More of an overview of Powell's life than a straight ahead bio, this book (wisely) focuses more on Powell's novels, concerning itself with their creation and relation to the author's life and experiences. Ms. Rice has a very fluid, readable style and makes many fascinating points about Powell's life and works (one thing which made me think a great deal was the fact that while her novels were very autobiographical, she excluded any 'character' resembling her autistic son.) This is a fine companion to Tim Page's bio of Powell and I highly recomend it; however, if you are looking for a more traditional biography, Tim Page's book is probably a better choice.

Either way, both volumes (as well as Powell's own works) have made me quite devoted to this wonderful novelist, and for that I thank Mr. Page and Ms.Rice both.

Having spent the last nine years involved in my own research into the life and work of Dawn Powell, I was unprepared for the richness and depth of Marcelle Smith Rice's fresh take on this extraordinary author. I learned a great deal from this book -- and enjoyed every bit of it. Rice's prose is clear, welcoming, insightful and detailed, and she has written an affectionate and appropriate study.

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 Grenwich 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 pacings 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 a town called 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 very 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, (modelled 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 possiblity 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 modelled 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 describing American experience in somewhat unexpected places. Powell deserves her place in this series and in American literature. This volume will give the reader a good exposure to the work of Dawn Powell.

An author of immense popularity, Dawn Powell (1896-1965) wrote satiric, witty, sharply written and observant fiction that went out of print following her death. Then in the early 1990s a renewed awareness of this major literary figure saw the reissuing of her work, only to have it fall back into obscurity once again. Now The Library Of America has brought her work back into print again and in a format that will insure that her fiction will continue to be available to both scholarship and the general reading public for decades to come. Volume 1: Novels 1930-1942 includes Dance Night; Come Back to Sorrento; Turn, Magic Wheel; Angels on Toast; and A Time To be Born. Volume 2: Novels 1944-1962 features My Home Is Far Away; The Locusts Have No King; The Wicked Pavilion; and The Golden Spur. Dawn Powell: Volumes 1 & 2 is a very highly recommended addition to both academic and community library literary fiction collections.

Thank you, Steerforth & Tim Page (and Gore Vidal) for making the work of Dawn Powell available. Of all her books, I like the diaries the best--so candid, such a grown-up view of the world; her comments on writing, the New York literary world, and the gritty beauty and ugliness of New York are always acute. Her grasp of the complexity of relationships is amazing-her comments about her husband Joe, her sweetheart, and her child are poignant reminders that life need not be perfect to be rich. Here is the voice of a remarkable woman, one of the most clear-eyed American writers of the twentieth-century. She captures a particular New York moment as does no other writer, and that's saying something.

I am somehow reminded of another great writer, another unsentimental woman: Natalia Ginzburg. An Italian, her work and Powell's are very different, yet they share a rare candor and stoicism.

I have used this new book by Powell & Cassidy -- twice. In an undergraduate class in Family Life Education (University of North Texas), I assigned this text the first semester it was available. I had received a desk copy from Mayfield in fall, just in time for adoption for my Spring 2001 class. Students found the text "readable," which is to say that the authors wisely kept theory short (though evident!) and application at the ready. On all topics, students found practical advice and explanation for working with families.

The second use was in a graduate class (Texas Woman's University) called Teaching Family Sciences. While this text is not a graduate-level textbook, I considered it an essential reading for our course because I fully expect the book to be a top choice for undergraduate courses in FLE for years to come. In other words, it is a good book for graduate students (future instructors) to be exposed to.

In case anyone is not familiar with Powell and Cassidy, they are well regarded in the circle of professionals and educators in the family field. Powell has just concluded service in a national role with the National Council on Family Relations. Cassidy is also associated with NCFR: she directs the certification program (national) of Certified Family Life Educators.

I recommend this book for use with undergraduate _and_ graduate students.

Mary Bold, Ph.D., CFLE

This novel, set before and into the Depression, covers Christopher Bennett's rise and fall as an executive in the Balding Company of Aviland, the midwestern city he and Joy have inhabited after leaving the farm back in Bennettsville. Also in Aviland from Bennettville is Madeleine Greaves, who completes a love triangle. Madeleine, the one clear-seeing character, is the most tragic, for Chris rises and falls in a fog, barely sensing the truths of his situation.He is a "natural" leader, not given to clear reflection.

As a novel of business, The Story of a Country Boy rejects any
easy Marxian analysis. Chris is deluded about being one of the
workers, but the workers aren't magnanimous or heroic. The bitter
process-server who becomes a radical street speaker says it all:
he's an unpleasant, ungenerous, vindictive creature.

