Answer the following about the career of novelist Dawn Powell, whom Fran Lebowitz called “The Best American Writer You’ve Never Heard Of,” for 10 points each.
[10m] Powell satirized New York bohemians in a novel titled for some of these animals that “have no king.” At the end of a novel partly titled for one of these animals, the painter Tod Hackett witnesses a riot outside an LA theatre.
ANSWER: locusts [accept The Locusts Have No King or The Day of the Locust (by Nathanael West)]
[10e] The Atlantic’s 2024 list of the Great American Novels included Powell’s A Time to Be Born, which is based on her move from this state to New York. Sherwood Anderson set a collection in this state’s town of Winesburg.
ANSWER: Ohio [or OH]
[10h] This friend of Powell’s helped re-popularize her via a 1987 NYRB essay. In a novel by this author, a lover of Parker Tyler’s film criticism moves to LA and teaches at an acting school after having a vaginoplasty.
ANSWER: Gore Vidal [or Eugene Luther Gore Vidal] (The novel is Myra Breckinridge.)
<TM, American Literature>