Back Novels 1944–1962

Dawn Powell: Novels 1944–1962

My Home Is Far Away | The Locusts Have No King | The Wicked Pavilion | The Golden Spur

Edited by Tim Page

“Few novelists writing in English have been able to create satire with quite so fine and sure a touch as Dawn Powell.”— Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Overview

Overview

American literature has known few writers capable of the comic élan and full-bodied portraiture that abound in the novels of Dawn Powell. Yet for decades after her death, Powell’s work was out of print, cherished by a small band of admirers. Only recently has there been a rediscovery of the writer Gore Vidal calls “our best comic novelist,” and whom Edmund Wilson considered to be “on a level with Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh, and Muriel Spark.” In this, one of two volumes collecting nine novels, The Library of America presents the best of Powell’s quirky, often hilarious, sometimes deeply moving fiction.

My Home Is Far Away (1944), the last of Powell’s novels set in Ohio, is a fictionalized memoir of Powell’s difficult childhood. With The Locusts Have No King (1948), the story of a scholar’s unexpected brush with the temptations of celebrity and riches, Powell resumed her lifelong dissection of New York’s pretensions and glamour. The first of three brilliant postwar satires, it was followed by The Wicked Pavilion (1954), a novel that lays bare its characters’ illusions about love and success against the backdrop of the Café Julien, a relic of a bygone era in the history of Greenwich Village. The volume concludes with Powell’s final novel, The Golden Spur (1962), in which she drew on her time spent among painters at the famed Cedar Tavern for an affectionate if pointed satire on Manhattan’s art world.

Dawn Powell’s New York novels are exactly what she wanted them to be: “crystal in quality, sharp as the skyline, and relentlessly true.”

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 1944–1962 is kept in print by a gift from D. Ronald Daniel and Lise Scott to the Guardians of American Letters Fund.

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ISBN: 978-1-93108202-0 969 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 127 Library of America Series

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Dawn Powell: Novels 1944–1962

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