I admired the slowness of the pacing, the way Powell lets big
changes occur so gradually that the characters are caught by
surprise.But can a man in a such a fog really rise to corporate
power? And can a clear-thinking, self-knowing woman really become
overwhelmingly enamored of such a man?

Powell's sentences are deft:
Yes, the dining room as Tannahill had said was a
really charming little room with its blue walls and
Wedgwood medallions, its little ivory balconies filled
with flowers, its softly lit tables, its hush so
compelling that, defiant as she already felt, it was
impossible for her to raise her voice above a whisper.
(54 words). There were only four other diners as they
entered, a gaunt old gentleman with a Van Dyke and
monocle with his elaborately décolleté, jaundiced wife;
she sat, hands folded, her broken bitter face caught to
her body with a rhinestone and velvet neck ribbon, her
sagging bones somehow organized for the evening under a
green brocade gown. (57 words) pp.241-242.

There's wit, too, as in the sentence that follows the two above:

The couple, created out of much-labeled steamer trunks
and exuding a faint aura of camphor balls, gloomily
permitted bouillon to enter into their chill esophageal
caverns and did not speak to each other, having
finished their conversation at least twenty years
ago.(43 words)

Finishing reading this novel, I wanted to discuss it with some
other reader. I went to the Web and found nothing beyond
publishers' blurbs and directives to my edition's own forward by
Powell biographer Tim Page. What did this book mean in its day?
What were the issues that Powell felt showed the keen edge of her
thought? At the distance of nearly 70 years, I want to see the
work as an examination of human nature, of "love," of limitation.
"Only intelligent women get their lives in such messes,"
Madeleine considers at the end. "They get too smart for their own
feelings, they try to control them and perhaps that's why they're
so miserable in love. . .or they want their self-respect and love
both, or security with love, and love doesn't go with anything
but agony and jealousy and humiliation and pain" (299).
In the end Joy, the wife, misses her bottle of Dom;
Madeleine, alone now, sees what everything's cost and who has
paid; and Chris, back at the family farm, clueless given his
Teflon heart, faces the Bennetsville night "free and incredibly
happy."

Dawn Powell (1896 -1965) wrote novels about her youth in small town Ohio at the turn of the century and about New York City, where she spent most of her adult life. In general, Powell wrote the New York City novels, such as "Turn Magic Wheel", and "The Locusts Have no King" later in her career. They tend to be sharp satires. Her earlier Ohio novels, such as "Dance Night" and "Come Back to Sorrento", are marked, I think, by a depiction of small town life which is critical and bittersweet, as well as somewhat satirical, and by a restlessness and sense of frustration, ...

Powell worked for three years on "My Home is Far Away" which was published in 1944. She had difficulty with the book, writing and rewriting the various scenes as she tried to fictionalize her biography and turn it into a novel. The book appears in the midst of her New York novels, and it is a throwback in to her earlier books with its setting in Ohio, its focus on childhood, and its bittersweet tone. Powell intended this novel as the first of a three-part trilogy, but the other two volumes never materialized.

Most of Powell's novels seem to me distinctly autobiographical in tone and "My Home is Far away" is particularly so. It tells the story of a family, focusing on three young sisters, Lena, Marcia, and Florrie, their father Harry, their mother Daisy, and, after Daisy's death, their stepmother Idah. There are basiclly three parts to the story: the period leading to the death of Daisy, and intervening period in which the three girls are raised by their father and assorted other relatives, and a the period after their father remarries and the girls are subjected to a cruel stepmother. When they find they can no longer take the abuse, they leave home and come into their own lives.

The title of the novel, "My Home is Far Away" derives from an Irish song that the girls sing with their mother. The title well captures some of the rootlesness of the family as they move from here to there. It also evokes well the longing for a home life and for a stability which the family, and Dawn Powell, never had.

One of the problems with this book is diffentiating the characters of three young girls. On the whole, this is handled effectively. The Dawn Powell character is the middle sister, Marcia, who is plain but highly precocious. The older girl, Lena, is much more sociable and outgoing.

The family moved a great deal from one small Ohio town to another and to different places within various towns. The most effective scenes in the book for me were the pictures of many dingy, run-down hotels and small town back streets during which the girls spent much of their childhood. The father, Harry, was a travelling salesman who, for most of the book, has difficulty holding a job and spending time with his family. He professes to love his family, but doesn't provide well. He spends his time and money hanging around with his friends and, apparently, with women in various towns.

One key moment in the book occurs rather early in it when the girls' mother dies. This scene is beautifully told. Then we see Harry trying to shunt the girls off to various relatives until he finally attempts to care for them himself. The marriage to Idah brings Harry some stability, but at a terrible cost. Idah is a shrewish, jealous stepmother. The two older girls both leave home to get away from her.

