HistoricSiteMarkers
Progressive & Modern Era

Dawn Powell

New York, New York, New York

Marker Inscription

Dawn Powell 1896-1965 The novelist, playwright, and diarist lived here from 1931-1942, where she wrote Come Back to Sorrento, Turn, Magic Wheel, Angels on Toast, and A Time to Be Born. Born in Ohio, she wrote perceptive novels set in small Midwestern towns, and high-spirited satires that celebrated life in New York City. All but forgotten after her death, her work enjoyed an extraordinary revival in the 1990's.

Erected by Historic Landmarks Preservation Center

The Story

From 1931 to 1942 the novelist and diarist Dawn Powell lived at this Greenwich Village address, turning out sharp comic novels like Turn, Magic Wheel and A Time to Be Born. An Ohio transplant, she made a career of skewering both small-town Midwestern life and the glittering ambitions of New York. Nearly forgotten at her death in 1965, Powell found an ardent new readership in the 1990s.

Why it matters

Powell's revival is a reminder of how many gifted American writers slip from view and are rescued by later generations, and of Greenwich Village's long role as an incubator of literary life.

The story behind this marker

AI context

The era

In the 1930s and early 1940s, Greenwich Village was one of the great gathering grounds of American literary life. Writers, editors, and artists crowded its townhouses and cafés, and a novelist could live in the thick of the city's creative energy while dissecting it on the page. This address was Dawn Powell's home from 1931 to 1942 — the very heart of that period.

These were hard, vivid years in New York: the Depression pressing on everyone, the city nonetheless glittering with ambition, talk, and reinvention. It was ideal raw material for a satirist, and Powell mined the contrast between striving and self-delusion with a sharp and generous eye.

Born in Ohio in 1896, Powell belonged to a wave of Midwestern writers who came east and made New York their subject. She kept one foot in each world — the small towns she came from and the metropolis she chose — which gave her fiction its double vision.

People & events

Powell was a novelist, playwright, and diarist, and this house saw an extraordinary run of work. During her years here she wrote Come Back to Sorrento, Turn, Magic Wheel, Angels on Toast, and A Time to Be Born — books that show her range, from tender studies of ordinary lives to high-spirited satires of the city's ambitious classes.

Her subject matter split neatly along the seam of her own life. In some novels she wrote perceptively about small Midwestern towns; in others she celebrated and skewered life in New York, where money, art, and reputation were forever colliding. She was, above all, a comic writer with a serious mind.

The hardest turn in her story came after her death in 1965, when her work was very nearly forgotten. Then, in the 1990s, it enjoyed an extraordinary revival — new editions, new readers, and a fresh recognition of just how good she had been all along.

Its place in the American story

Powell's arc is a cautionary tale about literary memory. A gifted writer, admired in her lifetime, can slip almost entirely from view — and then be rescued by a later generation that finally reads her clearly. Her revival in the 1990s is one of the most striking examples in American letters of a reputation restored.

Her career also embodies a classic American literary journey: the talented Midwesterner who comes to New York and turns both the place left behind and the place chosen into art. That movement, from heartland to metropolis, runs through a great deal of the country's twentieth-century fiction.

And her Greenwich Village years underscore the neighborhood's outsized role as an incubator of American writing. To live and work here in the 1930s was to be at the center of a conversation that shaped the nation's literature.

If you visit

This is a private home, so admire it from the sidewalk and let your imagination do the rest. The plaque marks the years, 1931 to 1942, when a remarkable stretch of novels was written behind that facade — a good thing to stand and consider for a moment.

The pleasure of a stop like this is the neighborhood itself. Greenwich Village still carries the texture that drew writers here: low townhouses, tree-lined streets, and a sense that around any corner someone once sat down to describe exactly this. Walk a few blocks and you're touring the literary map Powell knew.

If you're a reader, the best souvenir isn't anything you can buy on the street — it's picking up one of the books she wrote here. Come for the plaque, leave curious about a writer the twentieth century nearly lost and then found again.

Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.

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