Powell, Dawn

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Family Life Education: An Introduction
Lane H. Powell , and Dawn Cassidy
Manufacturer: McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages
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ASIN: 0767405706

Book Description

This text is the first ever developed as an undergraduate level textbook for Family Life Education. It introduces the theory, principles, and skills necessary to prepare, present, and evaluate family life education programs and workshops. The text is based on the National Council of Family Relations guidelines for undergraduate education, and integrates theory and applications appropriate for established areas of education such as high schools, educational extension services, and community and youth centers. The scope includes sex education, marriage and family relations, parenting, and youth services.

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Come Back to Sorrento
Dawn Powell
Manufacturer: Zoland Books
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Binding: Paperback

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Dance Night
A Time to Be Born
The Golden Spur
Turn, Magic Wheel
The Wicked Pavilion

ASIN: 1883642264
Release Date: 1998-06-01

Book Description

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED as The Tenth Moon, Come Back to Sorrento is the second of Powell’s "Ohio novels" to be re-issued in paperback. Here Powell turns her attention to those certain rare souls who have the secret of finding their lives glamorous and themselves magnificent under the most humble conditions. Connie Benjamin, the village shoemaker’s wife, always wanted an operatic career. Blaine Decker, the new high school music teacher, once spent time abroad studying piano. The two are drawn together into a powerful friendship of dependence, each sustaining the other and translating the surface monotony of their lives into drama richer than reality.

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Candid, tough, sensitive writing.

The Diaries of Dawn Powell: 1931-1965
Dawn Powell
Manufacturer: Steerforth Press
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Binding: Hardcover

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Dawn Powell: Novels 1930-1942 (Library of America)
Dawn Powell: A Biography
Dawn Powell: Novels 1944-1962 (Library of America)
Selected Letters of Dawn Powell : 1913-1965
Sunday, Monday, and Always: Stories by Dawn Powell

ASIN: 1883642086

Amazon.com

Dawn Powell has often been overlooked since her death at 67 in 1965, but her brilliant novels, such as Angels On Toast, A Time to Be Born and The Wicked Pavilion are returning to print. And to accompany her rediscovery, <B>The Diaries of Dawn Powell: 1931-1965</B> presents a wondrous evocation of the writing life. More than mere diaries, Powell's journals are at times a workbook presenting many fully-formed narratives. There are thoughtful pieces about why she feels compelled to write and gripes about how writers live. And scattered throughout are witty and gossipy essays about living in literary New York and socializing and working with such characters as Edmund Wilson, John Dos Passos, her editor Max Perkins, and the woman to whom she was often unfairly compared,Dorothy Parker.

Book Description

One of the outstanding literary finds of the last quarter century. --The New York Times Book Review

Customer Reviews:

Candid, tough, sensitive writing........1998-08-28

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.

Four Plays by Dawn Powell
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Four Plays by Dawn Powell
Dawn Powell , Tim Page , and Michael Sexton
Manufacturer: Zoland Books
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Binding: Paperback

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Sunday, Monday, and Always: Stories by Dawn Powell

Fefu and Her Friends (PAJ Books)

ASIN: 1883642612
Release Date: 1999-11-01

Book Description

FROM HER COLLEGE days onward, Dawn Powell dreamed of becoming a successful playwright. Indeed, over the course of four decades, she finished at least ten plays and was working on fashioning her novel The Golden Spur into a musical comedy during her final illness. Only two of her plays were mounted during her lifetime, however. This volume contains both of those works - Big Night which was produced by the legendary Group Theater in 1933, and Jigsaw, which was staged by the Theater Guild the following year. These are fast-paced, blunt-spoken - and very funny - comedies that directly anticipate the hard-boiled satire of such novels as Turn, Magic Wheel and Angels on Toast. Rounding out the book are two unpublished (and as yet unproduced) plays that Powell wrote in the late 1920s - the experimental, quasi-expressionist Women at Four O'Clock and a nostalgic, bittersweet story of old New York, Walking Down Broadway, which director Erich von Stroheim would later adapt into the Hollywood film Hello, Sister!
Eleven of Dawn Powell's fifteen novels are currently available in paperback from Steerforth Press, as well her widely acclaimed diaries. She died in 1965.

