Comprehensive information and links about Dawn Powell

Dawn Powell (November 28, 1896 – November 14, 1965) was an American writer of satirical novels and stories that manage to be barbed and sensitive at the same time.

Powell was born in Mount Gilead, Ohio, a village 45 miles north of Columbus and the county seat of Morrow County, Ohio. After her mother died when Powell was seven, she lived with a series of relatives around the state. Her father re-married, but his second wife was harsh and abusive toward the children; when her stepmother destroyed her notebooks and diaries, she ran away to live with an aunt, who encouraged her creative work.

At Lake Erie College in Painesville, Ohio, she wrote stories and plays, acted in college productions, and edited the college newspaper. After graduation, she moved to Manhattan. Most of her subsequent writing would deal either with life in small Midwestern towns, or with the lives of people transplanted to New York City from such towns.

In 1920 she met and married Joseph Gousha, an aspiring poet. In 1921, the couple had their only child, a son who was born mentally and emotionally impaired. Her husband abandoned poetry for the steady work of advertising, and the family moved to Greenwich Village, which remained her home base for the rest of her life.

Her novel , came out in 1930. The early work received uneven reviews, and none of it sold well. Her 1936 novel was the first work that both received critical acclaim and reasonably good sales.

She had a prodigious output, producing hundreds of short stories, ten plays, a dozen novels, and an extended diary starting in 1931. Her writings, however, never generated enough money to live off of. Throughout her life, she supported herself with various jobs, including freelance writer, extra in silent films, Hollywood screenwriter, book reviewer, and radio personality.

In 1939, her publisher became Scribner's, where Max Perkins was her editor.

In 1942, she published her first commercially successful novel, "Satire is people as they are; romanticism, people as they would like to be; realism, people as they seem with their insides left out." —Dawn PowellThe Library of America Presents Dawn Powell; extensive information on Powell's life and works, along with commentary