In Search Of a Father By Morris Gilbert (1962): “Dawn Powell for some decades has been whipping up successive human comedies of the most fastidious disenchantment. With her, the comic spirit is a mordant one; her knowingness is proverbially satanic. She has always had a precocious and highly esteemed gift for outrage. In The Golden Spur, she is again at her most outrageous, and again goes swinging on her patented Ohio-New York pendulum–a thoroughly familiar one for her, a native of little Shelby, Ohio, and a habituÈ of the metropolis. As early as 1940, a reviewer was observing that her eight novels (to that date) ‘have progressed steadily from Ohio sunshine to Manhattan madness.’ Here it is still the case–not to imply any suggestion of repetitiveness. The phenomenon that New York is filled and possessed, year in, year out, with successions of provincials who presently become New York’s New…