The Selected Letters of Dawn Powell: 1913-1965

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It is a wonderful collection - thank you Tim Page!

The Selected Letters of Dawn Powell: 1913-1965
Dawn Powell
Manufacturer: Henry Holt and Co.
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Dawn Powell: A Biography
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ASIN: 0805053646

Amazon.com

The great prose comedian Flann O'Brien called humor "the handmaid of sorrow and fear." Perhaps O'Brien, who had more than the customary quotient of misery in his own existence, was exaggerating--but his insight is certainly borne out by the art and life of Dawn Powell. Seldom has a writer's curriculum vitae been so overshadowed by wretchedness: as Tim Page documents in his fine biography, Powell had to contend with career frustrations, a seriously disturbed son, late-breaking penury, and a misdiagnosed tumor so large that it was actually cracking her ribs by the time it was extracted. But Powell managed to maintain an extraordinary standard of levity in her fiction, which treats both Manhattan sophisticates and Midwestern rubes with evenhanded, satirical brilliance (think of her as a homegrown Evelyn Waugh, with an added soupçon of Yankee asperity). And the same thing holds true for her correspondence, which the ever-dutiful Tim Page has now assembled in Selected Letters of Dawn Powell: 1913-1965.

Powell modulated her epistolary voice for her various pen pals, a group that included John Dos Passos, Maxwell Perkins, and Edmund Wilson (whom she calls "Wig," perhaps a reference to his shiny-pated middle age). But throughout, she tends to put a comical gloss on her tribulations, with the tears of things peeking out through the cracks. As the very first letter in the collection reveals, the author already had a handle on her comedic resources at age 17, describing a dog's righteous indignation: "Saturday I decided to make a miniature peach meringue pie. When Benjamin caught a glimpse of me, suspiciously decorated with flour, he gave a low cry of pain and staggered away. He didn't return until late that night when I heard him weeping and gnashing his teeth out in the chicken yard." But Powell just got better from there--much better. This volume contains thousands of incidental barbs and felicities, which makes it a true browser's heaven. And nobody should overlook the marvelous, on-the-fly credo she addressed to a publisher who was about to turn down her whip-smart masterwork The Locusts Have No King: <blockquote> Edmund Wilson, the critic, insists I have been writing "existential" novels for years, before Sartre. I object, for my novels are based on the fantastic designs made by real human beings earnestly laboring to maladjust themselves to fate. There is no principle for them to prove--they may disobey the law of gravity as they please. My characters are not slaves to an author's propaganda. I give them their heads. They furnish their own nooses. </blockquote> Powell labored as hard as humanly possible to accommodate her own fate--with, perhaps, mixed results. But her Selected Letters are a glorious and supremely funny record of her long struggles and (truly) lasting triumphs. --James Marcus

Book Description

The rediscovery of Dawn Powell is in full swing. Her novels, most of them back in print, now grace the shelves of bookstores across the nation. Tim Page's masterly biography of Powell has helped to generate an enormous amount of publicity and renewed interest in this immensely provocative and insightful writer-including a three-page spread in The New York Times.

Terry Teachout, writing in The New York Times Book Review, hailed The Diaries of Dawn Powell, edited by Tim Page, as one of the outstanding literary finds of the last quarter century. This collection of Dawn Powell's letters promises to create yet another wave of excitement and discovery. Written to friends, fans, relatives, and publishers, and to Malcolm Lowry, John Dos Passos, Edmund Wilson, Max Perkins, and Malcolm Cowley, they are rife with Powell's great ability to entertain. This collection will complete the restoration and rehabilitation of one of America's finest literary voices.

Customer Reviews:

It is a wonderful collection - thank you Tim Page!.......1999-09-28

I am a neice of Dawn Powell's and we are all very grateful for the notice she is finally receiving. She has contributed so much to American literature and our family is most grqateful to Tim Page for the recognition she is receiving at long last.