This book has some slow moments, but it is a wonderful coming-of-age novel and gives a good picture of the rural midwest. It is good that Dawn Powell's novels are in print and readily accessible. It is intriguing to think how she might have proceeded in the remaining two projected volumes of her autobiographical trilogy.

Dawn Powell was no whiner- and as this highly autobiographical novel attests, she had plenty of reason to complain! The story of her turn of the century Ohio childhood, is told through the viewpoint of Marcia, the gifted, plain, middle child of three motherless sisters. Despite a neglectful, absent and grandiose father, ( a child himself,) and a host of inadequate relatives, the girls are largely delighted with their world, which by modern standards is one of poverty and neglect. The book is an object lesson in attitudes and expectations that become reality.
This was an era that discouraged pity, and would have been dumbfounded by modern 'confessional' trends. The attitudes toward children, would be barbaric today. The girls remained loyal to their father, even as they grew to understand his weaknesses, and they found delight in characters that would be considered dangerous and forbidden today. Their own grandmother, refusing to attend to fire safety, managed to burn down four houses, including her own, from which weeks before the girls had just been removed. This is a story of a triumph of childhood with nothing of the tone of the adult looking back in a lament. In some ways, it is similar to "Angela's Ashes," another horrible experience of childhood, that uniquely avoids the subject of depression and rage. This even holds true for the archetypical wicked stepmother, an unrelenting, hateful woman who sadistically confiscated or forbade any object or activity of pleasure.
The most amazing part of Marcia, is this 'game' she played, when she was in the midst of an ordeal. She could reach down inside of herself and become the person who was devoid of reactions to the current stress and be completely strong and capable of enduring the trauma through to the end. It is a testimony, spoken by a child, of the human spirit, and the infinite manifestations and sources of power by which mankind survives. I will definitely read this book again, for its fresh outlook and restrained economy.

I have only recently begun to hear about the little-known American author Dawn Powell, and this is the first of her novels that I have read. It is so hard to believe that Ms. Powell's work has been largely ignored for decades--she writes so beautifully, with wit and pathos in equal measures. Dawn Powell's passion for writing comes through on every page, her characters lively and real, their adventures and personalities engaging, and her descriptions of turn-of-the-century Ohio vivid. She captures the points of view and imaginations of her child protagonists (the three sisters, who are central to the story) with complete accuracy--I found myself smiling in recognition at what it was like to think like a child again. And what's more, this is largely a true story--based on Dawn Powell's own sad childhood, when she lost her mother and gained an abusive stepmother (and seemed to be mainly neglected by her ineffectual father). All in all, a moving and enthralling story--the main character reminded me of Little Women's Jo as well as Jane Eyre, at times. Highly recommended.

This is a novel based upon Claire Luce, famed society figure and writer. At the time it was written, the Luce's were celebrities in the New York second world war era art/news world. The novel is a tale of middling plot, a poor girl adventuress, her even more [pitiful] friend and some basic cheaten heart adultery. Nothing in it is particularly involving, and though the characters may be quite accurately Luce, the Luce's have faded and the characters don't seem to live up to the intensity or interest worth a novel.
I am still waiting to read a Dawn Powell novel as fantastic as The Wicked Pavillion, and intend to keep hunting, for that novel was brilliant. I regret, this one, did not come close to the odd balls I had so enjoyed there. Still, Powell is a phenomenon that for me at least, is recent, and I hope will come through again as I go about reading her.

Despite its awkward title, Dawn Powell's A Time To Be Born is, after Washington Irving's A Knickerbocker's History of New York, the funniest book in American literature.

The story of the rise and fall of ruthless self-promoter, arch manipulator, and glamour girl Amanda Evans Keeler, the novel seamlessly propels the reader through its deliciously involving plot, dropping brisk, barbed, and piercing bombs of cutting humor all the way. Every other line in this New York City-based minefield is cause for bursts of healthy, uproarious laughter, as one character after another finds their egos and intentions rebuked and thwarted by fate in sardonically appropriate fashion.

While mildly cynical about human nature, the novel's humor thankfully never collapses into cattiness or camp; though sometimes approaching the brittle artifice of Saki or Firbank, Powell continually steers herself back in humanity's direction whenever she veers too far towards improbability or outright farce. And humanity, in Powell's vision as expressed here, exists only among those in the lower ranks--the novel's 'Little Men'--who are naive, gullible, and ignorant, but hopeful.

