'The Unmarked Graveyard' digs into the mysteries surrounding author Dawn Powell

: [POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that today, Dawn Powell's son would be diagnosed as having cerebral palsy and schizophrenia. Per Powell's biographer, Tim Page, today, Dawn Powell's son would actually be diagnosed as autistic.]

SCOTT DETROW, HOST:

Now let's go to Hart Island, located off the Bronx in New York City. It's America's largest public cemetery. More than a million people have been buried there since 1869. Often, those bodies went unclaimed or were unidentified. Today we continue a series from Radio Diaries called The Unmarked Graveyard. Each story untangles the mysteries of people buried on Hart Island, as told by the people they left behind.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Neil Harris (ph) was last seen in Inwood, N.Y., on December 12...

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: So many questions, man, so many questions.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: You can't help but wonder what her life has been.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: I never went back, and I never looked for them again.

DETROW: On Hart Island, there are no headstones or plaques, just white posts with numbers on them. And buried in one of those graves is a woman who Ernest Hemingway once called his favorite living writer. Today, from Radio Diaries, the story of how a well-known writer's books and body disappeared.

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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: Mutual presents...

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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: Now, we'd like you to meet our guest authors for tonight. The playwright, novelist and author of Happy Island, Ms. Dawn Powell.

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TIM PAGE: Dawn Powell looked on society, and she wrote it up. She made fun of millionaires and communists. She was a very smart, tough, sarcastic woman who put all of that into her books.

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DAWN POWELL: When they got back there, you see, he had opened up, and there was a tea room. And it was dinnertime. And they had to have their regular blue plate.

(LAUGHTER)

FRAN LEBOWITZ: She was a truth teller. Women who pointed things out, women who observed things, women who told the truth - those kind of women scare men.

PAGE: I do think there will come a time when people will realize that she's one of America's greatest writers.

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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: Well, Ms. Powell, thank you for joining us this evening.

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PAGE: But after she died, Dawn Powell was really kind of forgotten.

VICKY: My name is Vicky (ph), and Dawn Powell is my great aunt. When I was a teenager, I read "My Home Is Far Away," which is about her childhood growing up in Mount Gilead, Ohio. When she was 7 years old, her mother died, and she had to live with a stepmother who was very unkind. Dawn had a secret hiding place for her stories that she wrote, and the stepmother burned her stories. So Dawn went to college and then moved to New York and really never came back.

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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: Greenwich Village is recognized as being the center of art and letters in America.

PAGE: Dawn Powell arrived in Greenwich Village in 1918. My name is Tim Page, and I wrote Dawn Powell a biography.

LEBOWITZ: My name is Fran Lebowitz. I'm a writer. You know, she came from nowhere. She was no one. All right. But she knew that she was smart enough, good enough to be very good in New York, which is the most competitive place in the world.

PAGE: She met people like Dorothy Parker and Fitzgerald. She knew all of the famous writers. She was very funny, and people liked that. And she liked to drink, so she was out at taverns a lot of the evening, sleeping around and not caring what other people thought.

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UNIDENTIFIED VOICE ACTOR #1: (As Dawn Powell) Had best party, had new dress and was very drunk. Met Floyd Dell at dinner.

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PAGE: She started keeping a diary. It touches on her friends. It touches on sites she saw in New York. And the whole city comes alive.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE ACTOR #1: (As Dawn Powell) I contend that a writer's business is minding other people's business.

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PAGE: She wrote for The New Yorker and places like the Saturday Review and Esquire magazine. And she wrote for any place that would pay her. But then she started writing novels about New York, funny books.

LEBOWITZ: She had contempt for the rich. She had contempt for any kind of falsity.

PAGE: She's a satirist. She basically thought human beings were silly and frivolous, but she loved them, you know.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE ACTOR #1: (As Dawn Powell) Nowadays, men want a woman to work, but not to be too good at her job. Why couldn't the rich mind their own business, invite each other to dinner, and feast on each other's fruity conversation? Men use the term career woman to indicate a girl who made more than he did, and who was unforgivably good at her job when he was not able to hold one.

LEBOWITZ: Does that seem to you like it couldn't have been written yesterday? Dawn Powell was incredibly observant. That is the thing that she succeeded at.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE ACTOR #1: (As Dawn Powell) By this time next year, I will have a fortune, have cut the throats of my best friends, have kicked my inferiors in the pants and to be loved and respected by all. Perhaps I will be considered a real artist, a positive dreamer, a genius.