Dawn Powell: Novels 1930-1942 (Library of America)

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An author to meet
An American Novelist Attains Stature
Satiric, witty, sharply written and observant fiction

Dawn Powell: Novels 1930-1942 (Library of America)
Dawn Powell
Manufacturer: Library of America
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Dawn Powell: Novels 1944-1962 (Library of America)
The Diaries of Dawn Powell: 1931-1965
Dawn Powell: A Biography
Crime Stories and Other Writings (Library of America)
Willa Cather: Stories, Poems, and Other Writings (Library of America)

ASIN: 1931082014
Release Date: 2001-09-06

Book Description

"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)

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.

Edited by Tim Page.

Customer Reviews:

An author to meet.......2003-08-19

If you are unacquainted with Dawn Powell, as I was until just recently, this is an excellent means to begin your acquaintance, with five of her early novels arranged chronologically in one volume. Powell draws the reader along as she unwinds the thread of her narrative, slowing her pace for extended dialogue and description let her stories breath and speeding it to keep the narrative moving and reader engaged. A major benefit of having these five novels together is that the reader can trace the development of Powell's satiric style as it progresses from a spot here and there in "Dance Night" to all pervading in "Angels on Toast" and "A time to be Born".

The earlier works "Dance Night" and "Come Back to Sorrento", both of which have Midwestern small-town settings, have elements of Willa Cather, while the latter three, all New York satire, fall somewhere between Dorothy Parker and P.G. Woodhouse with punchy, sarcastic dialogue and vivid description. Like Woodhouse, Powell understands the humor of being anthropomorphic in describing inanimate objects.

The brief chronology at the end of the book, which I recommend readers unfamiliar with Powell read first, explains some of Powells returning motifs: absent parents, children farmed out to relatives, traveling salesmen, dysfunctional families and American class consciousness. She is masterful in presenting the "happily" part of the ending, but at the same time, registering misgivings about the "ever after."

"Dance Night", set in a generic Lamptown, is the story of Morry Abbot, a young man coming to maturity and sexual awareness. Powell sets this against the story of his dysfunctional parents, an absentee traveling salesman father and a mother who falls in love with the dance instructor. A whole set of fully-fleshed minor characters fill out the narrative.

In "Come Back to Sorrento", another small town narrative, Connie Benjamin's life changes when a new music teacher comes to teach at the school in Dell River. Connie, who has shown great promise as a singer, but who was restrained by her domineering grandfather who had raised her, has lived alone in her dream world for almost two decades. Professor Decker, who lives in his own artificial world, arrives and the two become fast friends. Although their pretensions, played out for before a spinster school teacher pass well into the realm of embarrassing, Powell deftly keeps them sympathetic simply by keeping the reader fully aware that these characters are lost in a world they only partly created.

Dennis Orphen, the hero of "Turn, Magic Wheel", a New York satire, has written a novelized book in which he satirizes a world-famous novelist, Andrew Callingham, having gleaned most of his information from Callingham's ex-wife, Effie. Dennis, an inveterate womanizer, has unbeknownst to himself, fallen in love with Effie and she with him.

The traveling salesman motif returns in "Angels on Toast", a story of the contrasting marital infidelities of Lou and Jay, who are continually on the road. Replete with wives, girlfriends, and at least one ex-wife, this is the fastest paced of the five novels in this volume.

"A Time to be Born", reportedly based on Clare Booth Luce, is the most complex of the five. Interspersed within the interwoven narratives of Amanda Evans and Vicky Haven are the workplace politics at Peabody Publications, the riotous family life of the McElroy's, (one of Vicky's colleague in the office) and a return of Dennis Orphen from "Turn, Magic Wheel", along with his writing and drinking buddy, Ken Saunders. Although Powell fully exploits her satiric wit in this novel, it does turn grim, especially towards the end.

These are all excellent reads and well worth the investment in this Library of America edition which has the same quality of their other publications. Library of America has also produced a second volume of Powell's works that include later novels.

