its premiere performance, Powell’s Women at Four O’Clock, along with Jig Saw, Big Night, and “several dramatic adaptations of Powell’s short stories,” was staged by Sightlines Theatre Company, at the Seventy-Eighth Street Theatre Lab in New York, from January through March 2002 in a festival named “Permanent Visitor: A Festival Celebrating Dawn Powell in New York.” Musical Theatre Works staged an adaptation of Powell’s 1942 novel, A Time to Be Born (Horwitz, 45), written by Suzanne Myers (Redeemable, 1). And Walking down Broadway, another Powell drama never before produced, debuted at New York’s Mint Theatre in late 2005.
Literary tours of Powell’s remaining haunts and residences are conducted from time to time; and her effect on popular American culture has even reached 1980s and 1990s television: Seinfeld, the program once thought to be “too New York” by television audiences and producers alike (Boudreaux, 1), may in fact owe something to Ohio-born Powell. At least three episodes closely echo certain incidents in her Turn, Magic Wheel (71), The Happy Island (121), and The Golden Spur (passim). The novelist has been linked to other television programming: Chicago Tribune writer Mary Schmich calls Powell’s New York novel A Time to Be Born a forerunner of the HBO series Sex and the City107 (4C.1); and Rory, the erstwhile college student in Gilmore Girls, is shown in one episode to be reading Dawn Powell’s collected works, thanks to Tim Page. Radio, too, has recently featured Powell: on January 29, 2005, WOSU radio program Ohio Arts Alive, of Columbus, Ohio, “paid tribute” to the author in a special broadcast featuring radio host Christopher Purdy, Tim Page, and two of Powell’s now-deceased cousins, sister and brother Rita and Jack Sherman. Selections from The Bride’s House, A Time to Be Born, Come Back to Sorrento, and Turn, Magic Wheel; certain Diaries entries; and the first act of Big Night were read (Purdy, “Christopher,” 1). In April 2005, her short story “Can’t We Cry a Little,” a “humorous look at radio’s Golden Age,” was read during the eightieth-anniversary tribute to the New York Public Radio station WNYC (“Women with Attitude,” 1). The story was read again on September 24, 2006, at New York’s Symphony Space and broadcast on National Public Radio Station WBFO, this time in “celebration of the short story” (WBFO, 1–4).
Additionally, discussions about and readings from Powell’s novels and plays have in recent years been held in various New York City locales and elsewhere; writers including Susan Minot, Francine Prose, and Melissa Bank have appeared at bookstores such as the Housing Works Used Book Café in Soho to speak about Powell and to read from her novels (Russo, 1). Marian Seldes, Michael Feingold, and Fran Lebowitz have given readings of Powell’s works at the Algonquin Hotel, an irony which surely would not be lost on our novelist, who sniffed that that crowd did little more than “spend their lives preventing each other from working” (Diaries, 209). America’s great stage actress Irene Worth (1916–2002) read from Powell’s novels on at least two occasions in New York, once at Joe’s Pub in Greenwich Village; Professor William Peterson has since the 1990s presented public lectures on Long Island about the novelist (Finalborgo, 9); and Tim Page has spoken on her at such locales as the Museum of the City of New York, New York University, and in numerous Greenwich Village bookstores. John Strausbaugh’s 2013 publication, The Village: 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues, mentions Powell throughout.