PAGE: Dawn Powell's personal life was not easy. She had one child. Today, he would be diagnosed as autistic. He got sent to mental hospitals and nursing homes.

VICKY: That was always a sadness, overall sadness, that it was her only son and he needed a lot of care.

PAGE: She saw life as a tough business, as a very tough business. All the very famous women writers were usually ending their stories with a man and a woman falling in love and living happily thereafter. Dawn had seen enough of life to realize, well, sometimes that's the case, but it's not what usually happens in the world. And so that's the way she wrote.

LEBOWITZ: But that is not appealing to many people, especially to the critics. Reviewers were really powerful, but she was not beloved by many people in that world like Edmund Wilson, a man, by the way, with the nickname Bunny.

POWELL: (As Dawn Powell) If Bunny's review had been offset by a powerful, favorable one, the book would have gotten off. It is very discouraging to have someone who actually has told me I'm equal to Sinclair Lewis at his best do me so much genuine damage. I have enough damage done me already, merely by the desire to write and my pleasure in people and strange angles of life.

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PAGE: Her last novel, "The Golden Spur," was published in 1962. But at this point, she was really starting to get sick.

VICKY: We knew that Dawn was not doing well health wise. My grandmother, Phyllis (ph), told me that she had trouble eating, and she was losing a lot of weight.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE ACTOR #1: (As Dawn Powell) Letter to Phyllis Powell, March 14, 1964. Dear Phyllis, I am really fascinated by the aging process, even if the victim is me. Somebody told me humans age like trees. Almost overnight, teeth and hair and all age, and you are 50. Then, with a big clank like a rusty chain, you are 60, and so on. Anyway, they tell me trees do this, too. The ring of the age cycle on the trunk shows up the same way - suddenly. Love, Dawn.

VICKY: We went to New York City and visited her. It was in 1964, and I was in high school then. I had a feeling my grandmother thought she'd never see her again after that visit, which is pretty much what happened.

PAGE: It was intestinal cancer. She just shrunk down to less than a hundred pounds. She died in Saint Luke's Hospital November 14, 1965. After she died, a lot of her books went out of print, and so she was pretty much forgotten. She was so unknown that you would go into a bookstore and you'd ask, do you have any Dawn Powell, and they said, I've never even heard of Donald Powell. She was just kind of lost. But then, in 1987, Gore Vidal published an article about her in the New York Review of Books.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE ACTOR #2: (As Gore Vidal) In her lifetime, Powell should have been as widely read as, say, Hemingway or the early Fitzgerald. The fact is that Americans have never been able to deal with wit. Wit deployed by a woman is a brutal assault upon nature, that is, man.

PAGE: When Gore wrote this article, a lot of people got interested.

LEBOWITZ: I never heard of her until Gore wrote that piece, and I bought whatever books there were. And I kept telling people, these - you have to read this. Your life will be better for reading this.

PAGE: The last years of her life, Dawn wanted her body donated to science, so it was claimed by Cornell Medical Center. Five years after she died, the hospital had a box of some of her remains left, and they talked to her executor, and she wrote back something saying we do not wish to claim this. You can do with it what you want. So in any event, in 1970, whatever was left of Dawn was buried out in Hart Island. The family knew nothing about this.

VICKY: My mom told me it was a potter's field, and it was just a place where people are buried who didn't have any money or no family to take care of them. My grandparents would have certainly found a better resting place for her than where she was buried.

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PAGE: She is, for better or worse, on Hart Island forever.

LEBOWITZ: There are people who say, I want this when I die. This is where I want to be buried. This is the kind of gravestone I want. I think Dawn Powell was too smart and realistic to care about this. I don't think she would have cared - I just don't.

PAGE: I mean, in a weird way, she might have been pleased in a funny way that the city of New York paid for her burial. She loved New York. She told the truth about New York, and I'm not sure she'd want to be anywhere else.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE ACTOR #1: (As Dawn Powell) There is really one city for everyone, just as there is one major love. New York is my city, because I have an investment I can always draw on - a bottomless investment of building up an idea of New York. So no matter what happens here, I have the rock of my dreams of it that nothing can destroy.

DETROW: Many of Dawn Powell's books are now back in print, and you could say she's even got a bit of a cult following. Powell got a shout-out on the "Gilmore Girls" TV show a few years ago, and several people have tried turning her books into films. The story was produced by Micah Hazel and the team at Radio Diaries. You can hear more stories from The Unmarked Graveyard series on the Radio Diaries podcast.

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