Shelby Museum - Authors

Shelby Ohio Authors

DAWN POWELL




Powell began work on two novels, "Come Back to Sorrento", and another she preliminarily titled "Lila". The first was published in 1932 using the title"The Tenth Moon" as the publisher requested. "Lila" would later become"Turn, Magic Wheel".


1932


The Mansfield Journal – August 24, 1932
“Dawn Powell Sends New Copy of 'The Tenth Moon' to Mrs. Steinbruek (sic)

“SHELBY, Aug.24. - Dawn Powell, former local high school student, has just published a new book, 'The Tenth Moon,' according to a copy of it which reached her aunt, Mrs. O. M. Steinbruek (sic), here Monday from New York City. Farrar & Rienhart (sic) are the publishers. The story of the new book is based on the fact that 'certain rare souls have the secret of finding their lives glamorous and themselves magnificent under the most humble of conditions.' It is another story of small town people, her favorite text, and what two of these people discover about what they think are dull lives of a small town.

“ Miss Powell, now the wife of J. R. Gousha, graduated from Shelby high in 1914, went east during the war, and has made her home in New York since then. Other books of hers are 'Dance Night,' 'She Walks in Beauty,' and 'The Bride's House.' She has also written numerous plays, some of which have been heard over the National Broadcasting network. One of her books 'She Walks Down Broadway' was bought by the Fox Film corporation before it was published and is being made into a movie starring James Dunn and Sally Ellers.”






Original Publication 1932 - Farrar & Rinehart, N. Y.



The Daily Globe – August 26, 1932
“Dawn Powell's New Novel Receiving Much Comment

"With great interest Shelby folks have watched the progress made by Dawn Powell who received her schooling at Shelby High and Lake Erie College for Women and was a resident of this city for a number of years. When her books were published folks read them in order, 'She Walks in Beauty,' 'The Bride's House', and 'Dance Night.' She has now added another to this list and friends are now busy reading 'The Tenth Moon'.

"Those who have already completed the contents of the latest fiction were thrilled with the descriptive qualities the authoress has been able to bring out. The novel possesses emotional appeal throughout and her characterization is much appreciated.

"This book points out that certain rare souls have the secret of finding their lives glamorous and themselves magnificent under the most humble conditions. They can translate the surface monotony of their lives into drama richer then reality. She thus puts into the lives of each of her characters a strain of fancy. The entire story keeps alive the charming pretenses on which happiness is based,

"The new book is no doubt one of the best works of the authoress and Shelby folks will again be proud to recall the days when Dawn Powell was just a school girl receiving her education in our own high school. From here she has gone far but not without the good wishes and congratulations of those friends she made in this city."






The Charleston Daily Mail (Charleston, West Virginia) – August 30, 1932

“Dawn Powell writes of small-town folks with a genius that is all her own. She can love them and laugh at them at once. And 'The Tenth Moon' is, I think, her finest book.

“ 'Say what you will,' the carping spinsters of Dell River commented, 'a man has no business talking of the grand opera in New York and his titled friends in Paris, the different names of wine, when he is sitting in a lovely home with mud caked on his old shoes and his trouser cuffs trailing raveled edges.' But Blaine Decker, teacher of music, did talk of vintage wines, and live in dreams of Paris, so successfully that when the embarrassed principal gave him an old coat he convinced himself he did the man a favor in accepting it.

“In all Dell River only Mrs. Benjamin, the cobbler's wife who had once sung for Morim, understood Blaine Decker. She too, lived in a world of dreams. And though the two never so much as held each other's hands, their common faith in dreams bound them close together. Dawn Powell makes those ridiculous people heartbreakingly real, without sugary sentiment or the acid of easy satire. She makes them real, and also Mrs. Benjamin's hard-boiled daughter who scorned dreams and plunged direct for what she wanted. So that in the end Mrs. Benjamin could see that Helen would succeed precisely because she had no respect for the heights, but only for herself. There is a sturdy lyric humor in the book, a flavor that is Dawn Powell's own.”



