“The reputation of Dawn Powell may be doomed to a perpetual state of revival,” wrote John Updike in the New Yorker in 1995. The underappreciated and somewhat forgotten American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter, who was born in Ohio in 1896 and died in 1965, may not have found the fame she deserved during her lifetime. Reading A Time to Be Born, the 1942 novel that is being reissued this month by Pushkin Press Classics, it is impossible not to root for the 2026 revival to be the one that sticks. The book is such a masterclass in satirical fiction that after reading it, your first question is something like: Why have I never heard of her? Your second is sure to be: Where can I find more? Upon further examination, you learn that Powell was a writer’s writer who earned the full admiration of her contemporaries and some of those who came after. In 1944, Ernest Hemingway named her his “favorite living writer,” according to an entry in Powell’s published diaries. In 1987, Gore Vidal spent a year reading her out-of-print and out-of-fashion works, and wrote the definitive essay of her career in the New York Review of Books, in which he concluded: “Dawn Powell never became the popular writer that she ought to have been. In those days, with a bit of luck, a good writer eventually attracted voluntary readers, and became popular. Today, of course, ‘popular’ means bad writing that is widely read while good writing is that which is taught to involuntary readers. Powell failed on both counts.”