Dickinson, Donald C., W. David Laird and Margaret F. Maxwell. From the Southwest: a Gathering in Honor of Lawrence Clark Powell. Flagstaff: Northland Press, 1976.
Essays published on the occasion of Powell’s seventieth birthday. Of special interest is a series of 1936 letters between LCP and his friend Elston Harrison, written when Powell worked for Los Angeles rare book dealer Jake Zeitlin and just prior to his enrollment in the School of Librarianship at UC Berkeley. “What a great bookseller – or possibly con artist—Lawrence Clark Powell would have made” wrote Zeitlin.
Dutton, Davis and Judy Dutton. Tales of Monterey. New York: Ballantine Book, 1974.
General anthology selected with commentary and notes by the Duttons. Includes an entry on Robinson Jeffers by Powell and one of Powell’s favorite sections from Henry Miller’s book, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch.
Haslam, Gerald W. Lawrence Clark Powell. Boise: Boise State University, 1992.
A brief, yet surprisingly comprehensive biographical and critical examination of Powell as a western author of belles-lettres. “Passion is the trait that most marks the varied careers of Lawrence Clark Powell.”
Harlow, Neal. Lawrence Clark Powell. Chicago: The American Library Assoc., 1954.
While Powell was never president of the American Library Association, he served on the ALA Council and was twice a keynote speaker at their annual conference. He received the first ALA Clarence Day award in 1960 in recognition of his encouragement of books and reading, along with an honorary life membership in ALA. LCP was active in the Association of Research Libraries, serving on the board and as Chair, and enjoyed his activity in the Bibliographic Society of America, where he served as Western president. He served as president of the California Library Association in 1950, and he was a fellow of the California Historical Society.
The writer of this piece, Neal Harlow, was the first UCLA Head of Special Collections under Powell, and was in charge of planning for the post-war east wing addition to what is now the Powell Library. Powell used his connections as the son of a prominent citrus industry manager to gain legislative funding for the project.
Jackson, John B. “Personalities in U.C.L.A. History: Lawrence Clark Powell.” The U.C.L.A. Magazine December 1944: 5+
Powell was in his first year as University Librarian when these two articles were published. He had served as a junior librarian since 1936. His scholarly bibliographic articles and books, and his affable and effective style caught the attention of UC President Robert Sproul, as well as a number of influential faculty members.
Powell, G. Harold. Cooperation in Agriculture. New York: Macmillan, 1913.
Lawrence Clark Powell’s father was a ranking pomologist in the citrus division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture under President Herbert Hoover. The third of three sons, LCP was born in Washington D.C. in 1906. Each summer they journeyed to Riverside, California, where his father was investigating decay of citrus fruit in transit. As a result of this work, he became general manager of the California Fruit Growers exchange, the Sunkist cooperative, and they moved to South Pasadena. This book written by him was a standard text for many years.G. Harold was often on the road, and died of a heart attack at the age of 50, when LCP was fifteen years old. Powell wrote that the loss marked him for life.
Powell, G. Harold. “The Italian Lemon Industry.” Pamphlets on Lemons, 1899-1920. Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1909.
Powell, G. Harold. Letters from the Orange Empire. Los Angeles:Historical Society of Southern California,
1990.
Published in a limited edition when Lawrence Clark Powell was 84, these personal letters from his father to his mother Gertrude offer an intimate portrait of the life of a busy citrus industry manager at the turn of the century.
Powell, Lawrence Clark. The Alchemy of Books, and Other Essays and Addresses on Books and Writers. Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie Press, 1954.
Early essays on—what else?—Powell, books and libraries. A good read!
Powell, Lawrence Clark. Aldous Huxley, 1894-1963. Addresses at a Memorial Meeting held in the School of Library Service, February 27, 1964. Los Angeles: University of California, 1964.
