A Dawn Powelled Pulitzer Prize Winner

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Margo Jefferson receives her 1995 Pulitzer Prize
from Columbia UniversityPresident George Rupp.

She won the category of "Criticism."

Ms. Jefferson's award-winning essays appeared
in the New York Times.

In one of the esays, Margo had this to say about
Dawn Powell: Where have you been all our lives?




CHARACTERS 'LABORING TO MALADJUST'

Margo Jefferson  
October 19, 1994


So, we say to ourselves, another nearly forgotten writer exhumed, cleaned up, reissued and put on display with endorsements from Edmund Wilson, Diana Trilling and Gore Vidal. Then a friend says no, she's terrific, read her, and we do, and here it is, that infinitely distinguished thing, a dead writer so full of charm and derring-do that literature's canon makers should sit back, smile and say, Dawn Powell, where have you been all our lives?

"Dawn Powell at Her Best" is edited by Tim Page, the chief music critic for Newsday, who is writing her biography. It contains two novels, eight stories and a short, lovely piece about fleeing Ohio ("We were on a farm with a new stepmother who didn't know what to do with us so she put us outdoors after breakfast and locked all the doors") and going to New York to write and live as she wanted to. Born in 1897, she moved to New York in 1917 and stayed there until she died in 1965.

The entire Pulitzer Prize winning essay is here.

The next  Powell Page is there.  

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