'The virtues of a writer'

 

“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

 

A prolific satirical novelist and short story writer, Powell also was a popular playwright who frequently set her stories in Midwestern towns or created plots involving the transplantation of Midwesterners to New York City.

 

Born in Mt. Gilead, OH on this date in 1896, Powell is best known for her novels She Walks in Beauty and A Time to be Born.  Over her nearly 50-year writing career, she produced a dozen novels, 10 plays, hundreds of short stories, and an extended diary starting in 1931 until her death from cancer in 1965.  

 

Powell learned to read at age 4 and started writing her diaries and journals at age 6.  It was those journals that fostered her further creativity after an abusive stepmother destroyed all of her writings out of spite.  The then 13-year-old Powell ran away from home and was taken in by a sympathetic aunt who encouraged her to resume writing.  Powell later fictionalized that tale in the novel My Home Is Far Away.

 

While she grew up in Ohio, she spent most of her adult life in New York City where she began her writing in 1918, first as a freelance essayist and then as a short story writer.  Her first novel Whither was published in 1925, but it was her 1936 novel Turn Magic Wheel that marked her turn to writing social satire.

 

“A writer’s business is minding other people’s business,” she said of her writing choice.  “All the vices of the village gossip are the virtues of the writer.”