Powell’s friendship with Huxley began in 1937 when Huxley wrote the introduction to the catalog of an exhibit of D.H. Lawrence manuscripts, a project Powell did for the Los Angeles Public Library, when he worked there part-time before he came to UCLA. Huxley, a close friend and confident of Lawrence, also opened the exhibit with a talk. At UCLA, as a junior librarian, Powell prepared about fifty exhibits for the Library rotunda, working mostly on weekends since he was given no release time from his other duties.
In the early 1960’s, Huxley’s Hollywood Hills home burned, destroying papers and manuscripts meant for UCLA. Fortunately, many Huxley items were bequeathed to the Library by bookseller Jake Zeitlin—once Powell’s employer and life long friend.
Powell, Lawrence Clark. Arizona: a Bicentennial History. New York: Norton, 1976.
Written as part of a series funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, with assistance of two Arizona scholars, among others: anthropologist Bernard “Bunny” Fontana and historian Bert Fireman. To the latter, Powell said “You should be writing it, you are a better historian.” True,” admitted Fireman, “but you are a better writer.”
Powell, Lawrence Clark. The Blue Train. Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1977.
When Powell retired in 1966, he intended to write more books, both fiction and fact. Written in 1941, The Blue Train is to some degree autobiographical—an erotic collection of five vignettes set in Europe. Despite encouragement by his Beverly Glen neighbor Henry Miller and others, it was rejected by several publishers until it was published in 1977 by the Capra Press.
Miller, who provided the Afterward, wrote in a letter: “Anyway, pay no attention to negative criticism, even if from people you believe in. Just believe in yourself—completely. Avanti! Fuck the critics, editors and their ilk. I do remember the warm sensuous feel of your book. You’ll never lose that. And if I may say so, don’t go for perfection. Turn one out after another—time is short. You have dozens of books in you.”
Powell, Lawrence Clark. Bookman’s Progress. Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie Press, 1968.
Essays about books, scholars, nere-do-wells, writers and the like. A great collection.
From the introduction by Powell’s publisher William Targ: “Knowing and working with Lawrence Clark Powell is a unique experience. He is a renaissance man. His enthusiasms include Mozart, Haydn, sports cars, travel, history, the arts, fine printing, the Southwest; books of every imaginable sort and period, including paperback reprints; rare manuscripts and autograph letters; authors such as D.H. Lawrence, Robinson Jeffers, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Austin Wright, Raymond Chandler, Rabelais, Dobie, Joyce, Steinbeck; his home in Malibu, collectors, libraries and librarians, bookshops and booksellers;--and the good life, meaning really the world of the mind and the heart.”
Powell, Lawrence Clark and John David Marshall, ed. Books are Basic: the Essential Lawrence Clark Powell. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1984.
Editor Marshall collected Powell quotes from his writings for some thirty years. Included are quotations on reading libraries, librarians, librarianship, writers and writing, and insightful words on Lawrence Clark Powell himself.
Powell, Lawrence Clark. Books in My Baggage: Adventures in Reading and Collecting. Cleveland: World Pub. Co., 1960.
A volume of essays listed as number 51 in the 1999 San Francisco Chronicle “Best in the West Top 100 Nonfiction” books.
Powell wrote that his books were good recruiting agents for students to library work, and to UCLA in particular. “A writer has no way of knowing how long his books will be read. That they were read in my time was enough for me.”
Powell, Lawrence Clark. Books: West Southwest; Essays on Writers, Their Books, and Their Land. Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie Press, 1957.
Chosen by the American Institute of Graphic Arts as one of their “Fifty Books of the Year”. Powell’s inspiration for this and similar volumes on the Southwest was writer J. Frank Dobie, whom he called the “finest Southwesterner of them all.” Powell’s love of the landscape and literature of the region led to his move to Tucson and a very active retirement in the 1970’s.
Powell, Lawrence Clark. California Classics: the Creative Literature of the Golden State. Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie Press, 1972.
Arguably his finest book, California Classics was one of Powell’s first projects after he retired in 1966 as head of the Clark Library and Dean of the School of Library Service, having previously left his position as University Librarian in 1960. These essays first appeared in Westways magazine, which then flourished under the editorship of Larry Meyer, Davis Dutton and Frances Ring. Powell was a Westways contributor from 1934 until November 1978.