Today, interest in Powell is climbing again. In 2010 the ReGroup Theatre Company helmed by Allie Mulholland staged a reading of Big Night at St. Luke’s Theatre in New York and presented a talk on her work and that of other Group playwrights at Symphony Space in 2011; in November and December 2012, they produced the comedy off-Broadway, also in Powell’s original version. Jig Saw was recently restaged at the Riverside Arts Center in Ypsilanti, Michigan, in December 2013, by Nan Bauer; Tim Page and Carol Warstler were on hand to introduce the play. Page remarked that ““Dawn Powell’s fizzy, dizzy Jig-Saw comes to brilliant and exhilarating life in [this] production!” In late 2012 Page offered her original diaries for sale, prompting much attention in such publications as the New York Times and the New Yorker and in social media sites. A short while later Columbia University purchased the volumes, to much media notice, including a piece by John Williams in the New York Times which stated, quite rightfully, that “Page has done more than anyone [else] to champion her work.” Powell was featured in a 2011 discussion of Group Theatre playwrights at New York City’s Symphony Space; her friend and portraitist, Peggy Bacon, was in 2012 featured in an art exhibit at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC; and her novel A Time to Be Born was not only chosen that same year as a selection of the New York Times’ “Big City Book Club” but a few months later named by literary blogger Nathaniel Rich as one of the finest novels of World War II; he stated that “it doesn’t have a single gun” in it yet it “captures the viciousness and madness of the homefront.” Contemporary writer Whitney Otto, perhaps most famous for her novel and the film adaptation of How to Make an American Quilt, told me in a 2013 e-mail that her 2002 novel A Collection of Beauties at the Height of Their Popularity had been partially influenced by The Wicked Pavilion and that she did not fail to speak of the Powell novel while on publicity tours. Her 2012 book, Eight Girls Taking Pictures, similarly contains a sly nod to Powell (289), who also receives much attention in Playing Smart: New York Women Writers and Modern Magazine Culture, Catherine Keyser’s 2011 publication. Historian John Joseph delivered a well-attended speech on Powell on December 11, 2014, entitled “Dawn Powell: An Often Overlooked Literary Great,” under the auspices of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation. Most prominently, perhaps, on June 2, 2015, Powell was presented a prestigious award from Rocco Staino and the Empire State Center for the Book. In October of the same year, David Earle, amasser of Powell’s earliest short publications, wrote “Dawn Powell, Flapper Stories, and the Pulps”; and Terry Teachout published an essay, “Little Miss Wolfsbane,” on October 13, 2015, in response to David Pomerantz’s, Robert Nedelkoff’s, and Tim Page’s Facebook announcement that a previously unknown recording of Powell’s voice on a radio show of October 9, 1939, had surfaced. In April 2016, R. Scott Evans, Senior Vice President of Lake Erie College’s Institutional Advancement and Chief of the President’s Staff, along with Lake Erie College English professors Jennifer Swartz-Levine and Adam Stier, hosted a celebration of Dawn Powell scholarship at her alma mater at which Marcy Smith and I spoke. The activity continues.
Yet despite all this praise, despite all this activity, I have still encountered few readers who have heard of Dawn Powell. Perhaps this work will help to shine a little more of the spotlight squarely on Powell; perhaps it will help bring her out of the “perpetual dusk” in which she has too long languished (Wolcott, 42). For novelist Lorrie Moore, it seems not at all unusual that yet another revival might be required for the author to receive her due, for “during [Powell’s] own lifetime, her struggling though productive career seems to have been in constant semi-revival” (1). As we have noted, some activity around Powell is beginning again. Perhaps now the time is finally ripe for Dawn Powell.
CHAPTER THREE
“EVERY ARTIST WRITES HIS OWN AUTOBIOGRAPHY”
The Diaries, Letters, Short Stories, and Criticism
As for New York City, it’s the only place where people with nothing behind them but their wits can be and do everything.
—Letters, 75–761
Because all of Powell’s novels are to some extent autobiographical, those studying her would do well to acquaint themselves with the biography as they approach her fiction. For that reason, among others, it is fortunate that she left us the great many letters and diaries she did, for they help to inform our understanding of what she was attempting to accomplish in each novel, assist us in measuring what she thought she had achieved against what critics then and now believe she did in fact achieve, and shed light on the ways in which certain autobiographical events as they appear in letter or diary are transformed into fiction. Edited by Tim Page, both diary and letter collections have met with praise: Gerald Howard, an editor at Doubleday, calls The Diaries of Dawn Powell, 1931–1965 “one of the finest interior portraits of the novelist’s art and temper