Sunday Read: Despite a Diamond-Sharp Wit, Dawn Powell’s Diaries Remain Unsold
The novelist Dawn Powell has been described as a social satirist with a diamond-sharp eye for detail, yet very little of her writing remains in print, and even the imagined bidding war for her private diaries did not happen. Her biographer Tim Page organised the auction at which the 43 hand-written diaries he owns did not fetch the starting price of $500 000. In an interview with the New Yorker, Tim Page stated that he felt Powell was in the same league as Mark Twain. He published The Diaries of Dawn Powell: 1931 – 1965 in 1998.
Described as a “writer’s writer”, and dubbed “an outstanding literary find” by the New York Times, Dawn Powell died in 1965 at the age of 69. Her works include the novels A Time to Be Born and Turn, Magic Wheel, The Locusts Have no King and Angels on Toast. She has been compared to writers such as Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark. Yet even after all Tim Page has invested in Powell, this has not sparked the literary resurgence he hoped for:
At midnight on Sunday, July 15th, the online bidding period for the complete diaries of the novelist Dawn Powell quietly came to an end. There was no buyer. There were no serious bids at all.
Tim Page, Powell’s biographer and the owner of the forty-three handwritten volumes, was anticipating a feeding frenzy for the diaries—when we met at a small café on Mott Street a week before the auction closed, he told me he was expecting “a very busy Sunday”—even with the outsized starting price of five hundred thousand dollars. “Half a million dollars won’t buy you a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan,” he said, sipping a Peroni. “But here is this unique work of gossip, of literary history. These are some of the great diaries of New York. The only other satirist in her league is Mark Twain. I don’t like using gender labels, but I really do think Powell is our finest woman writer. You can’t easily put a price on that.”
Book details
- A Time to be Born by Dawn Powell
EAN: 9781883642419
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- Turn, Magic Wheel by Dawn Powell
EAN: 9781883642723
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- Angels on Toast by Dawn Powell
EAN: 9781883642402
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- The Locusts Have No King by Dawn Powell
EAN: 978883642426
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- The Diaries of Dawn Powell by Dawn Powell, Tim Page
EAN: 9781883642259
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Apr
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