Faculty Spotlight: Bohemia Is An Imaginary City — Jude Webre on Dawn Powell, the Lady Wit, and the American Mid-Century

In this episode of Faculty Spotlight, hosts Mark DeLucas and Lauren K. Wolfe sit down with Jude Webre, cultural historian and practicing musician, to discuss the life and legacy of Dawn Powell, the urbane, acerbic, and woefully undercelebrated “lady wit” of Greenwich Village in its mid-century heyday. Attracted, as many of her generation were, by the allure of bohemia, its promise of liberation and self-realization, Powell exchanged her native midwest environs for an artist’s life in the city. Known, if not unremittingly beloved, by nearly all the literary lights of 1940s New York City—Edmund Wilson, Ernest Hemingway, Diana Trilling, Dorothy Parker, John Dos Passos, e.e. Cummings, and Jean Stafford to name just a few—it is hard to reconcile Powell’s social acumen, bracing wit, and the vitality of her literary output with the obscurity into which her life’s work has fallen in the six decades since her burial in a pauper’s grave. What were the manners, mores, and moods of mid-20th-century American bohemia? And how did Powell both share in and depart from them, both capture and censure them? What is it to follow a moral judgment and an aesthetic conviction, be they ever so slightly out of step with prevailing tastes? And what, finally, accounts for lasting literary fame?

The Podcast for Social Research is produced by Ryan Lentini.

From Plato to quantum physics, Walter Benjamin to experimental poetry, Frantz Fanon to the history of political radicalism, The Podcast for Social Research is a crucial part of our mission to forge new, organic paths for intellectual work in the twenty-first century: an ongoing, interdisciplinary series featuring members of the Institute, and occasional guests, conversing about a wide variety of intellectual issues, some perennial, some newly pressing. Each episode centers on a different topic and is accompanied by a bibliography of annotations and citations that encourages further curiosity and underscores the conversation’s place in a larger web of cultural conversations.

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