Dawn Powell: A Biography

The first biography and the definitive story of a restored American literary treasure.

Perhaps the biggest mystery of Dawn Powell's life is the fact that when she died, all of her books were out of print. She seemed destined to be forgotten. Powell had come to New York City at the age of twenty-one, a gifted and ambitious young woman from a small-town in Ohio. There she lived, usually in some form of domestic uncertainty, for the next forty-seven years. But she always managed to maintain the fresh perspective of a "permanent visitor," exalting the multiplicity and sheer sensory overload of Manhattan. This is what she distilled into her extensive and impressive body of work: her poems, stories, articles, plays, and her dizzying and inventive novels. In Dawn Powell: A Biography, Tim Page gracefully and intelligently explores all the fascinating ironies and often sad complexities of Powell's life and work. Gore Vidal once referred to her as "our best comic novelist," deserving to be as widely read as Hemingway and Fitzgerald. This biography will be a capstone to her triumphant rise from the ashes of near oblivion and her establishment among the giants of twentieth-century American literature.

Tim Page is chief music critic for The Washington Post, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1997. A graduate of Columbia University, Page is the executor of Dawn Powell's publishing rights and the editor of The Diaries of Dawn Powell. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.