may in fact be brought to the movie screen: filmmaker David Mamet is said to have purchased the film rights to two of them (Loper, 4), and award-winning filmmakers Ivy Meeropol and Mark Campbell completed a screenplay of The Happy Island, which they were in recent years said to be shopping around (“Ivy”).101 A decade ago Angelica Huston was working on bringing out a film based on a Powell book, and Julia Roberts has been said to have had some interest, but nothing has come of any of it.
To Charles McNulty, it seems that she “has been ‘rediscovered’ so many times that nearly every age tries to claim Powell as a contemporary” (2), while Michael Rogers calls her “the comeback kid” (“Golden,” 160). The Christian Science Monitor notes that the “compassionate and sharp-eyed” Powell “keeps turning up on the lists of the underrated” (“Great Reads”); and Erica Jong, who polled “250 or so distinguished writers and critics” to put together a women’s fiction list, found Powell ranked in the top 100 (35). The novelist is included in 2002’s Invisible Giants: 50 Americans Who Shaped the Nation but Missed the History Books, and Terry Teachout’s well-received 2004 collection of essays leads off with “Far from Ohio” in her praise.102 She is sometimes mentioned in the Sunday New York Times Book Review: to name a few occasions, in 2005 she appeared in Randy Cohen’s article “We’ll Map Manhattan” and in its follow-up article a month later. In the same publication, Thomas Mallon in 2008 regretfully referred to Powell and fellow New York writer Helene Hanff103 as “sharp, gallant characters . . . women clinging to New York literary life, or its fringes, by their talented fingernails” (15). In a 2004 review of a new book—Boomtown, by Greg Williams—Chris Lehmann noted that, when Williams makes a certain point about New York City, readers “can almost see Dawn Powell nodding faintly in assent” (C.04), a comment placing Powell in the position of novel-writing authority on New York; another book reviewer called Gloria Emerson, the author of Loving Graham Greene, “a delicious cross between Dawn Powell and Martha Gellhorn”104 (Russo, Review). A Maryland bookstore owner recently told me that late cartoonist and award-winning American Splendor screenwriter Harvey Pekar was an ardent Powell fan and collector. An article celebrating the 180th birthday of Ninth Street headlines Powell over all the other artists who have lived there, including such notables as Marianne Moore, Elinor Wylie, S. J. Perelman, Bret Harte, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and many others (Loschiavo, 2). In another recent New York Times Book Review, Morris Dickstein called Powell the Village’s “wittiest chronicler” (9), while for the Village Voice’s Toni Schlesinger, the very words “Greenwich Village” make her “think of Dawn Powell throwing one back” (2). Nick Dennison includes Powell’s A Time to Be Born in his two-part article, “Reading the City: Old New York.” The series, an exploration of novels that bring Manhattan to life, links her works with those of more famous novelists such as Henry James, Edith Wharton, Steven Crane (I, 1–3); and Henry Roth, John Dos Passos, and Damon Runyon (II, 1–5). Ross Wetzsteon devotes a chapter to Powell in his book Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village, the American Bohemia;105 and Alice Sparberg Alexiou, in her 2006 biography of Jane Jacobs, foe of Robert Moses and noted preservationist of city neighborhoods, includes Dawn Powell as a familiar Village “luminary” (22, and passim).
Powell’s name frequently turns up even when one is not expecting to find it: for example, perusing the “About Us” link on the Peccadillo Theater Company’s website, I stumbled upon this item: “Peccadillo concentrates on the era of the well-made play, a period of sparkling wit and sophistication in comedy as well as deepening realism in the drama. It encompasses such diverse and, sad to say, little-known American playwrights as Sidney Howard, Philip Barry, William Inge, Dawn Powell, and many, many more” (1). True to their word, the Peccadillo Theatre Company in March 2001 produced Powell’s 1934 comedy Jig Saw under the direction of Dan Wackerman, and a year later New York’s Sightlines Theatre Company also staged it. For Village Voice theater critic Jessica Winter, the play, this time staged as written, “hardly lacks for whiskey-lubricated one-liners” though it “evokes less the droll chamber music of Powell’s contemporary Noel Coward than the cacophony stirred by the recent revival of The Women.” Powell would detest being compared to Clare Boothe Luce, whom she famously satirized in her 1942 novel A Time to Be Born. But these New York productions were not the first revivals of the play: in 2000, Los Angeles Classical Theatre Ensemble Antaeus staged it in a production directed by John Walcutt, and even before that, in 1997, it had been restaged at Long Island University (Parks, 1).
