Her writing was admired by Hemingway. Then her books — and body — disappeared
Dawn Powell infiltrated the writing world by hanging out in bars and taverns around New York's Greenwich Village in the 1920s. What happened after she died didn't go according to script.
This is the third story in The Unmarked Graveyard: Stories from Hart Island series from Radio Diaries. You can listen to the next installment on All Things Considered next Monday, and read and listen to previous stories in the series here.
Dawn Powell infiltrated the writing world by hanging out in bars and taverns around New York's Greenwich Village in the 1920s, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Edmund Wilson.
"She came from nowhere, she was no one," writer Fran Lebowitz told Radio Diaries.
But Powell had a voice. She had style. And she rose from obscurity by turning her gaze on the city of New York itself and its cast of characters. Over the coming decades,
