| This dissertation examines the eight New York novels of Ohio-born novelist, playwright, and short-story writer Dawn Powell (1896-1965), apart from her six novels of the Midwest. Because the Ohio books are very different from the New York, both in theme and in tone, they should be considered separately. The New York works, overall, are more satiric, more comic, than the lyrical Ohio novels are, and it is in them that Powell famously writes about characters she fondly calls "The Midnight People, who drink and dance and rattle and are ever afraid to be silent." Even though Powell often said that what she wrote was not satire but the Truth, with a capital T, she most often did call it satire.; Because Powell was always such a "resolutely autobiographical writer" (Page Bio 66), here I examine her Manhattan novels beside the biographical facts of her life, consulting not only Tim Page's splendid biography but also his editions of her diaries and letters. Further, I use both period and modern-day sources to explore persons she knew, places she went, and the important historical events of her lifetime, such as Prohibition and World War II, all the while studying the real-life "victims" on whom Powell based her Manhattan characters, among them Clare Boothe Luce, Ernest Hemingway, Dwight Fiske, and Peggy Guggenheim. Last, I place her novels (and some of her plays and short stories) among the writings of many of her contemporaries, including Edna Ferber, George S. Kaufman, William Carlos Williams, Virginia Woolf, and Dorothy Parker.; Additionally, I examine themes that Powell regularly revisits, such as that of newly arrived provincials in New York; their dreams and fierce determination to succeed despite all odds; material longing and consumerism; and the interrelationships among them. In discussing the two final novels I focus on Powell's plaint against the destruction of historic New York, placing her lament beside that of writers from Henry James and E. B. White to Roger Angell and Pete Hamill. Finally, in writing this dissertation I hope to shed new light on the works and to encourage future studies of Dawn Powell. |
