Back Novels 1930–1942

Dawn Powell: Novels 1930–1942

Dance Night | Come Back to Sorrento | Turn, Magic Wheel | Angels on Toast | A Time to Be Born

Edited by Tim Page

“Dawn Powell is a supremely deserving candidate for admission to The Library of America.”— Atlantic Monthly

Overview

Overview

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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.

Tim Page, the volume’s editor, is the author of Dawn Powell: A Biography and the editor of The Diaries of Dawn Powell and Selected Letters of Dawn Powell. He won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1997 and is a culture critic at The Washington Post.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Dawn Powell: Novels 1930–1942 is kept in print by a gift from Jacqueline Miller Rice to the Guardians of American Letters Fund.

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ISBN: 978-1-93108201-3 1068 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 126 Library of America Series

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Dawn Powell: Novels 1930–1942

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