The Auction of Dawn Powell's Diaries

Dawn Powell
(photo from Library of America)

Dawn Powell was an American writer whose work few people have read. I am among the many who have never started or finished a Powell novel. However, her name would occasionally occur in essays on American writers that got my attention. One of them was by Gore Vidal. My trust in his literary taste and admiration for his prose led me to read his essay about Powell's life and work. I admit I kept reading Vidal and never got around to exploring Powell's oeuvre. Others have, including current keeper of the Powell flame, author and critic Tim Page.

Today's online editions of The New York Times includes a piece about Page's attempted Internet auction of Powell's diaries. The piece notes the melancholy and praiseworthy aspects of this episode. Page became aware of Powell's output from an Edmund Wilson review, which inspired him resuscitate interest in her work. Page admirably succeeded in this enterprise, to the extent that he edited and annotated the two-volume Library of America reprint of Powell's writing.

However, according to the Times story, the Internet auction has not yet met Page's expectations. His financial valuation of the Powell manuscript has apparently not been shared by the institutions and private collectors who would be likely bidders. Viral marketing, on which Page assumed this small, specialist world would learn of the auction, did not generate sufficient interest on its own merits. Powell's name, while known within the literary world, just didn't have the clout.

Powell's work, if one is to believe Page, Vidal, and Wilson, is worthy of a permanent place in America's literary heritage. Yet, despite those efforts, destiny may consign Powell a fate more merciless than her final interment in a potter's field (yes, that really did happen) would suggest. Powell's original diaries may very well end up buried in some academic library, while her prose slowly disappears from our collective cultural memory. The erratic, remorseless force known as "the judgement of history" offers little consolation for that unjust vanishing.