Dawn Powell

Dawn Powell
Dawn Powell, c. 1914.
Born	November 28, 1896 Mount Gilead, Ohio
Died	November 14, 1965 (age 68) New York City
Occupation	Writer
Genre	Dark social satire
Notable works	A Time to Be Born, The Wicked Pavilion, The Locusts Have No King
Notable awards	1963 National Book Award nominee, 1964 American Academy of Arts and Letters presents her with the Marjorie Peabody Waite Award for lifetime achievement in literature
Spouse	Joseph Gousha, poet and copywriter
Children	Joseph R. Gousha Jr.

Dawn Powell (November 28, 1896 – November 14, 1965) was an American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and short story writer.^[1] Known for her acid-tongued prose, "her relative obscurity was likely due to a general distaste for her harsh satiric tone."^[2] Nonetheless, Stella Adler and author Clifford Odets appeared in one of her plays. Her work was praised by Robert Benchley in The New Yorker and in 1939 she was signed as a Scribner author where Maxwell Perkins, famous for his work with many of her contemporaries, including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe, became her editor.^[1] A 1963 nominee for the National Book Award, she received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Marjorie Peabody Waite Award for lifetime achievement in literature the following year. A friend to many literary and arts figures of her day, including author John Dos Passos, critic Edmund Wilson, and poet E.E. Cummings,^[2] Powell's work received renewed interest after Gore Vidal praised it in an 1987 editorial for The New York Review of Books. Since then, the Library of America has published two collections of her novels.^[2]