Powell's understanding of what happens to human beings and human relationships as people rise or force their way through the hierarchies of the power elite is wonderfully astute. Though the story takes place just before World War II, the book is timelessly relevant in its illustration of power structures, protocol, and propriety among the powerful and power-mad. Powell also excels here in illustrating how shrewd, calculating and talented individuals go about creating shining, influential, publically-adored and much-venerated if entirely artificial media personalities for themselves.

Though Powell's work is often compared to that of Muriel Spark, there's literally a world of difference between their novels, though each filled their books with large casts of odd-ball characters and believable eccentrics. Spark's novels always take place in a world where God and the possibility of grace are always present, though sometimes only remotely so. Powell's comic novels take place in a universe in which the question of God has never even been raised; certainly none of Powell's characters ever give the idea of god or grace a first or second thought. In Powell's work, there is little more to the world than what meets the eye, and it is around these glittering prizes that her often phlegmatic characters circle relentlessly.

However, both Powell and Spark write brilliantly about servants and masters, and Powell does a hilarious job here of portraying Hurricane Amanda's servant, frustrated power monger Miss Bemel, who tries to seize control over events even as Amanda insist she buy herself a girdle.

Insightful, perceptive, and almost perfectly structured, A Time To Be Born is also entertainment of the highest form.

This magical novel was published in 1942. Unlike most of Dawn Powell's earlier novels, it sold well and went through several printings. Although Powell denied it, one of the major characters of the book, Amanda Keeler Evans, is based in part on and satirizes Claie Boothe Luce.

These external details say little about the appeal of this novel.
As with most of Dawn Powell's books, "A Time to be Born" talks about New York City and its effect on young men and women who meet their chances there from small towns in the Midwest. The book's two main characters, Amanda Keeler Evans and Vickie Haven, come to New York City under different circumstances and with different results after being girlhood friends in the town of Lakeville, Ohio.

On the verge of WW II, Amanda has become a success by publishing a schmaltzy romantic novel and hobnobbing with the powerful under the guidance of her husband, Julian, a newspaper magnate. Amanda has married her way to success with Julian but with success will not touch much less sleep with him.

Vicky Haven comes to New York at the peak of Amanda's success to escape the memory of a failed affair in which she has lost
her love to her business partner. She is put up, begrudgingly, by Amanda who uses her pad to entertain the lover, Ken Sanders, that she jilted to marry Julian. Amanda takes the fancy pad for Vicky to have an excuse to have an affair with Ken on the side.

The climax of the book occurs when Vicky decides to leave Amanda's fancy pad and lease an apartment of her own. No luxury this. It is a cold-water flat on the fourth floor of a dilapated building surrounded by warehouses and with a pet shop on the lower floor. But it is Vicky's and it is where her life begins. Powell writes: "She only wanted to be alone with her new house so definitely hers, because nobody, Amanda, Ethel, brother Ted, Eudora Brown, Ethel Carey, nobody would ever have selected it for her, and so it was the beginning of her own life." There is magic here, in life beginning anew, with self-affirmation and choice, even if, and especially if in Powell, the outcome is uncertain and the scene itself is partially ironic.

In addition to the theme of having one's own start at life, the book paints a memorable picture of New York on the eve of WW II. The book juxtaposes the lives of the rich, famous and powerful -- their self-importance, their officiousness, their concern for the weighty matters of peace and war -- with the lives of the "little people" who, as Powell describes them, "can only think that they are hungry, they haven't eaten, they have no money, the have lost their babies, their loves, their homes, and their sons mock them from prisons and insane asylums, so that rain or sun or snow or battles cannot stir their selfish personal absorption.". The little people have little to do with the fate of nations. Specifically in the book, Vicky is concerned not with affairs of state or with the rich and famous. She is concerned with love -- with the love she lost in Lakeville -- and with finding herself and a new love in New York City.

The characters in the book are masterfully drawn from Amanda and Vicky to many of the secondary characters such as Amanda's assistant Bemel and vicky's elderly would-be lover Rockman. New York City is depicted memorably, as elsewhere in Dawn Powell's writings. In this book, the best depictions are those of the cold water flats of Grenwich Village -- of the place that Vicky finally finds to try to find a life.

As with most of Powell's novels, this book is a satire. But in this book it is more delicate, more tinged with understanding and compassion, than is the case in some of her novels. The feelings that the book brings for its characters is the source of its magic. There is a sense of foreboding and irony in the book, but little cynicism and anger. The book occupies that fragile point at which a person is able to act on her ideals and attempt to find a life for herself -- without moving into the line that determines whether or not the effort will end in success or failure.

This is a wonderful, little-known American novel.

