“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?