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

Robustly funny, spangled with shining phrases, neat, deft, and deadly.

—Review of The Locusts Have No King,
in The New York Times


More Commentary
NPR Interviews Powell's Editor, Tim Page*
The Diane Rehm Show

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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