Between the Covers

Hardcover. First edition. Spine lettering a bit tarnished, a little rubbing on board, very good or better in very good dust jacket with some shallow chips. Inscribed by Powell to her lifelong friend, the French scholar and writer Jacques LeClercq: "To Jacques LeClercq who got me published and now wants to take it all back. Love, Dawn. 9 East Tenth St. N.Y."

LeClercq was a noted translator of Rabelais and Dumas, as well as a number of modern French texts, who moved in the same Greenwich Village circle as Powell and appears frequently in her diaries over a period of forty years. LeClercq was also the Dedicatee of Powell's novel, *The Story of a Country Boy*. From the estate of his daughter, the polio-stricken prima ballerina Tanaquil LeClercq, the final wife of George Balanchine. A very nice association copy of the author's exceptionally uncommon fifth book, which she had wanted to name *Come Back to Sorrento*, but changed the title at her publisher's insistence.

Powell was a prolific and well-regarded author, but mostly forgotten until a well-deserved revival was prompted by a 1987 reassessment by Gore Vidal in *The New York Review of Books*. For forty years she was a valued jewel of the New York literary world and if you read her books it's easy to see why. Ernest Hemingway once referred to her as his "favorite living novelist". At the time of her death all of her books were out of print, now almost all are back in print, including two collections of her novels published by The Library of America in 2001. Seldom found signed.

Item #584033