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

* Requires RealPlayer

The novelist Dawn Powell, whose books Edmund Wilson hailed as "among the most amusing being written" and whom Gore Vidal celebrated as "America's only satirist," is buried in an unmarked grave in the City Cemetery on Hart Island, New York's potters field. Before she died in 1965, Powell willed her body to Cornell Medical Center. After the doctors had their way, what was left was to be returned to the family for burial, but no one claimed her. Five years later, her executor authorized Cornell to dispose of the remains. And so she was put in a plain pine coffin and deposited in a mass grave onto layers of New York's nameless and unwanted dead.

The fate of her remains might suggest another sad chapter in the annals of America's neglect of its finest writers, but don't cue the violins. We are in Dawn Powell country, where there is humor underpinned by a tough-minded realism, where solemn social arrangements are constantly subverted by the comedy of human fallibility. Powell didn't put much stock in funerals or cemeteries, and her own interment seems appropriate material for another of the mordantly funny novels she can no longer write. In fact, when her husband died she simply had him cremated and never collected the ashes.

She surely would have cared more about the disposition of her literary remains. Until the last three or four years, they received similar neglect. At her death her fifteen novels were out of print; her executor had sunk into depression and ignored requests trickling in from the few scholars interested in Powell's work. There was a small cult following of her books, mostly New Yorkers who relished her Manhattan satires.

It's true Powell never had a bestseller, but her books weren't exactly neglected in her lifetime; par for her was a sale of around 5,000 copies. Among the reasons for her lack of popularity is perhaps that the American taste is inimical to her brand of urbane, sophisticated satire. In 1956, in the middle of writing one of her lesser novels, she noted in her diary: "There is no wit or humor in this story, so it may be successful. Waugh, Huxley, Thurber—none were really able to make a decent living until they lost their sense of humor and practically their ability to feel."