A Time To Be Born

Dawn Powell

Published by Constable, London, 1943

About this Item

Dawn Powell (1896 1965) was an American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and short story writer. Known for her acid-tongued prose, "her relative obscurity was likely due to a general distaste for her harsh satiric tone." 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. 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, Powell's work received renewed interest after Gore Vidal praised it in a 1987 editorial for The New York Review of Books. Since then, the Library of America has published two collections of her novels. Powell's first editions, both US and UK editions, are relatively uncommon. This copy of the UK first is very good in gray cloth with black titles on the spine. Slight soiling on the covers and slight bumping at the corners. There are two ink inscriptions from a previous owner on the front pastedown. Page edges are age darkened, but no other marks or damage. No DJ. TN.

Seller Inventory # B357

Bibliographic Details

• Title: A Time To Be Born
• Publisher: Constable, London
• Publication Date: 1943
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First UK.
• Condition: Very Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • Literature
  • Fiction