Dawn Powell and Edmund Wilson enjoyed a long and comfortable friendship from the early 1930s until Powell’s death in 1965. It remains unclear how and when they met —perhaps at the Brooklyn Heights home of Powell’s patron, Margaret De Silver and her anarchist lover, Carlo Tresca; perhaps at what Wilson later referred to as one of Powell’s own “knock down and drag out” parties.

Powell and Wilson shared many qualities —staunch independence, voracious curiosity, catholic and wide-ranging interest in the arts, political skepticism (Wilson’s curious regard for the Soviet Union notwithstanding), and a taste for good food and liquor. Wilson was one of three people to whom Powell wrote her most specifically “literary” letters; the other two recipients were John Dos Passos and her cousin John F. (Jack) Sherman, a businessman and educator in Shelby, Ohio, who became the guardian of her son and, later, the person who provided the familial authority to free the Powell estate from a long limbo.

Wilson admired the wit and spirit of Powell’s novels. But he often found them unfinished—an “all but final drafts,” as he put it. When Wilson wrote a perceptive, affectionate but decidedly mixed review of My Home Is Far Away for The New Yorkerin 1944, the friendship barely survived and Powell believed he had done her “real harm.” Perhaps he thought better of this tender quasi-autobiographical novel of childhood as time went by; in any event, Wilson never reprinted his review in any of his collections,