Dawn Powell | |
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Born | November 28, 1896 Mount Gilead, Ohio |
Died | November 14, 1965 (age 68) New York City |
Occupation | Writer |
Genre | Dark social satire |
Notable works | A Time to Be Born, The Wicked Pavilion, The Locusts Have No King |
Notable awards | 1963 National Book Award nominee, 1964 American Academy of Arts and Letters presents her with the Marjorie Peabody Waite Award for lifetime achievement in literature |
Spouse | Joseph Gousha, poet and copywriter |
Children | Joseph R. Gousha Jr. |
Dawn Powell (November 28, 1896 – November 14, 1965) was an American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and short story writer.[1] Known for her acid-tongued prose, "her relative obscurity was likely due to a general distaste for her harsh satiric tone."[2] Nonetheless, Stella Adler and author Clifford Odets appeared in one of her plays. Her work was praised by Robert Benchley in The New Yorker and in 1939 she was signed as a Scribner author where Maxwell Perkins, famous for his work with many of her contemporaries, including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe, became her editor.[1] A 1963 nominee for the National Book Award, she received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Marjorie Peabody Waite Award for lifetime achievement in literature the following year. A friend to many literary and arts figures of her day, including author John Dos Passos, critic Edmund Wilson, and poet E.E. Cummings,[2] Powell's work received renewed interest after Gore Vidal praised it in a 1987 editorial for The New York Review of Books. Since then, the Library of America has published two collections of her novels.[2]