Powell, Lawrence Clark. Eucalyptus Fair: a Memoir in the Form of a Novel. Tucson: Books West Southwest, 1992.
Written in 1943, this was one of Powell’s several memoirs as a novel, about the early years of his relationship with Fay, his wife of fifty-eight years. He promised never to publish it while she was alive, and thus did so a year after her death in 1991, a year shy of her 80th birthday.
Powell, Lawrence Clark. El Morro. Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1984.
Powell once wrote that “the short novel proved the form most natural for me.” El Morro was written while he was recovering from surgery in 1975. It tells the story of an older park ranger assigned to escort a young English woman as she tours archaeological sites in northern Arizona and New Mexico.
Powell, Lawrence Clark. Fortune & Friendship, an Autobiography.New York: R.R. Bowker, 1968.
The first of two autobiographies, the book is a rich tapestry of UCLA and Los Angeles cultural, literary and library history as seen by Powell from the 1930’s until 1966 when he retired at the age of 60. Many of the people for whom UCLA buildings and sites were named were close friends and acquaintances: Edward Dickson, Ernest Carroll Moore, Vern Knudsen, Robert Gordon Sproul, Earl Hedrick, Clarence Dykstra, and Franklin D. Murphy. There are many interesting stories and anecdotes such as the time as a library school graduate student in Berkeley, he spent the day drinking with John Steinbeck and hit a telephone pole on the way home.
Powell, Lawrence Clark. Islands of Books. Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie Press, 1951.
This was the first of many essay collections about Powell’s life with books and libraries, and the people he met and came to know through his passion. He wrote that he originally tried to emulate Emerson as a model for his essays.Many of his early books were published by the Ward Ritchie Press, a small fine press owned by his boyhood friend. This particular set of essays was originally written for the quarterly of the Zamorano Club known as Hoja Volante. Other essays were first conceived as speeches to various groups. Powell was a powerful speaker and always in demand.
Powell, Lawrence Clark. Life Goes On: Twenty More Years of Fortune and Friendship. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1986.
Depicts Powell’s life after his “retirement:” first his European travels with wife Fay, and their eventual move to Tucson in the early 1970’s.
Powell, Lawrence Clark. The Little Package: Pages on Literature and Landscape From a Traveling Bookman’s Life. Cleveland: World Pub. Co., 1964.
The “little package”, of course, is the Book, and the title is taken from a commencement address Powell gave at the University of Arizona in 1961. He “sought to make it a kind of time bomb, set to explode a decade hence, when the graduates would have mostly become middle-aged readers of nothing but magazines.”
Powell, Lawrence Clark. “Ocian in View”: the Malibu. Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1987. Reprint.
The Powells moved from Beverly Glen to a beautiful beachfront cottage in Malibu in 1955. The writing is equal to the setting. One of Powell’s finest works—a collection on the sea, the hope and the mysteries of life, death and existence. In Christmas 1956 the Powells saved their home from fire, only to lose it after they moved to Tucson, in 1978.
Powell, Lawrence Clark, An Orange Grove Boyhood: Growing up in Southern California, 1910-1928. Santa Barbara: CapraPress, 1988.
Written when Powell was 81, this memoir of his South Pasadena boyhood gives a frank picture of early 20th century California and vivid portraits of the people from all walks of life.
Powell, Lawrence Clark. A Passion for Books. Cleveland: World Pub. Co., 1958.
Another great, vintage collection by Powell.
Powell, Lawrence Clark. Philosopher Picket: the Life and Writing of Charles Edward Pickett, Esq. of Virginia, Who Came Overland to the Pacific Coast in 1842-43 and For Forty Years Waged War With Pen and Pamphlet Against All Manner of Public Abuses in Oregon and California; Including Also Unpublished LettersWritten by Him from Yerba Buena at the Time of the Conquest of California by the United States in 1846-47. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1942.