The story of two neurotic artist manqués living in the small Ohio town of Dell River, Come Back To Sorrento is a moderately enjoyable failure. In attempting to describe and bring to life her two inwardly desperate but outwardly shrill protagonists, Powell makes each so exaggeratedly pretentious, affected, and unlikable that the reader cannot sympathize or identify with them; it is also continually unclear how author Powell feels about them or what she intends the reader to feel.

Newcomer, music teacher and apparent closet homosexual Blaine Decker is so transparent, smarmy and brittle that Powell's portrayal of him is just short of caricature (Blaine makes a cult of his former companion's cast off linen underpants, wearing and laundering them year after year). Housewife and one-time ambitious vocal student Connie Benjamin is only slightly more two-dimensional. After meeting and becoming friends, Blaine, too predictably for a homosexual character, requires Connie become and remain a larger-than-life and slightly superior feminine embodiment of Art and Culture, while Connie, walled in on all sides by her own illusions, becomes dependent on Blaine to sit at her feet and support her madness.

By comparison to Blaine and Connie, next-door neighbor and 'gentlewoman who takes in laundry as a hobby' Mrs. Busch, the butt of their jokes, and the rest of the underdeveloped supporting cast, seems eminently likable. Connie's older daughter, Helen, appears on a few pages, makes a lot of noise, and, phantom-like, disappears again, like a character stepping in and out from another novel (Mildred Pierce). And what can the reader make of nebulous Laurie Neville, the book's catch-all Fifth Business and deus ex machina character?

There's a well-conceived scene late in the book that takes place on May Day morning in which Connie momentarily frees herself from her limiting neurotic shell and perceives a more expansive horizon. If Powell had approached the entire book in the same manner and with the same sensitivity as she did here, Come Back To Sorrento might have been equal to the wonderful novel that preceded it, Dance Night.

By making Blaine and Connie as written her main characters, Powell put extraordinary limits on what she could achieve. Powell also fails to provide a contrast to Connie and Blaine's perspective of the town, leaving the reader to wonder if their constricted vision is really Powell's own. Nothing in Dell River is portrayed as having self-evident value and meaning in and of itself; nature is beneath notice and the townspeople are petty, shortsighted, envious, coarse, or soft in the head. Since no one does as much harm to Blaine and Connie as they do to themselves, the real theme of Come Back To Sorrento is not the dampening effects of small town life on creative personalities, but the way in which people with dreams beyond imagining and corrupt values permanently disappoint and frustrate themselves.

Whether Blaine or Connie have any genuine artistic talent is never completely made clear, and thus the question of what truly constitutes artistic success cannot be meditated upon by the reader in relation to the material. Powell seems to be uncertainly suggesting that artistic and worldly success are always the same thing; that only front-page achievement and name-in-lights notoriety in New York, London, Milan, or Paris matter. The value of personal goals, challenges, inspiration, and meaning in the creative process is only addressed briefly at the end, by likeable wallflower Louisa Murrell, who no one listens to or takes seriously.

Readers familiar with Powell's later comic novels will rightly suspect that Come Back To Sorrento was an unintentionally transitional novel; perhaps without consciously realizing it, Powell was already moving towards satire, as without being funny in fact, Sorrento reads like farce.

Dawn Powell's "Come Back to Sorrento", was published in 1932 under the title "The Tenth Moon" to little notice from critics or from the public. But this poignant, mostly understated novel set in a drab midwestern town called Dell River is a gem.

The two main characters in the book are Connie Benjamin and Blaine Decker. When we meet Connie as a housewife in her mid-thirties, she is leading a life she finds sterile and barren with her husband Gus, a cobbler, and her two adolescent daughters. As a young woman, Connie had visions of a career as an opera singer, even though this ambition seemed to be based on little more than a commendation of her voice by a famous teacher. Connie also has a past in which she ran off with a young man named Tony who did acrobatics with a circus. Tony aboandoned her, and Connie lives with dreams of a singing career that perhaps could have been and with faded memories of Tony.

Blaine Decker comes to Dell River as the high school music teacher. He rents a small apartment above Gus Decker's shoe repair shop. Decker is a pianist by training (with small hands) who likewise has never had the artistic success of which he dreams. He spent his early years in Europe during which time he was a friend of a writer, Starr Donnell, who had written, as far as Decker knows, one novel. Powell hints throughout the novel at Decker's repressed homosexuality.

The novel explores the relationship that develops between Connie and Blaine. With their shared love of music and their broken, and probably illusory dreams, they feel stifled by the small town of Dell River. They share confidences with each other and at the same time quarrel severely with each other over their respective failures to pursue their dreams. The relationship is at bottom frustrating and unconsummated. It never becomes sexual.

