Between the Covers

Hardcover. First English edition. Corners a little bumped, top stain a little rubbed else very near fine in a nice, near fine dust jacket with some shallow chips and short tears. Inscribed by the author using the entire front fly: "To F. Monaghan, with the laciest of valentine wishes, Dawn Powell. P.S. Is there cause here (in v.1.) for a World's Fair? Or do you feel that it merely deals with Time? On this subject I think you will find it the definitive volume, dealing with the three schools (a) Is Time a pipe? (b) Is Time a 6 o'clock train? (c) Is Time just papa dressed up? Dr. Powell says yes to all these moots pts." Powell has also crossed out the incorrect title of one of her books on the front flap (*The Bride's House*, here rendered by the English publisher as *The Birdie House*).

By consensus the best novel on New York's bohemian life by this satirical, proto-feminist novelist who has only fairly 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 biography of Powell by Tim Page 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. An exceptionally scarce book, especially with such a fulsome, if curious, inscription.

Item #584129