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When asked about the characters in her novels and plays, Dawn Powell said, "I give them their heads. They furnish their own nooses." Powell's wicked sense of humor, keen ear for dialogue and human sense of pathos pervade her barbed, shrewd fiction about mid-century Americans in Manhattan and Ohio. "Always sharp, never cranky, and with a pagan's delight in the pleasures of this world, Powell's work elaborates the human comedy with a vigor matched only by its unpretentious wisdom," wrote one of her critics.
Born in Mount Gilead, Ohio in 1896, Dawn Powell ran away from an abusive stepmother when she was thirteen and settled with her unconventional aunt in nearby Shelby, Ohio. "Auntie May," a divorcée, owned a home near the railroad depot, made lively by Powell's cousins, Auntie's lover, and passing strangers who stopped for meals. Encouraged by her aunt to further her education, Powell begged a scholarship to Lake Erie College for Women. There she wrote and performed in plays and edited the Lake Erie Record, a campus quarterly, which often contained her playful yet pessimistic stories.
In 1918, Powell moved to New York City. There she worked briefly for the Butterick Company, the U. S. Navy, and the Red Cross while writing freelance articles and stories. She married Joseph Gousha, Jr., a Pennsylvania-born poet turned ad man, and the couple had a son, Jojo. They settled in Greenwich Village. Powell loved her bohemian neighborhood and the Manhattan nightlife she spent alongside friends John Dos Passos, Edmund Wilson, E. E. Cummings, and others from the literary scene. "There is really one city for everyone just as there is one major love," she wrote.
Powell tried her hand at writing plays, particularly when the family felt pinched financially, and several were produced, but she came to consider her primary work the creation of novels. Powell set her fiction in the small Ohio towns of her youth and later, most successfully, in familiar New York neighborhoods and cafés. Though dogged by Gousha's drinking, Jojo's probable autism, financial strain, and her own struggles with alcohol, illness, and depression, Dawn Powell managed to write sixteen novels, nine plays, and numerous short stories and reviews. She died in 1965. Her remarkable diaries, published in 1995, were hailed by the New York Times as "one of the outstanding literary finds of the last quarter century."
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