There are wonderful pictures in this book of music and its capacity to bring meaning to life. The seriousness with which Powell discusses the pursuit of classical music in this work contrasts markedly with her picture of frivolous people and activities in her subsequent satirical New York novels. Powell also shows how music can be a means by which people evade their own selves and their own reality. There are also good depictions in the book of life in a small town, particularly those people who teach in High Schools, and of many secondary characters.

As do Powell's latter works, this book contrasts life in a small town with life in the cosmopolitian city, here represented by Paris more than by New York. But there is a certain inward focus to this book which is not shared by her latter satirical pictures of New York. The characters here are limited by Dell River and its environs, but their problems and discontents lie within themselves, in their lack of self-knowledge, and in their failed dreams. The book lacks the sharp cynicism of the latter novels but features instead reflectiveness and sadness.

Powell's writing style in this novel is rather flatter than in her subsequent works but it fits the atmosphere of Dell River that she conveys. There are several moments in the novel or lyricism and intensity.

This probably is not a novel that will ever enjoy wide readership. But it is rare and a treasure.

What a haiku evokes beyond the language, a few words summon a large panorama, Dawn Powell did in this novella. With artful simplicity, the author relates a somewhat comic and somewhat cosmic fable of two lost souls that blend unrealized dreams into reality. Powell writes with the sensitivity of an empath. In the bearly visible twitch, the eye that cannot contact, the unconscious hesitations belie the character's pretense so that the secret is just between Powell and her reader. In the far less precise language of psychiatry, this is termed the "as if" self. This deceptively simple story succeeds as myth for within the doubling up of solitary dreams, their souls sweep the cosmos.

Shards of memories, are picked from the realities that defeated them and together they build a palace of dignity that not only holds at bay, their individual sufferings, but becomes wide enough to bring a muted sort of redemption to others, afflicted with similar destinies.
Through music and desire, (platonic, alone) a middle aged housewife, and a odd and tattered music teacher shake off fate and taste, if briefly, what they had been denied. Woven in the tale, is the past of childhood trauma and rejection, abandonment and 'making do,' that the odd duo become nothing less than extraordinary people who choose happiness and get it. In this it is a morality tale, par excellance.
Anyone who has ever reached out of despair with a rebound of delight, who has taken an old piece of cloth and thrown it in some transforming wrap over their head, or around their waist, as Connie does, remembers that triumph, so rare, but perfect brilliant touch. Suddenly, an old dress, has color and shape, bohemians, they are beyond the ordinary in fashion and finance.

There are no authorial statements here, Powell has her own transformative power, whereby sentences do indeed show, voluminously what she composed sparingly. Her genious for showing human instincts is beyond any of her peers. Perhaps the most stunning is her instinct for understanding that ancient animal survival rule whereby we must hide our wounds and primal sufferings or risk in discovery- annihilation. There is none of the confessional self-absorption that was the legacy of the psychoanalytic fever, that was in its American childhood at the time she wrote the novel.


Anyone who has suffered and not hurt others, is rare indeed. The sublime experience between the two does not rely on inflicting pain upon others, a far more common means of elevating conditions of esteem.
The message, if I may, is in the true artistic gift that they benefitted from, but if spoken, would have broken the spell. They saw the Touilleries in an unweeded garden, the Volga in a brown shallow river, and in the unattractive, uncultured, midwestern town, they found a quaint village to delight in.

The physical conditions of life bore down upon their paradise and yet Connie and Blaine, prevailed, looking we are told through colored pains of glass, bringing the grey, unsympathetic world into prismmatic shimmering color.

It is a love poem to the artistic process that is a gift for life as much as technique with a brush or an instrument or a sentence. This contrasts effectively with her more cynical tales of the corrupted artist and the exploited audience.

A glorious book.

Tim Page's sketchy Dawn Powell: A Biography has been written and published before its time. Page has clearly gathered and woven together a great amount of information about Powell, but too often the reader comes to a "little is known at present about _____ at this time" text line in fact or attitude. This dearth of information pertains not only to Powell herself but to intimate friends, general relationships, her relationship with her autistic son, important decisions, her creative process, etc. When Powell arrives in New York City as a young woman, Page generally traces her relationships in the following manner: "She did sleep with _______," "She may have slept with _______," "She probably never slept with ______." This would-be literary gossip serves neither Powell's nor Page's reputation.

Page's approach would be reasonably acceptable if he otherwise wrote about Powell with depth and broad understanding, which he does not. In fact, from the selections taken from her novels letters, and diaries, which Page clearly finds definitive, insightful and fascinating, Powell seems relatively untalented and dull, which she was not. His descriptions of and discussions about her novels are inadequate in many cases. For a Powell scholar, the key elements of a novel as good and as succinct as 'Dance Night,' those that make it highly readable, should be easy to identify. Page approaches his subject ardently but superficially, and so perhaps inadvertently portrays Powell as superficial in turn. He writes with immense enthusiasm about her 'incredible' diary, which spanned decades, but fails to mention that he was the editor of the esteemed tome when it was published.

