Dawn Powell

American novelist and playwright Dawn Powell was born in Mt. GIlead, OH, in 1897. Her mother died when Dawn was a child, and she and her two sisters were sent to live with various relatives while her father traveled out of the area looking for work.

In 1909 her father remarried, gathered the family together and moved to his new wife's farm outside of Cleveland, OH. The children, and especially Dawn, were extremely unhappy there; in addition to the farm being in very isolated country--at 12 Dawn had won a scholarship to high school, but there were no high schools in area for her to attend--her stepmother was a very prim and severe woman with very strict ideas of what young girls should and should not do. When she found a sheaf of stories that Dawn had written, she burned them all as punishment. Infuriated, young Dawn--with 30 cents in her pocket--ran away from home. She traveled to the home of an aunt she liked in Shelby, OH, a more populous area in which she was finally able to attend high school. She became editor of the school newspaper and even worked part-time on the local city newspaper. She eventually attended Lake Erie College in Painesville (OH)--where she and two friends began their own newspaper--and became editor of the college's student magazine.

She graduated in 1918 with a B. A. and traveled to New York City, where she eventually secured work as a publicity agent. She married Joseph Gousha, an advertising man, and they had one son.

She had written a novel, "She Walks in Beauty", in 1924, but it wasn't published until 1928 (after 36 rejections).

She wrote novels, short stories that were published in various magazines; several of her plays were produced on Broadway, and one of them, "Walking Down Broadway", was twice turned into films (Hello, Sister! (1933), The Hoyden (1998)).

Biography in: "American National Biography". Supplement 1, pp. 489-490. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.