The LOA Edition
Dawn Powell The Library of America Her Life Her Work Commentary
Detail of A Man's Affair book jacket Edmund Wilson
Gore Vidal
Richard Lingeman
James Gibbons
Commentary and Criticism: In Her Time

Miss Powell gets out of her backgrounds a humor and a fairy-tale poetry that have something in common with Dickens. Her quality is all her own: an odd blend of sharp sophistication with something childlike, surprised, and droll.

—Review of My Home is Far Away,
in the New Yorker


More Commentary
NPR Interviews Powell's Editor, Tim Page*


Weekend All Things Considered
Commentary

Dawn Powell wanted to write and write she did
dozens of poems, hundreds of short stories and articles, at least ten plays, magnificent diaries that span three and a half decades, and—the accomplishment that meant the most to her—a number of dizzying and inventive novels. Absolutely unsentimental about mortality, she would have been far more concerned about what happened to her work than about what became of her exhausted body. As a character in Powell's first acknowledged novel puts it, shyly allowing a new friend to read her writing, "This—well, this is me."

 

From the book Dawn Powell: A Biography by Tim Page. Copyright © 1998 by Tim Page. Reprinted by arrangement with Tim Page and Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

 

Detail of Dance Night cover

 

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