From Library Journal
Powell is definitely the comeback kid. Her novels were unavailable for years, but now every time one goes out of print, another publisher picks it up for reissue. This set runs the gamut of her career, with Come Back to Sorrento (originally published as The Tenth Moon) representing an early release (1932) and The Golden Spur, her last (LJ 9/15/62). The autobiographical Come Back is the third of Powell's "Ohio Novels" about small-town life, while Spur portrays the tainted, wise-cracking New Yorkers for whom she is known.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From the Inside Flap
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED as The Tenth Moon, Come Back to Sorrento is the second of Powell’s "Ohio novels" to be re-issued in paperback. Here Powell turns her attention to those certain rare souls who have the secret of finding their lives glamorous and themselves magnificent under the most humble conditions. Connie Benjamin, the village shoemaker’s wife, always wanted an operatic career. Blaine Decker, the new high school music teacher, once spent time abroad studying piano. The two are drawn together into a powerful friendship of dependence, each sustaining the other and translating the surface monotony of their lives into drama richer than reality.


About the Author
DAWN POWELL, who died in 1965, was the author of fifteen novels.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Dawn Powell turns her attention to those certain rare souls who have the secret of finding their lives glamorous and themselves magnificent under the most humble conditions. Connie Benjamin, the village shoemaker's wife, was raised in a wealthy household and had pretensions toward an operatic career. Blaine Decker, the new high school music teacher, is a homosexual in a closeted era who once spent time abroad studying piano. The two are drawn together into a powerful friendship of dependence, each sustaining the other in a conviction of superiority and translating the surface monotony of their lives into a drama richer than reality.

SYNOPSIS

Page's biography is a thoughtful examination of both the author's life and work, exploring the central mystery of her literary career -- how an author so gifted could have been so easily forgotten. Page follows Powell from her turbulent, painful childhood through her years of growth and exploration in college to her true home, New York. In New York, Powell was at the center of a literary circle every bit as important as that surrounding Dorothy Parker; comparisons were often made between the two women, comparisons that made Powell bristle with resentment. In fact, Powell's circle included the more lasting literary lights: Edmund Wilson, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Malcolm Cowley, and Djuna Barnes.

More importantly, Powell's writing shows greater depth and broader range than does Parker's; her early works, thought of as the "Ohio novels," are as moving and vivid as any of the novels of Sherwood Anderson or Willa Cather, and the later New York novels display a satiric skill surpassing that of Truman Capote and rivaling that of Evelyn Waugh. In Dance Night, for instance, Powell depicts the painfully constrained lives of the citizens of a small working-class Ohio town on the verge of a boom, following Morry Abbott and his mother as each seeks a means of escape.

Turn, Magic Wheel, the first of the New York novels, introduces Dennis Orphen, a minor writer and not-so-minor cad, a character who will return in much of Powell's later work. Orphen has, at the novel's opening, just published his latest book, which he is shocked to discover he has based on -- or copied from -- the life of his friend Effie Callingham. Powell found herself at the center of just such a controversy with the publication in 1942 of /booksearch/isbninquiry.asp?&isbn=1883642418"> A Time To Be Born. She insisted quite vehemently that her central character was not based on Clare Booth Luce, until she later found a note she'd written to herself some years earlier, which said "Why not do novel on Clare Luce?" The New York novels are in fact replete with schemers and seducers, cheerfully amoral city dwellers who embody urban speed, glamour, and the drive to get ahead. As Tim Page points out, "Her characters are rarely admirable but they are usually eminently likeable, in their own deluded and floundering ways."

Powell was awarded the Margaret Peabody Waite Award for lifelong achievement in literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters shortly before her death. Now, with Page's biography, which is not only a retelling of the author's life but also an incisive critical examination of her work, we can at last appreciate the depth of that achievement and celebrate the return of Dawn Powell to her rightful place in the American literary landscape

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal