Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life: The Letters of J. F. Powers, 1942-1963
*Starred Review* His body of work may be small—three collections of short stories and two novels—but National Book Award winner J. F. Powers drew praise from such prominent fellow writers as Flannery O’Connor, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth. His fiction primarily concentrated on the lives of Catholic priests, but he had long planned to write a novel of family life, which he never finished. He did, however, write thousands of letters, which his daughter, Katherine A. Powers, has carefully and thoughtfully assembled. They reveal a complicated and, at times, exasperating figure, a man and an artist at odds with the outside world. Beginning with the publication of his first short story at age 25, the volume contains letters detailing his experiences in prison (Powers served time as a conscientious objector during WWII), his courtship and marriage to Betty Wahl, an existence mired in poverty (“No money is the story of my life,” he once wrote), and his constant search for “suitable accommodations.” The locations vary from Chicago to Minnesota to Ireland; his correspondents include such literary figures as Robert Lowell, Jack Conroy, Katherine Anne Porter, and Evelyn Waugh. A major literary accomplishment. --June Sawyers