Novels 1930-1942 | Novels 1944-1962

This volume contains four novels by Dawn Powell that were first published between 1944 and 1962: My Home Is Far Away (1944), The Locusts Have No King (1948), The Wicked Pavilion (1954), and The Golden Spur (1962). This volume prints the texts of the first American editions for each of these novels. Although these novels were published in England, Powell's involvement in the preparation of the English editions was minimal, and her editors made changes based on British conventions of spelling and usage.

According to an entry in her diary dated January 27, 1941, Powell began writing My Home Is Far Away after having a dream about her childhood. "Unfortunately my fever brought back so many childhood memories with such brilliant clarity that it seems almost imperative to write a novel about that—the three sisters, the stepmother, Papa. This is bad because the new idea is so much work and the old one now seems wooden. Wrote a start from 3 to 5 A.M. in bed with temperature." The novel took shape during the next three years. On April 25, 1942, Powell wrote in her diary that she was "dissatisified with novel—which is not like me. But it is the longest, most expansive book I've ever attempted and I'm afraid I have not the actual capacity for handling this big a theme. I still like it and feel cheated that I can't linger more over it and make it richer, which is what it needs." By February 1944, Powell was more confident about her handling of autobiographical material in the novel, writing that "I haven't the faintest notion of whether it's good or bad but at least now it is going very fast. It pours out spontaneously now that it is more fictionalized." Powell's diary records conflicting attitudes toward the progress of My Home Is Far Away as the novel neared completion. In February 1944, she remarked that she was "actually bored" by the book and "eager to get to the other one which permits the special kind of writing I like," but the following month she wrote, "I'm just beginning to think this novel may be of value. I write and rewrite each chapter half a dozen times with pleasure—perhaps because the material is so limitless." On May 15, 1944, Powell claimed that she was "exhausted" by the novel and "not sure of it, even"; three days later, she wrote, "Book back on right foot—up to page 260 now, after throwing out a great deal—forty pages or so." She submitted the finished version of My Home Is Far Away to Maxwell Perkins, her editor at Scribner's, on July 25, 1944, noting in her diary that she was "pleased with ending and other features of end more than beginning or earlier part." The book was published by Scribner's in October 1944. Powell had envisioned it as the first part of a trilogy and worked on a sequel to My Home Is Far Away, tentatively called "Marcia," throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Only a fragmentary draft survives of "Marcia," which was never completed. This volume prints the text of the 1944 Scribner's edition of My Home Is Far Away.

The Locusts Have No King was called "The Destroyers" when Powell began writing the novel in 1943. The book developed slowly and evolved as a response, at least in part, to the end of World War II. In a letter to Perkins written in the summer of 1946, Powell described the book as "a follow-up of A Time to Be Born, which dealt with New York in the beginning follies of war. This book deals with the more desperate follies of post-war Manhattan—the exaggerated drive to perdition of a nation now conditioned to destruction." Diary entries from the summer of 1946 contain references to the atomic bomb tests in the Pacific which figure as the background to the novel's final scene; there is also a description of the novel as "a love story, the New York love story of a triangle marking time. The love story is serious and important and tragic to the people in it, but a matter of cosmic burlesque to all casual outsiders. Therefore the book has a serious main story in the setting of ageless laughter." She sent an incomplete draft of the novel to Perkins in April 1947 and received his comments shortly before his death in June 1947 (John Hall Wheelock replaced Perkins as Powell's editor). By November 1947, Powell wrote that she was able to "see end of novel clearly now—day of atom bomb (Bikini). Lesson—cling to whatever is fine." The book was finished in late 1947 or early 1948, and it was published by Scribner's on April 26, 1948. This volume prints the 1948 Scribner's text of The Locusts Have No King.

In January 1950, while visiting Gerald and Sara Murphy in Snedens Landing, New York, Powell read parts of The Creevey Papers, a collection of letters to and from Thomas Creevey (1768-1838), a member of Parliament. Powell wrote in her diary that she "became fascinated, especially at Mrs. Creevey's letters to her husband from Bath in which she refers to 'that Wicked Pavilion'—the place everyone enjoys till after midnight, drinking so they cannot get up till noon, and then with heads." Two days later, in an entry dated January 31, 1950, Powell wrote, "Started novel about Cafe Lafayette. Wrote seven pages. Called The Wicked Pavilion. If this goes it will be due to Murphy weekend—early bed in strange, river atmosphere and without the dull callers." The following week she wrote that the novel "seems to have already been written in my head waiting for the title (and focal point of the Lafayette) to release it." In a letter to John Hall Wheelock dated September 18, 1950, Powell wrote that "reading the gossipy letters of French ladies and all the letters in The Creevey Papers, it struck me how sad it was that the vivid realness of the life as described by these ordinary letter-writers—the customs, the town talk, the scandal, the financial and personal problems of a Londoner or Parisian—was never really done in a novel. I felt compelled to do my own favorite city the service the old letter-writers did for their times." After this promising start, however, the novel progressed slowly. Despite "working steadily" on The Wicked Pavilion, Powell noted on July 29, 1951, "I have gotten no further than 12 pages or so and this is due to talking to blank wall." She began to make headway with the novel in the summer of 1952 and continued to work on it throughout the remainder of 1952 and 1953; it was completed in February 1954. Having left Scribner's in September 1951, Powell submitted the novel to Houghton Mifflin, which had published a collection of her short stories, Sunday, Monday and Always, in 1952. The Wicked Pavilion was published by Houghton Mifflin in the autumn of 1954. This volume prints the 1954 Houghton Mifflin text of The Wicked Pavilion.

Powell began writing The Golden Spur in March 1958, shortly after making some preliminary notes for a "Cedar novel" (referring to the Cedar Tavern, the Greenwich Village bar on which The Golden Spur of the book is based). She worked on the novel for the next four years. Because of Powell's dissatisfaction with the editing of her novel A Cage for Lovers (1957), she left Houghton Mifflin, which had published her previous three books, in 1958. Malcolm Cowley, a senior editor at Viking, recommended that his firm publish The Golden Spur and commented on drafts of the novel. When Powell submitted a finished version of The Golden Spur to Viking in 1962, Helen Taylor, one of the editors at Viking, suggested revisions. Powell rejected Taylor's recommendations, writing in her diary on September 27, 1962, "I was so dimmed by doubting publisher, editors that I could not sustain my original explosion of life technique until literal-minded editing made me so mad I tore back into it, throwing out every suggestion that had been made and being more myself than ever." The Golden Spur was published on October 5, 1962. The text of the 1962 Viking Press edition of The Golden Spur is printed here.