Powell arrives in New York, and in an incredibly short time has become a published writer and knows everyone in the arts (including artists of great fame, such as Hemingway, whose picture is hilariously included in the photo section) and high society. How did she accomplish this? Since the period described was one of New York's golden ages, especially in the arts, this part of Powell's life should have been recorded meticulously. Powell was not a pretty woman, as the photographs included reveal; she was an esteemed wit, but can wit alone be responsible for her ascent, in a city full, then and now, of witty, clever people? Especially when her early work sold poorly and went largely unreviewed? Page's attitude towards this period of Powell's life is ho-hum at best, leaving the reader with a score of spontaneous questions begging to be answered. Did she know Maya Deren, Anais Nin, or Marguerite Young, who were all both prominent Greenwich Village characters and struggling, creative women living only blocks away?

Worse, Powell seems, at book's end, to be somewhat of a fool, merely another sweaty Greenwich Village libertine who lives to excess, spends money with extreme carelessness, makes no provision for the future, and finds herself at the end of her life alone, destitute, hungry, and dependent. Is this who Powell was? Is this the impression Page intended to leave with the reader?

Page seems most comfortable writing about the grotesque angles of Powell's life and death, of which there were apparently many. The reader is treated to lengthy sections on the subject of the disposal of Powell's human remains; these eventually, after many twists, turns, and travel, made their way to the New York City pauper's cemetery, where what was left of Powell's body was thrown into a mass grave and bulldozed over. Bravo.

Page also writes extensively about Powell's famous teratoma, or dermoid tumor, which was lodged and growing in her chest for most of her adult life. Advised by her doctors early on to have it surgically removed, Powell refused, year after year. Finally unable to breathe, and in severe pain, Powell had the tumor extracted, at which time it is identified as a teratoma. While teratomas are not nearly as rare as Page believes, most of his information here is correct. Composed of some combination of blood, hair, teeth, bone tissue, cartilage, and the occasional eye, teratomas make for fascinating, repulsive reading. Powell believed her tumor (which was, predictably, about 'the size of a grapefruit') to be a thwarted or stunted twin of some kind, which in fact it was not. However, it's not difficult to understand how a person in physical and emotional distress, and in a state of revulsion towards his or her body, could draw such a conclusion or figurative understanding.

Page excels whenever his material concerns Jojo, Powell's tragically autistic, occasionally violent and eventually institutionalized son. With what seems like almost emotional involvement, Page writes with a broader range and depth whenever Jojo is his subject. Page's discussion and research concerning Jojo's early life and diagnosis, and the author's general discussion about autism and related illnesses, is excellent.

Ultimately, Dawn Powell: A Biography reads like three-fifths of a completed work. The section devoted to Powell's family and early childhood begins well, but quickly thins. The information concerning the unpleasant involvement in Powell's life of perverse, fanatical stepmother Sabra is spotty and insubstantial. Sabra seems almost falsely accused: hard, persuasive facts are simply not presented. The reader consistently gets the impression that Page is anxious to make something more transcendent out of the clay of Powell's earth-bound life, while simultaneously missing the essential. Page has made something of a cottage industry out of Powell's life and work, and the literary world has recognized his hard work, research, court battles, and perseverance in reviving her reputation and assisting in bringing her work back into publication. However, Dawn Powell: A Biography can only be relied upon as a rough breakdown of Powell's life; even if extroverted, a novelist of Powell's sensitivity must have had an inner life of some kind. Page's text reveals other important, perhaps critical, weaknesses in his understanding of his subject. It's time for Page to pass the crown, and all that goes with it, at least temporarily, to other authors, biographers, and interested parties so new and different interpretations of Powell's life and work can be made available.

Dawn Powell comes vividly to life in this affectionate, well-reasoned and meticulously fair biography. Tim Page has been nothing less than heroic in the service of this once-forgotten American writer -- and it seems to me that he understands her very well indeed.

I had a very different response than one earlier reader to Page's occasional admissions that he didn't know what happened at this or that point in Powell's life. It struck me as refreshingly honest. Very few biographers have the courage to confess that they aren't omniscient and that certain facts will simply get lost over the course of 100 years. And I was very glad that he didn't pad the book with all the Greenwich Village 101 stuff that you find in biographies of practically everybody who ever lived below 14th Street.

