A ruthless debunking and the quintessence of cattiness, Miss Powell's A Time to be Born is at least one instance in which female venom becomes a special force for good. She cries out to be quoted, not one sentence at a time, but whole paragraphs and pages; it all adds up to a first-rate satiric talent.

—Diana Trilling, The Nation

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.