What Dawn Powell lacked that these other American authors had was affection for her characters. But then the malformed plot or the tiresome reappearance of the same personality under different names in many of a novelist’s works-these are faults that can be found aplenty in such canonized writers as, say, Ernest Hemingway. True, it often broke down on the technical side. Her work brimmed with intelligence, honesty, and humor. Scott Fitzgerald, and she avoided Fitzgerald’s self-indulgent and hackneyed romantic situations. She conjured a world of East Coast socialites as engaging as that of F. Here was a writer who could lampoon the bourgeoisie as well as Sinclair Lewis did, and she avoided Lewis’s satirical overkill. Why the re-publication of several of her novels has failed to create a lasting commotion is a question that is worth pondering. According to Wolcott, Powell, the bard of midcentury Greenwich Village, was supposed to be the literary comeback story of the 1990s. James Wolcott’s optimistic pronouncement three years ago that “the Dawn Powell boom is about to be heard again” has been followed by silence.
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