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She considered herself no better than the people she gossiped about with such witty but (mostly) affectionate malice; for she had the same vices and odd virtue or two (e.g., love, honor, loyalty), the same ambitions and failures. She never expected much of her characters, let alone demanded of them heroic deeds, violent behavior, grand suffering. She was well schooled in failure, and her aim was deadliest when she had some swollen urban success in her sights, like the character Amanda Keeler Evans in A Time to Be Born, who was based on Clare Boothe Luce and who is perhaps Powell's most caustic fictional portrayal—a scheming, self promoting Ice Queen with the soul of a hedge-fund trader.
Still, New York was the central character in her novels about the city, and she evoked it as memorably as any of her contemporaries. For example, the standard tourist view from the top of the Empire State Building, à la Powell:
spangled skyscrapers piled up softly against the darkness, tinseled parks were neatly boxed and ribboned with gold like Christmas presents waiting to be opened. Sounds of traffic dissolved in distance, all clangor sifted through space into a whispering silence, it held a secret, and when letters flamed triumphantly in the sky you felt, ah, that was the secret, this at last was it, this special telegram to God—Sunshine Biscuits. On and off it went, Eat Sunshine Biscuits, the message of the city.
One perceives her sensing a Symbol bearing down on her in mid-poetic flight, undercuts it. The worst thing is to seem to be taking oneself too seriously.
"Seem" is the operative word, for there was always a serious undercurrent in her novels, an attempt to reflect and comment on her times. A Time to Be Born, set in New York in 1942, begins with a prose riff running several pages and capturing the nervous, indecisive mood of that first year of war:
There was no future; every one waited, marked time, waited. For what? On Fifth Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street hundreds waited for a man on a hotel window ledge to jump; hundreds waited with craning necks and thirsty faces as if this single person's final gesture would solve the riddle of the world. Civilization stood on a ledge, and in the tension of waiting it was a relief to have one little man jump.
But we do not read Powell for her historical insights, though they add heft to her books; we read her for laughs, for her ear for gossip, her satirically skewed vision, her generous, comic view of life. All these qualities had their origins in her small-town Ohio girlhood. She was born in 1896 in Mount Gilead, Ohio, daughter of a traveling salesman, who was always on the road. Her mother was a loving woman who died when Dawn was 7. That turned out to be the central disaster of her life. Her father, possibly out of practical motives, since he wasn't any great shakes as a provider, remarried a woman with some money, Sabra Stearns Powell. Sabra was a stepmother straight out of the Grimm gallery, sadism and all. She beat Dawn and her two older sisters whether they needed it or not; sent them into town in shabby clothes to be laughed at by classmates; forbade them to read the books in the home library or play the piano in the parlor. In short, she treated them as poor relations.
At age 13 Dawn ran away and landed with an aunt in Shelby, near Cleveland. It was a precociously shrewd career move, for her aunt, Orpha May Sherman Steinbrueck, was one of those rare, unaccountable free spirits. She ran a boardinghouse near the depot, had a lover and encouraged Dawn to go to college and to become a writer.
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