Bøger af Dawn Powell

Dawn Powell's She Walks in Beauty recounts the adolescence of Dorrie and Linda, two sisters who live in a railroad station boarding house owned by their Aunt Jule in a small Ohio town. The story's cast of characters includes gently venal theater actors, the town gossip, a penurious piano teacher, eccentric alcoholics, not quite respectable women, philosophical "old man Wickley," and town golden boy Courtenay Stall, among others. A tale of class society, ambition, longing, and coming of age, She Walks in Beauty is a taut, merciless, and psychologically astute portrait of pre-World War I life in small town America. This Warbler Classics edition includes a detailed biographical timeline.

Dennis Orphen, in writing a novel, has stolen the life story of his friend, Effie Callingham, the former wife of a famous, Hemingway-like novelist, Andrew Callingham. Orphen's betrayal is not the only one, nor the worst one, in this hilarious satire of the New York literary scene. (Powell personally considered this to be her best New York novel.) Powell takes revenge here on all publishers, and her baffoonish MacTweed is a comic invention worthy of Dickens. And as always in Powell's New York novels, the city itself becomes a central character: ';On the glittering black pavement legs hurried by with umbrella tops, taxis skidded along the curb, their wheels swishing through the puddles, raindrops bounced like dice in the gutter.' Powell's famous wit was never sharper than here, but Turn, Magic Wheel is also one of the most poignant and heart-wrenching of her novels.

Set against an atmospheric backdrop of New York City in the months just before America' s entry into World War II, A Time To Be Born is a scathing and hilarious study of cynical New Yorkers stalking each other for various selfish ends. At the center of the story are a wealthy, self-involved newspaper publisher and his scheming, novelist wife, Amanda Keeler. Powell always denied that Amanda Keeler was based upon the real-life Clare Boothe Luce, until years later when she discovered a memo she'd written to herself in 1939 that said, ';Why not do a novel on Clare Luce?' Which prompted Powell to write in her diary ';Who can I believe? Me or myself?'

It is sometime after the turn of the century in Lamptown, Ohio, a working-class town filled with factory girls. Every Thursday night at the Casino Dance Hall above Bauer's Chop House and across the street from Elsinore Abbott's Bon Ton Hat Shop and Bill Delaney's Saloon and Billiard Parlor, women and a few men gather to escape their pedestrian lives in fantasy, and sometimes to live out these fantasies.Observing all are the novel's two young protagonists, Morry, who dreams of becoming an architect and developer, and Jen, an unsentimental orphan of fourteen who, abandoned by her mother, dreams of escape.