characters are a young man who has published one successful novel lampooning a literary idol of the day, the literary idol himself, (modeled on Earnest Hemingway), and the women who are involved with both of them. There are great descriptions of the streets, bars and sites of New York City. The story is sharply, but compassionately, told. The book, I think, is ultimately a love story with an ambiguous message about the possibility of happiness.
"Angels on Toast" (1940) is a satire of the world of business with its two main characters commuting by train from Chicago to New York City in search of money and mistresses. It is sharp and engaging, if one-dimensional. I don't think it as good as the other four novels in this volume.
The final work in this collection, "A Time to be Born" (1942) was one of Powell's few novels to achieve commercial success during her lifetime. One of the main characters in this book is modeled in part on Clare Boothe Luce. In this book, Powell juxtaposes life in midwest Ohio with life in New York City. The two major women characters in the book move to New York from the same small town in Ohio with very different results. This book is satirical but it is also -- actually primarily -- a coming-of-age novel for its young woman heroine. It gives an unforgettable picture of life in New York City just at the eve of United States entry into WW II.
Powell is best known as a satirist, but the books in this series show she was that and more. Her themes as a novelist are somewhat limited, but they are developed well and embroidered in each successive work. Her writing style develops with time until in her final novels (the second volume of the series) it becomes beautiful. She offers a vision of New York City and of the loss of innocence that is her own. The Library of America series is to be commended for finding writers in unexpected places describing American experience.. Powell deserves her place in this series and in American literature. This volume will give the reader a good exposure to her writing.
