The Story of a Country Boy

New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1934. Hardcover. Near Fine. First edition. Orange cloth gilt. Boards a trifle soiled, near fine without dustwrapper. A novel about the evolution of a "self-made man" from a humble country bumpkin to a pretentious captain of industry, by this satirical, proto-feminist novelist who has recently been rediscovered. Basis for the 1935 film *Man of Iron* directed by William C. McGann, and featuring Barton MacLane and Mary Astor. 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 a fairly recent biography of Powell 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.