This was Powell’s first published book after his dissertation on Robinson Jeffers, published in 1939. He wrote it while spending his early UCLA Library years as a junior librarian organizing the Cowan collection of California history “a private seminar in Californian history.” The book helped secure his status on the UCLA campus amongst the faculty.
His work with the Cowan collection also led to a paper “The Problem of Rare Books in the College and University Library” and another presented at ALA in 1939 “The Functions of Rare Books” in which he developed his ideas for their collection, care and use in academic libraries.
Powell, Lawrence Clark. The Poet and the Professor. Los Angeles: F.E. and L.C. Powell, 1981.
Originally given as a talk to the Library Patrons of Occidental College. Powell maintained close ties to his alma mater, donating some portion of his book collections to the Oxy library and arranging in 1970 to have a granite carving of a hawk by his sculptor friend and former classmate Gordon Newell placed by the library.
Powell, Lawrence Clark. Portrait of My Father. Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1986.
Powell’s fourth novel explores in a fictional format the speculations and memories of his father, partially based on his mother’s admission that she and Powell’s father were emotionally incompatible.
Powell, Lawrence Clark. The River Between. Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1979.
Powell wrote the first draft of this highly charged erotic novella while a guest lecturer at Wesleyan, on a challenge from members of his creative writing class. Rewritten extensively, it was finally published in 1979. The setting is the Colorado River region of Arizona. The theme is familiar: attractive, older professor meets young grad student—single, female and confused.
Powell, Lawrence Clark. Robinson Jeffers: the Man & His Work. Los Angeles: the Primavera Press, 1934.
The first trade edition of Powell’s University of Dijon PhD dissertation. After graduating from Occidental in 1928, Powell embarked on a Wanderjahr, wandering as far as Dijon, France where he enrolled in the university and lodged with future writer M.F.K. Fisher and her husband. (M.F.K. and Powell’s wife-to-be, Fay, were sorority sisters at Occidental.)
Jeffers was also an alumnus of Occidental. After Powell returned to the States, he visited him and his wife Una in Carmel. He remained acquainted with Jeffers until his death in 1962.
The Primavera Press was L.A. bookseller Jake Zeitlin’s imprint. Jeffers, like all Primavera titles, is scarce and sought-after on the rare books market.
Powell, Lawrence Clark. Southwest Classics: the Creative Literature of the Arid Lands, Essays on the Books and Their Writers. Pasadena: Ward Ritchie Press, 1974.
Powell traveled extensively across the dry Southwest in search of material for these thirty-odd essays which do for the great creative writers of the Southwest what California Classics did for the Golden State. The writing is powerful, graceful and spare, like the land and literature it deals with. Powell at his best.
Powell, Lawrence Clark. Susanna’s Secret, or, The Lost Mozart Letters. Tucson: Press of the Mesquite Harpsichord, 1981.
Written over a period of nine years, this imagined dramatic rendering of the relationship between Mozart and Anna Selina (Nancy) Storace (his first Susanna in Le Nozze di Figaro) is based on letters never found. Mozart himself does not appear in this brief drama.
Mozart and Haydn were Powell’s favorite composers, and with the advent of LP records in the 1950’s, their music began and ended his day. “It is their music that best meets my need for the light and the shade, the joy and sadness which, when blended, gives wholeness and meaning to life.”
Powell, Lawrence Clark. Le Train Bleu. Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 1978.
The Blue Train was particularly well received in France.
Powell, Lawrence Clark. Where Water Flows: the Rivers of Arizona. Flagstaff: Northland Press, 1980.
Convinced that water was the key to Arizona’s destiny, Powell decided to observe the state from an airplane. He was accompanied by pilot Chris Condit and photographer Michael Collier, both youthful geology grad students, and eager to join in Powell’s airborn adventure. The series of personal essays and fine photos was first published in Westways magazine, and later was made into this book, with a forward by Governor Bruce Babbitt.
Created by Catherine Brown and Davis Dutton 9/2006
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