Turn, Magic Wheel

London: Constable, 1936. First English edition. Boards a bit soiled, else a nice, very good or better copy in poor dustwrapper with large chips missing from the front and back panels. Inscribed by the author: "To Genevieve Norwood with best wishes, Dawn Powell." By consensus the best novel on New York's bohemian life by this satirical, proto-feminist novelist who has only fairly recently been rediscovered. Gore Vidal, whose critical essay helped restore her fame, called her a better satirist than Twain and said she was "our best comic novelist," and Ernest Hemingway once told her she was his "favorite living novelist" -- although she was not averse to poking fun at Hemingway himself, which she did in her novel, The Wicked Pavilion. Novelist Lisa Zeidner, in a review of the biography of Powell by Tim Page in The New York Times Book Review, said that "she is wittier than Dorothy Parker, dissects the rich better than F. Scott Fitzgerald, is more plaintive than Willa Cather in her evocation of the heartland and has a more supple control of satirical voice than Evelyn Waugh, the writer to whom she's most often compared." Powell was an archetypal free spirit, living much of her life in Greenwich Village, taking -- and flaunting -- lovers frequently (although she was married), and mercilessly skewering the postures and foibles of an array of New York types, from bohemian artists to wealthy tycoons. An exceptionally scarce book, especially signed. (Inventory #: 78887)