James Weldon Johnson
American writer and activist
Dawn Powellwas an American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and short story writer. Known for her acid-tongued prose, “her relative obscurity was likely due to a general distaste for her harsh satiric tone.” Nonetheless, Stella Adler and author Clifford Odets appeared in one of her plays.
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About the Dawn Powell
Dawn Powellwas an American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and short story writer. Known for her acid-tongued prose, “her relative obscurity was likely due to a general distaste for her harsh satiric tone.” Nonetheless, Stella Adler and author Clifford Odets appeared in one of her plays. Her work was praised by Robert Benchley in The New Yorker and in 1939 she was signed as a Scribner author where Maxwell Perkins, famous for his work with many of her contemporaries, including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe, became her editor. A 1963 nominee for the National Book Award, she received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Marjorie Peabody Waite Award for lifetime achievement in literature the following year. A friend to many literary and arts figures of her day, including author John Dos Passos, critic Edmund Wilson, and poet E.E. Cummings, Powell’s work received renewed interest after Gore Vidal praised it in a 1987 editorial for The New York Review of Books. Since then, the Library of America has published two collections of her novels.
9 Quotes by Dawn Powell
- 1.
Joe and Jojo and I had lovely day together. I love Joe so much – more and more.
Dawn Powell(1896-1965) American writer
- 2.
Yet better for one of my nature to have it that way than to have life a peaceful, placid flow of quiet contentment. I must have days of rushing excitement.
Dawn Powell(1896-1965) American writer
- 3.
The basis of tragedy is man’s helplessness against disease, war and death; the basis of comedy is man’s helplessness against vanity (the vanity of love, greed, lust, power).
Dawn Powell(1896-1965) American writer
- 4.
A novel is like a gland pill – it nips off the cream of my hysterics and gets them running on track in a book where they belong instead of rioting all over my person.
Dawn Powell(1896-1965) American writer
- 5.
I want so much for my lover. At night when our beds are drawn close together I waken and see his dear yellow head on the pillow – sometimes his arm thrown over on my bed – and I kiss his hand, very softly so that it will not waken him.
Dawn Powell(1896-1965) American writer
- 6.
A capacity for going overboard is a requisite for a full-grown mind.
Dawn Powell(1896-1965) American writer
- 7.
I think we will have a boy baby and he will be born on the 20th of August. Everyone else has a girl baby and at times I don’t believe I should mind having a little Phyllis Dawn but Dearest wants a boy and I do.
Dawn Powell(1896-1965) American writer
- 8.
Satire is people as they are; romanticism, people as they would like to be; realism, people as they seem with their insides left out.
Dawn Powell(1896-1965) American writer
- 9.
The human comedy is always tragic, but since its ingredients are always the same – dupe, fox, straight, like burlesque skits – the repetition through the ages is comedy.
Dawn Powell(1896-1965) American writer