American literature has known few writers capable of the comic élan and full-bodied portraiture that abound in the novels of Dawn Powell. Yet for decades after her death, Powell's work was out of print, cherished by a small band of admirers. Only recently has there been a rediscovery of the writer Gore Vidal calls "our best comic novelist," and whom Edmund Wilson considered to be "on a level with Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh, and Muriel Spark." With these two volumes, The Library of America presents the best of Powell's quirky, often hilarious, sometimes deeply moving fiction.

Dawn Powell—a vital part of literary Greenwich Village from the 1920s through the 1960s—was the tirelessly observant chronicler of two very different worlds: the small-town Ohio where she grew up and the sophisticated Manhattan to which she gravitated. If her Ohio novels are more melancholy and compassionate, her Manhattan novels, exuberant and incisive, sparkle with a cast of writers, show people, businessmen, and hustling hangers-on. All show rich characterization and a flair for the gist of complex social situations. A playful satirist, an unsentimental observer of failed hopes and misguided longings, Dawn Powell is a literary rediscovery of rare importance.

The first of these volumes contains Dance Night (1930), Powell's own favorite among her works; Come Back to Sorrento (1932), orginally published as The Tenth Moon, a compelling study of frustrated aspirations; Turn, Magic, Wheel (1936), a whirlwind tour of Manhattan's literary life; Angels on Toast (1940), whose farcical pace recalls screwball comedy; and A Time To Be Born (1942), with its evocation of wartime mass media.

The second volume opens with My Home Is Far Away (1944), a fictionalized memoir of Powell's difficult childhood. The Locusts Have No King (1948), The Wicked Pavilion (1954), and The Golden Spur (1962) are brilliant comedies that extend her dissection of the follies and longings of a sophisticated cast of characters.

Tim Page, the volumes' editor, is the author of Dawn Powell: A Biography and the editor of The Diaries of Dawn Powell and Selected Letters of Dawn Powell. He won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1997, and is a culture critic at the Washington Post.