The story of how a career woman goes about getting what she wants, which is, quite simply, the whole earth. The book is enormously funny and the humor, which could easily have been an end in itself, manages to do some very neat blasting, not only of the stuffed shirts and careerists who are the main characters but of pretentiousness in general.

—Review of A Time to Be Born,
in the New Yorker

Archive of Reviews from The New York Times

NPR Interviews Powell's Editor, Tim Page*
	¶ The Diane Rehm Show ¶ Weekend All Things Considered

How Dawn Powell can save your life from Salon.com

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dozens of poems, hundreds of short stories and articles, at least ten plays, magnificent diaries that span three and a half decades, and—the accomplishment that meant the most to her—a number of dizzying and inventive novels. Absolutely unsentimental about mortality, she would have been far more concerned about what happened to her work than about what became of her exhausted body. As a character in Powell's first acknowledged novel puts it, shyly allowing a new friend to read her writing, "This—well, this is me."

From the book Dawn Powell: A Biography by Tim Page. Copyright © 1998 by Tim Page. Reprinted by arrangement with Tim Page and Henry Holt and Company, LLC.