For decades after her death, Dawn Powell's work was out of print, cherished by a small band of admirers. Only recently has there been renewed awareness of the novelist who was such a vital presence in literary Greenwich Village from the 1920s to the 1960s. With these two volumes, The Library of America presents the best of Powell's quirky, often hilarious, sometimes deeply moving fiction.

Dawn Powell was the tirelessly observant chronicler of two very different worlds: the small-town Ohio of her childhood and the sophisticated Manhattan to which she gravitated. If her Ohio novels are more...

Dawn Powell had a brilliant mind and a keen wit and her humor was never at a finer pitch than in her diaries. And yet her story is a poignant one - a son emotionally and mentally impaired, a household of too much alcohol and never enough money, and an artistic career that, if not a failure, fell far short of the success she craved. All is recorded here - along with working sketches for her novels, and often revealing portraits of her many friends (a literary who's who of her period) - in her always unique style and without self-delusion.

Powell's remarkable Diaries will stand as...