Dawn Powell – Ohio Center for the Book at Cleveland Public Library

Born: November 28, 1896
Died: November 14, 1965

Ohio connection: Birth

Mount Gilead

Novelist and playwright Dawn Powell, daughter of Roy K. and Hattie B. (Sherman) Powell, was born in 1896 in Mount Gilead, Ohio. Because her father was a traveling salesman and her mother died when Dawn was only six years old, the young Dawn was raised mostly by relatives in different parts of the Midwest until her father remarried in 1907 with the family then moving to North Olmsted, Ohio. Powell’s stepmother was abusive and treated her and her sisters with extreme cruelty. At the age of 13, after her stepmother burned the personal diaries and stories she had written, Powell ran away from home to stay with her maternal aunt in Shelby, Ohio. Her aunt was considered to be eccentric and something of a social misfit but proved to be an affirming presence in Dawn’s life.

Powell attended Shelby High School where she served as the editor of the yearbook. In 1918, Powell graduated with a B.A. degree from Lake Erie College in Painesville, Ohio, and wrote for the college newspaper and participated in the theater. After graduation, she spent the summer living on a farm in Pomfret, Connecticut, writing and farming. In September of that same year, she moved to New York City which would be where she would live the rest of her life.

Powell held a variety of jobs while doing freelance writing for magazines and newspapers. On November 20, 1920, she married Joseph Roebuck Gousha, a poet and music critic from Pittsburgh, PA, who would later have a successful career in advertising. The couple had one child with special needs. Coping with the pressures of homemaking, Powell found solace in her writing. During her lifetime, Powell was a prolific writer, producing short stories, articles, book reviews, diary entries, ten plays, and fifteen novels.

Powell’s first novel, Whither, was published in 1925. She was reportedly unhappy with the work, however, and “preferred to let the error be forgotten” and disavowed it. Her second book, She Walks in Beauty (1928), met with some critical acclaim and was much more in keeping with the style she would develop as her writing career progressed. Her books were largely based on her own life in New York City and Greenwich Village. With humor as well as satire, she often criticized the very life she lived – the life of plays, parties, drinking, and affairs. Her novels included The Bride`s House (1929), Dance Night (1930), The Tenth Moon (1932), The Story of a Country Boy (1934), The Happy Island (1938), Turn, Magic Wheel (1936), Angels on Toast (1940), and A Time To Be Born (1942). Powell’s later novels, such as The Locusts Have No King (1948), The Wicked Pavilion (1954) and The Golden Spur (1962) depict what Powell saw as the demise of New York café society. Two of Powell’s plays were successfully produced: Big Night (1933) and Jig Saw: A Comedy (1934). Powell’s writing attracted many influential admirers including critics Edmund Wilson and J.B. Priestley.

Dawn Powell died of cancer on November 14, 1965.

Awards
D.Litt., Lake Erie College, 1960; 1963 National Book Award Finalist for The Golden Spur; Marjorie Peabody award, National Institute of Arts and Letters, 1964.

Books