1. Dawn Powell was an American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and short story writer.
17 Facts About Dawn Powell
1. 2.
Dawn Powell's 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.
3.
Dawn Powell was born in Mount Gilead, Ohio, a village 45 miles north of Columbus and the county seat of Morrow County.
4.
Dawn Powell regularly gave her birth year as 1897 but primary documents support the earlier date.
5.
Dawn Powell's father remarried, but his second wife was harsh and abusive toward the children; when her stepmother destroyed her notebooks and diaries, she ran away to live with an aunt, who encouraged her creative work.
6.
Dawn Powell later gave her childhood fictional form in the novel My Home Is Far Away.
7.
Dawn Powell's husband abandoned poetry for steadier work in advertising, and the family moved to Greenwich Village, which remained her home base for the rest of her life.
8.
Dawn Powell wrote hundreds of short stories, ten plays, a dozen novels, and an extended diary starting in 1931.
9.
Later in life, Dawn Powell did most of her writing in an apartment at 95 Christopher Street.
10.
Dawn Powell died in 1965 of colon cancer, fourteen days before her 69th birthday.
11.
When Dawn Powell died, virtually all of her novels were out of print.
12.
The result was a revival in the late 1990s, when most of Dawn Powell's books were made available once more.
13.
Dawn Powell's papers are now in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library of Columbia University in New York.
14.
Dawn Powell is referenced in the 2002 Gilmore Girls episode "Help Wanted", in which Rory expresses sadness over her relative obscurity.
15.
Dawn Powell is referenced in the novel A Collection of Beauties at the Height of Their Popularity by Whitney Otto.
16.
Dawn Powell is referenced by novelist Alan Furst in his 2014 work Midnight in Europe.
17.
Dawn Powell appears as a character in several scenes of Vidal's novel The Golden Age.