Dawn Powell should very decidedly not be in my 'lost in the stacks' posts. At the time of her death in 1965 most of her work was out of print and it was only through the attention of Tim Page and Gore Vidal that her work was reissued. During her lifetime her work was acclaimed, but she never had quite the success of her more famous contemporaries despite being well regarded by the likes of John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway. She seems always to have been on the cusp of something greater, but never quite pushed over the edge into fame.
I think many people who read her now, read her and love her and appreciate her work but she seems to me to be a still somewhat neglected author. I rarely see her name bandied about the blogosphere (my corner of it anyway), which is why I chose her as my lost in the stacks author. My library has several of her books, but I think she's not circulated as often as she could and should be, so I've brought home Sunday, Monday, and Always, which contains the original eighteen stories that appeared in the collection during Powell's life and an additional four in the reissue.
She wrote over a hundred short stories, which were printed in magazines such as The New Yorker, Mademoiselle, Story and the Saturday Evening Post. According to the introduction by Tim Page short story-writing came easily to Powell, though not naturally.
"In all her work, she fought off a tendency to overwrite, and she seems to have found this clipped, tautly controlled genre restrictive. After all, much of her best writing always went into inspired digressions from her plots and such method was not suited to the traditional short-story form, which has room for few, if any, meanderings."
I love short stories (something you wouldn't have heard me say even five years ago), though I don't read nearly enough of them. Page writes that there was a time when short story-writing was a lucrative business (think F. Scott Fitzgerald or Ernest Hemingway), though not so much anymore it seems which is a real pity. For Powell it was a way to pay the bills while she worked on her novels. Sunday, Monday, and Always was published in 1952 and here's a little of what the New York Times had to say about it:
"A collection of short stories, her first, by the author of The Locusts Have No King is likely to be something of a reading event. And so it is, it must be wryly noted, for these unusual stories, some of them no more than vignettes, reveal in Miss Powell the kind of demure and deceitful authority that, for example, Jane Austen knew a thing or two about. The female writer, no doubt of it, is the deadlier of the species. Our own time has produced several specimens, notably Dorothy Parker. Miss Powell, of these, is not to be outranked; her observation is merciless, her style a marvel of economy, her pen double-edged."
The review goes on to say:
"...the savageness of her portrait is always balanced by the implication that the likeness is from life, and what a pity it is that life can be so dreadful. It is one of Miss Powell's triumphs that, somehow, unobtrusively, the warmth of her pity comes through."
I want to read every book I bring home from the library and share here on Fridays, but I can never quite manage it. I do want to read these stories, however. Since I have finished Daphne du Maurier's Early Stories, I can very conveniently pick this one up and read or two a day. Dawn Powell is not a new to me author, I wrote about her here and here, and now I am looking forward to finally revisiting her work. She's well worth seeking out in a bookstore or your own local library.