The Brooklyn Citizen (Brooklyn, New York) - October 5, 1932
“Frustrated Lives
"Dawn Powell Writes a Story of People Who Might Have Been -
A Bit of Lyric Beauty Amongest Complex Situations

" 'TENTH MOON', By Dawn Powell, New York , Farrar & Rinehart - $2.00
Reviewed by PATRICIA MANN

"Dell River - a community of frustrated souls - but souls so thin and brittle that they crack before the Eye. They fade away imperceptibly to mere pen scratches as the book reaches its close. Miss Powell has taken a flimsy psychological characteristic of common-place people and attempted to weave around them a tender living story. All her people are pathetic might-have-beens: Connie, a might-have-been singer; Blaine, a might-have-been famous pianist, Louisa, a might-have-been famous poet; Laurie, a might-have-been famous beauty - with the exception of red-face; Mrs. Busch, who takes in washing as a hobby and adores her beautiful idiot daughter.

"Connie Benjamin-- the village shoemaker's wife--made a blunder on the verge of an operatic career--and continued blunderingly through her married life. So (w)rapped up is she in compensating the lack of real success by dream success, that no chink of feeling escapes for either her husband or children. Into her life comes the new music teacher, Blaine Decker, who once spent a summer in Paris studying piano. Between them they construct a new life for each other, flattering each other's superior vision of themselves, spending the moments with each other saying 'bon mots' they had rehearsed before. They are filled with that purring contentment of those whose egos have been stroked the right way. Louisa Murrell--the sensitive English teacher--seems to be there for the sole purpose of a shining deflector for them--they positively glow with but ill-concealed genius (in their own eyes) whenever she joins them. Louisa helps them keep their subtle agreement, based on mutual dissatisfaction and inability to cope with reality.

"One's actual 'feeling' for any one character is so rare and fleeting that one wonders if Miss Powell's brain children didn't somehow fall short of her own expectations. There is potential strength, beauty, and pathos in every incident in the book--but it is buried under inane gestures, futile words and complex situations where emotions fluctuate unreasonably.

"The book is not without one highlight, which is a bit of a lyrical beauty. Mimi, the plain daughter of Connie, has heard that to bathe in May dew will make her beautiful--at least pretty. Connie awakes and steals out with her. After a while they sit down on a mossy bank near the brook. Connie is so filled with rapture over the aching beauty of the Dawn, that she sings in ecstasy. The description is painted with the delicate colors of the rising morn, with the charm that Miss Powell has occasionally evinced in her other books.

"If Miss Powell in her future works, were to turn the potentialities she possesses into actualities, she would become a more significant writer."





Plattsburg Leader (Plattsburg, Missouri) - November 4, 1932
“ 'THE TENTH MOON'
by Dawn Powell,----Farrar and Rinehart, 9 E. 41st St., New York

"Life for many folks is monotonously complacent--reality alone furnishing what little fascination can be ferreted out. But for Connie Benjamin, the wife of the village cobbler, and for Blaine Decker, the high school music teacher, dreams of their own unrealized careers and ambitions colored and made glamorous uneventful days--dreams which became so vivid that the dreamers themselves almost believed them to be reality. Dell River, the dull, eventless little town could not subdue rare souls like these. In a tender appealing manner, Miss Powell has presented a beautiful story. The plot is simple, unpretentious, but her style reveals the world of feeling and emotion. She does not describe the mental reaction in her characters but presents it to us without comment. It is a part of the complete description of her characters--an attribute of her superb apperception.

"The story flows along smoothly and graciously. '. . . there never is any real choice about your life . . . just the one door open to you always . . . You can't say you're sorry . . . ', and thus Connie Benjamin accepts her past and looks back upon lost opportunities as colors with which to decorate and be-jewel an otherwise dull life. From the concert career which was to be hers and the brilliant musical future which was to have been Blaine Deckers' a friendship -- more binding than love--develops. Their faith in each other's talents, and the conviction of superiority each finds in the other obliviate tedious tasks of caring for a home, a too practical husband, two daughters, and the trials encountered in a small high school. Their lives, both pathetic and gay, are converted into a brilliant, illuminating drama richer than reality, even in the final scene when death reveals its power--even over a dream."



Work in Progress - stop back.


1933


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