The Diaries of Dawn Powell: 1931-1965

by Dawn Powell

Other authors: Tim Page (Editor), Tim Page (Introduction)

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Dawn Powell had a brilliant mind and a keen wit and her humor was never at a finer pitch than in her diaries. And yet her story is a poignant one - a son emotionally and mentally impaired, a household of too much alcohol and never enough money, and an artistic career that, if not a failure, fell far short of the success she craved. All is recorded here - along with working sketches for her novels, and often revealing portraits of her many friends (a literary who's who of her period) - in her always unique style and without self-delusion.… (more)

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These are interesting but not as interesting as the novels. In her diaries, Powell collected vignets of New York life, recorded her anxieties and inspirations, chronicled significant events in her life, set down aphorisms for use in her fictions, and cataloged the roster of the people who passed through her life from Edmund Wilson ("Bunny") to Filipe Alfau. The novels are finished works of art, full of satire and life, and yield a more rounded and literary experience. The diary is a peak behind the curtain, but the novels contain the magic. (

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le.vert.galant | Nov 19, 2019 |

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There are few intimate revelations in the diaries. There is a hint that she and the Communist playwright John Howard Lawson once had an affair but one doubts that with the other points to her triangle-Joe and Coby-they would have bothered much with sex when wit and work and the company of each other and the passing parade of the Village was more than enough to occupy them. One is astonished at the amount of work that Dawn was obliged to do in order to pay for the institutionalized son, with not much help from Joe, himself feckless in money matters. She even made an obligatory trip or two to Hollywood to write for movies. Of Hollywood: "The climate picks you up and throws you down in the most amazing way." That was about it.

added by SnootyBaronet | editThe New York Review of Books, Gore Vidal

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Author name	Role	Type of author	Work?	Status
Dawn Powell	—	primary author	all editions	calculated
Page, Tim	Editor	secondary author	all editions	confirmed
Page, Tim	Introduction	secondary author	all editions	confirmed

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Is abridged in

Writing New York: A Literary Anthology by Phillip Lopate

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Ohioana Book Award (Winner – Nonfiction – 1996)

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Dawn Powell

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Dawn Powell had a brilliant mind and a keen wit and her humor was never at a finer pitch than in her diaries. And yet her story is a poignant one - a son emotionally and mentally impaired, a household of too much alcohol and never enough money, and an artistic career that, if not a failure, fell far short of the success she craved. All is recorded here - along with working sketches for her novels, and often revealing portraits of her many friends (a literary who's who of her period) - in her always unique style and without self-delusion.

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Hannah Green: This is a real writer's diary. It is a great work, so alive you can't stop reading. Writing with the most natural absolute clarity and in marvelous detail, Dawn Powell fills the pages year after year with her brilliant observations, with the things people said, with working sketches for her books, with dreams and daily life, with New York and Ohio, with her rages and angers and disappointments and illnesses, with the books she read, the writers she loved (and those she didn't), the portraits of people she knew (often hilariously funny), with notes that are luminous, beautiful, moving, heart-breaking, and quick - quick as her brilliant mind, as her wit, and warm as her open, loving, romantic heart. She had a lucid, piercing eye that saw through hypocrisy and self-delusion and casual cruelty. She lived a hard-drinking, hard-working, productive, fun-loving, full life...

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