Certain people don't "get" Powell, and they probably won't get Page either. For the rest of us, this book has been, and will continue to be, a revelation.

I fell in love with Dawn Powell after reading this biography! I recommend reading it highly, as well as looking into some of Powell's own works. My only complaint is the lack of photographs of Powell during her best writing (and flirting) years. After reading this book I thought about how many worth while authors are forgotten and lost to us, and how fine and generous Mr. Page has been in exhuming this wonderful woman's reputation and career for a new generation that perhaps has finally caught up with her.

The novels of Dawn Powell (1896-1965)have an autobigraphical tone. Powell grew up in Mt. Gilead, Ohio, but left this small midwestern town to seek her career in New York City. She wrote "The Wicked City" in 1938, and the novel captures both the allure and the disappointment of fast-paced sophisticated New York. Although the satire is sharp and biting, Powell shows considerable ambivalence for both the small town she left and the cosmopolitanism she adopted.

"The Happy Island" opens with its protagonist, Jefferson Abbott, arriving in the New York City bus terminal from Silver City, Ohio to make his career as a budding playwright. Jefferson is serious, stodgy in character and is taken aback by what he sees as the frivolity and shallowness of the New York cultural and entertainment community on which he hopes to make his mark. In New York, he meets another transplant from Silver City and an old flame, Prudence Bly. Prudence has survived the and mastered New York show business to a degree. She is a successful nightclub singer with many contacts. As adolescents in Silver City, (16 years before the story begins) Jefferson and Prudence had a teenage romance. When the pair was caught necking behind the railroad, Prudence received the sobriquet "Tracks" from the mocking young men of Silver City. In New York, Jefferson remains attracted to Prudence but dismayed by the life she is leading as a nightclub singer and socialite.

The plot of "The Happy Island" centers around the relationship between Jefferson and Prudence and in the contrast between New York City, New York and Silver City, Ohio. But as elsewhere in Powell, the plot of the book is the least of its attractions. The value of the book lies in its depiction of the places and people of New York City, in Powell's writing style, and in her sharp, caustic one-liners. There is an underlying sense of morality lost.

The book features a plethora of characters from the New York entertainment and literary scene. In particular, this book is somewhat unusual because several of the characters in the book are gay or bisexual, and Powell presents these characters without any particular moralizing. The moral tone of the book, though, is sharp and critical. In general, the characters in the book exhibit the morals of the barnyard. Infidelity, promiscuity, and double-crossing are the rules of the day. Together with the sexual double and triple dealing, Powell emphasizes parties and alcohol. She is good at describing party scenes and even better at emphasizing the dependence of her characters on booze. One can sympathize with some of Jefferson Abbott's reaction to this environment.

With all its sharpness, irony and satire, New York City is presented with a certain magic and allure. It is the dream of a new life and of opportunity, for Powell and for many others. Inflated hopes and ideals too often lead to cynicism, as I think this book and other books by Powell suggest. In the introduction to this book, Tim Page concludes that "The Happy Island" is a relatively minor novel of Dawn Powell. That may be, but there is still much in the book to reward the reader.

This novel captures the time when CAfe Society ruled the Greenwich Village scene. Ms Powell captures the nuances and slang of that time marvelously. As always, her wit and style shine through every sentence.

For every person who comes to New York from a small town or suburb and makes it in their chosen profession, there are a thousand others who don't. What happens to them? What are they like? Dawn Powell describes them all. This book is a wonderful literary read and a fine corrective to the notion that every transplanted provincial is either interesting or deserving of sympathy. Powell's characters are wonderfully drawn and fleshed out with fine prose: here's the business wife "bragging in a dozen beds of her perhaps old-fashioned chastity." Here's the "new society reporter from the largest and worst newspaper in New York." Here's a young playwrite freshly arrived from the sticks mortifying a seedy arty-professional crowd and their "shrill insistence on fun" by exclaiming, "New York, eh? What a dump!" And her is the (not so) young kept woman who "with considerable care placed her head in her hands as if it were a very fine melon." Powell is a treat; there are memorable lines on every page. Her novels came out between the 30's and the 60's and all the New York books are very fine, literary reads. She is considerably more on the mark in terms of wit and irony and quality of prose than her well-meaning editor, Tim Page (actually a music reviwer by profession) seems to realize, and in satire can hold her own with Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, Sinclair Lewis, Joan Didion, etc. Check out Vidal's essays on her (they're much better, less aenemic, than Page's comments, I felt, after reading her books). Angels On Toast, The Wicked Pavillion, The Golden Spur, The Locusts Have No King, And A Time to Be Born are all also very fine, sharp witty novels of New York; both its fascinating side and in all the balderdash of its aspiring provincials.