To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser salon.com > People March 31, 2000 URL: http://www.salon.com/people/obit/2000/03/31/powell Author Anthony Powell dead at 94 - - - - - - - - - - - - By AUDREY WOODS Anthony Powell, whose 12-volume "A Dance to the Music of Time" secured his place among the great figures of 20th-century English literature, has died. He was 94. Powell died Tuesday at his home in Frome in Somerset, his family said. The cause of death was not announced. His huge work of fiction, chronicling the morals and manners of the English upper-middle class from the 1920s to the 1970s, was often compared with Marcel Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past." Although "A Dance to the Music of Time" was lavishly praised as a modern classic, Powell dismissed intricate interpretations and insisted it dealt with "things as they are." The dance, narrated by a novelist named Nicholas Jenkins, is choreographed in four trilogies, representing the seasons of his life. Powell took the title from a Nicolas Poussin painting. Powell created a series of vivid, acutely perceived and often humorous characters whose stories are interwoven through half a century. The most memorable is the comic figure Kenneth Widmerpool, son of a liquid manure manufacturer. He begins as the butt of jokes at school but with ruthless ambition achieves ever-greater power. Anthony Dymoke Powell was born Dec. 21, 1905 in London, the only child of an army lieutenant colonel. He was educated at Eton and at Oxford, where his contemporaries included Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Cyril Connelly and George Orwell. Powell began working for a publisher in 1926 and within 10 years had published five blackly humorous novels. His biography of John Aubrey, the 17th century English antiquary, was published in 1948, after Powell's wartime service in army intelligence. Powell embarked on the "Dance" series with "A Question of Upbringing" in 1951. "Hearing Secret Harmonies," published in 1975, completed the series. Powell's gossipy and often caustic diaries -- begun in the 1980s and published in 1995 -- are filled with anecdotes and remembrances of famous characters, including the literary Longford family to whom he was related through his marriage in 1934 to Lady Violet Pakenham, daughter of the Earl of Longford. Powell was acidic about other writers, rating Virginia Woolf as "a dreadful woman ... humorless, envious, spiteful," Graham Greene as "wholly unreadable" and Salman Rushdie as "tedious." Novelist A.N. Wilson called the diaries "wise, sharp and at times extremely funny." Yet Robert O'Byrne, writing in the Irish Times, spoke of "the sheer tedium and triviality of most of his entries." In 1988, Powell was appointed a Companion of Honor, a prestigious order headed by Queen Elizabeth II and limited to 65 men and women who have done a "conspicuous" national service. Powell is survived by his wife and two sons. A funeral service was planned for next Tuesday in Frome. salon.com | March 31, 2000 © 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press. - - - - - - - - - - - -