An American Novelist Attains Stature.......2003-02-12

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.

Satiric, witty, sharply written and observant fiction.......2001-10-15

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.

My Home Is Far Away: An Autobiographical Novel

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Very Memorable Autobiography That Touched Me in a Very Personal Way
ORDER THIS BOOK AS SOON AS POSSIBLE
Coming of Age in Rural Ohio
Triumph!
Beautiful and poignant

My Home Is Far Away: An Autobiographical Novel
Dawn Powell
Manufacturer: Zoland Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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The Wicked Pavilion
The Diaries of Dawn Powell: 1931-1965
Come Back to Sorrento
A Time to Be Born
Dance Night

ASIN: 1883642434
Release Date: 1998-06-01

Amazon.com

Dawn Powell was in the midst of writing one of her finest satires, A Time to Be Born, when she contracted a fever that brought childhood memories back so vividly that she stopped her novel and began scrawling reminiscences that were later collected in My Home Is Far Away. Although not true autobiography, the life of the main character, Marcia Willard, parallels Powell's life, including the death of her mother, life with a father who was on the road, and the traumatic remarriage of her father to a vicious and selfish woman. My Home Is Far Away is an excellent depiction of what childcare was like for motherless children in the 19th century in comparison to their family-oriented neighbors.

Book Description

My Home is Far Away is the most precisely autobiographical of Powell’s fifteen novels. In this family chronicle set in early twentieth century Ohio, young Marcia Willard’s family struggles to keep up with the rapidly changing times, and Marcia endures disillusionment, cruelty, and betrayal to forge a survivor’s sense of independence. John Updike has compared Powell with Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, “and those other Midwestern writers who felt something epic in the national shift from rural to urban, from provincial sequestration to metropolitan liberation.” By 1941, when Powell set to work on My Home Is Far Away, she was better known for the smart, boozy, bawdy, hilarious send-ups of Manhattan high and low life. She had begun to attain a reputation for high sophistication and nothing could be less “sophisticated” – in the glittering, all-knowing, furiously present-tense, big-city manner Powell had perfected – than My Home Is Far Away.
This was the month of cherries and peaches, of green apples beyond the grape arbor, of little dandelion ghosts in the grass, of sour grass and four-leaf clovers, of still dry heat holding the smell of nasturtiums and dying lilacs. This was the best month of all and the best day. It was not birthday, Easter, Christmas, or picnic, but all these things and something else, something wonderful, something utterly unknown. The two little girls in embroidered white Sunday dresses knew no way to express their secret joy but by whirling each other dizzily over the lawn crying, “We’re moving, we’re moving! We’re moving to London Junction!”
My Home Is Far Away is one of the very few examples of a book written for adults, with an adult command of the language, that maintains the vantage point of a hungry, serious child throughout. It might be likened to a memoir that has been penned not with the usual tranquility of distance but rather with the sense that everything happening to the characters is happening right now, without any promise of eventual escape, without any assurance that childhood, too, shall pass away.
My Home is Far Away had been out of print for sixty years when Steerforth reissued it in 1995. It received immediate widespread acclaim, and was featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, where Terry Teachout called it “one of the permanent masterpieces of childhood, comparable with David Copperfield, What Maisie Knew and the early reminiscences of Colette,” and where he proclaimed Powell to be “one of this country’s least recognized great novelists.”

Customer Reviews:

Very Memorable Autobiography That Touched Me in a Very Personal Way.......2006-07-24

This is one of my favorite books that I have ever read. Some of the charm it held for me may be that it describes life in towns in the North part of Ohio, and I grew up in Toledo, Ohio. Powell's narrative of events and places made me feel like I could imagine my own ancestors experiences in this part of the country. I think that the times were the times of my grandparents, and great grandparents.

The telling of the sequence of events showed the differences between daily life of the late 1800s-early 1900s and our own time in a way that changed my consciousness of those times, so near, so different, and so expository of the attitudes and personalities of my own grandparents. There is a lot of hardship, by today's standards, but it seemed to be taken as a matter of course in the times.

