Selected Letters of Dawn Powell

A posthumous triumph, these letters are in many ways the perfect record of a difficult life lived with pluck, intelligence and verve. Powell (1896-1965) spent much of her youth shipped from relative to relative in small Ohio towns after the death of her own mother from a botched abortion. she worked and borrowed her way through a small women's school in Ohio, then arrived in New York's Greenwich Village in 1918. There she became involved in left-leaning causes and met Joseph Gousha, her future husband (later an advertising executive). Their marriage, which lasted until his death in 1962, withstood a series of catastrophes, periods of separation and love affairs. Both Powell and Gousha struggled with alcoholism; their only child, Joseph Jr. (Jojo), born in 1921, suffered from birth from what may have been autism or a combination of cerebral palsy and schizophrenia, and spent most of his life in state institutions; Powell survived a long battle with misdiagnosed cancer; and the family was perpetually short of money. Powell's wonderful satires of New York life (Turn, Magic Wheel; A Time to Be Born; etc.) never made her famous. But her letters (to Gousha, family in Ohio and friends like John Dos Passos, Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Lowry, Gerald and Sara Murphy, benefactress Margaret De Silver and editor Maxwell Perkins) record a sense of humor, a political acuity and a down-to-earth genius for friendship, love and getting by that is nothing less than invigorating. The great flaw of this volume is that there isn't more of it (all but one of the thousands of letters that Powell wrote to Jojo have been lost). What letters we have may win Powell even deeper admiration than The Diaries of Dawn Powell, edited by Page, or his Dawn Powell: A Biography. (Oct.)