. . .
The Peccadillo also produced Talk of the Town, an original musical comedy about the Algonquin group; and The Ladies of the Corridor, Dorothy Parker and Arnaud d’Usseau’s weepy 1953 drama (McNulty, 2). I ran across the following mention in a review of Broadway’s 2004 revival of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s comedy Twentieth Century: “Just a footnote: you know, most urban literature of this time—by the likes of John O’Hara, Dawn Powell, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker—was very, very hip. This play, with its snappy dialogue, modern thoughts about sex and adultery and cynicism about show business, could be set in 2004 instead of 1932 and no one would notice” (R. Friedman, “Anne,” 3). It seems as if, in theatre circles at least, Dawn Powell’s name had almost become a household word.
Extracts from Powell’s diaries appear in 2000’s The Assassin’s Cloak: An Anthology of the World’s Greatest Diarists, in Phillip Lopate’s Writing New York, and in Teresa Carpenter’s New York Diaries, 1609–2009. Seeing that Carpenter had included so much of Powell in her 2012 book, I wrote her to ask why. She replied,
I’m sometimes asked to pick my favorite diarists from this collection and I usually demur out of a sense of literary courtesy. But I’ll break ranks with courtesy in this instance to say that Dawn Powell is emphatically top-tier. She was a woman who knew so much sorrow—alcoholic husband, disabled son, personal struggles. . . . Yet in the end it’s her extraordinary resilience and vitality that make her diary entries so compelling. In her personal writings, sorrow is eclipsed by a constant stream of ideas for novels and stories all of which sparkle with wit and insight into the human condition. Her off-the-cuff vignettes of Greenwich Village, which she called her “creative oxygen,” are more vivid than photos, and her often ruthlessly spot-on portraits of New Yorkers are classics of the genre.
Though Powell has been named one of the “extraordinary diarists of our era” (Levinson, 107), more often of course she is acclaimed for her novels. Lewis M. Dabney, in his biography of Edmund Wilson, placed Powell among the ten novelists who “helped define the literary and intellectual life” of this country in the last century (6). The bookseller Powell’s Books, reviewing the Library of America’s issues, called her “a rediscovery of rare importance” (2), while the Library Journal noted that the collection placed her among our finest writers, where she belongs (Rogers, “Dawn Powell Novels,” 160). For New York Times critic A. O. Scott, Dawn Powell is “a writer we can no longer imagine ever having forgotten” (B10).
One can imagine her impatient response, “It’s about time!”—softened with a rueful laugh, of course.
—Margaret Carlin, 1106
By 2000, Powell’s work had begun to appear in a few anthologies and some college course syllabi as well. Not only does Ross Wetzsteon’s Republic of Dreams include her, but she appears as a character in Vidal’s 2000 novel The Golden Age, in which the writer describes her as “a round little woman with squirrel-bright eyes” (284). Vidal called her last published work, The Golden Spur, one of his five favorite postwar novels (“True Gore,” 1–2). A course at the New School, called “Dawn Powell’s New York,” was offered by Professor Theresa Craig in the fall of 2003 (New School, 44); and her work has been included in a course called “Urban Myths and the American City” at Columbia University’s Barnard College. Powell friend and emeritus Professor William Peterson of Southampton College, Long Island University, who once taught at the novelist’s alma mater, together with Tim Page presented a symposium for the centennial of Powell’s birth at Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve University in 1996; and in 2006, the sesquicentennial of the founding of Lake Erie College, all freshman arrivals