The personalities and foibles, concerns and coping mechanisms of the characters, at the same time, were so recognizable in the people and lives I know today. Dawn Powell's story, and Dawn Powell's way of telling her story, have stayed with me for many years after having read the book.

ORDER THIS BOOK AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.......2003-07-13

I finished reading this in one day -- that's how gripping I found it. It's literary in the way that F. Scott Fitzgerald and Willa Cather are literary -- the diction and syntax are polished, the setting is captured with precise details, but the plot comes through clearly -- and it's hard to put this down once you start to read it. This is my first Dawn Powell novel, but I intend to read all of her works after this amazing introduction.

Coming of Age in Rural Ohio.......2003-02-22

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.

Triumph!.......2002-06-02

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.

Beautiful and poignant.......2001-10-11

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.

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Angels on Toast
Dawn Powell
Manufacturer: Zoland Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Literary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 188364240X
Release Date: 1998-06-01

Book Description

EVERYONE IN Angels on Toast is on the make: Lou Donovan, the entrepeneur who ricochets frantically between his well-connected current wife, his disreputable ex, and his dangerously greedy mistress; Trina Kameray, the exotic adventuress whose job title is as phony as her accent; T.V. Truesdale, the man with the aristocratic manner, the fourteen-dollar suit, and the hyperactive eye for the main chance. A dizzyingly fast-paced and deliriously entertaining novel.
"For decades Dawn Powell was always just on the verge of ceasing to be a cult and becoming a major religion."
-- Gore Vidal

Sunday, Monday, and Always: Stories by Dawn Powell

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Sunday, Monday, and Always: Stories by Dawn Powell
Dawn Powell
Manufacturer: Zoland Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

United States | Short Stories | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

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The Happy Island
Dawn Powell: A Biography
The Diaries of Dawn Powell: 1931-1965
Dance Night
The Golden Spur

ASIN: 1883642604
Release Date: 1999-10-01

Book Description

IN ADDITION TO THE novels and the diaries that have won her posthumous acclaim, Dawn Powell wrote hundreds of short stories over the course of half a century. Sunday, Monday and Always, initially published in 1952, was the author's own personal selection of her best work in the form. This new, expanded edition of Sunday, Monday, and Always includes four additional short pieces written after the original collection was printed.
"What Are You Doing in my Dreams?" is an uncommonly moving autobiographical sketch that may serve as a pocket sketch for all of Powell's art. All the familiar elements are here - life and death; Ohio and New York; the awkward, hungry country girl and the city sophisticate; romantic yearning and realist self-deprecation - brought together one last time at the close of a half-century of meditation.
The haunting vignette entitled "The Elopers," is based on the author's own experiences with her much loved, much troubled son. An early gem from The New Yorker, "Can't We Cry A Little?" has never before been reprinted, and "Dinner on the Rocks," a typically riotous send-up of Manhattan manners, was one of Powell's last stories.
Sunday, Monday, and Always promises to introduce Powell's many admirers to a new facet of her extraordinary talent.

"The whole collection is wonderful, plumbing the depths of sadness and the heights of humor [Powell] knew so well in her own life and felt in the lives of those she watched so closely."-- The Cleveland Plain Dealer

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The Locusts Have No King
Dawn Powell
Manufacturer: Zoland Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1883642426
Release Date: 1998-06-01

Book Description

NO ONE HAS SATIRIZED New York society quite like Dawn Powell, and in this classic novel she turns her sharp eye and stinging wit on the literary world, and "identifies every sort of publishing type with the patience of a pathologist removing organs for inspection." Frederick Olliver, an obscure historian and writer, is having an affair with the restively married, beautiful, and hugely successful playwright, Lyle Gaynor. Powell sets a see-saw in motion when Olliver is swept up by the tasteless publishing tycoon, Tyson Bricker, and his new book makes its way onto to the bestseller lists just as Lyle's Broadway career is coming apart.
"For decades Dawn Powell was always just on the verge of ceasing to be a cult and becoming a major religion." -- Gore Vidal

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