Between the Covers

Unbound. Partially Printed Document Signed twice. Expected cancellations and stamps, none significantly affect the signature, near fine. Check made out to cash on the Manufacturers Trust Company, Signed by Dawn Powell, and additionally endorsed by her on the verso. Powell was a satirical, proto-feminist novelist who has only recently been rediscovered. Gore Vidal, whose critical essay helped restore her fame, called her a better satirist than Twain and said she was "our best comic novelist," and Ernest Hemingway once told her she was his "favorite living novelist" – although she was not averse to poking fun at Hemingway himself, which she did in her novel, *The Wicked Pavilion*. Novelist Lisa Zeidner, in a review of the wonderful Tim Page biography of Powell in *The New York Times Book Review*, said that "she is wittier than Dorothy Parker, dissects the rich better than F. Scott Fitzgerald, is more plaintive than Willa Cather in her evocation of the heartland and has a more supple control of satirical voice than Evelyn Waugh, the writer to whom she's most often compared." Powell was an archetypal free spirit, living much of her life in Greenwich Village, taking – and flaunting – lovers frequently although she was married, and mercilessly skewering the postures and foibles of an array of New York types, from bohemian artists to wealthy tycoons. Her signature is uncommon.

Item #346166