Set against an atmospheric backdrop of New York City in the months just before America’ s entry into World War II, A Time To Be Born is a scathing and hilarious study of cynical New Yorkers stalking each other for various selfish ends. At the center of the story are a wealthy, self-involved newspaper publisher and his scheming, novelist wife, Amanda Keeler. Powell always denied that Amanda Keeler was based upon the real-life Clare Boothe Luce, until years later when she discovered a memo she’d written to herself in 1939 that said, “Why not do a novel on Clare Luce?” Which prompted Powell to write in her diary “Who can I believe? Me or myself?”
A Time to Be Born
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Here's one to savor when you're feeling sour--a reissue of a 1942 novel teeming with egregiously opportunistic, social-climbing Manhattanites who see WW II as just one more cause to manipulate and who are appalled not by Hitler's barbarism but by his mean birth and bad manners. The narcissistic queen bitch of the hour (who Gore Vidal purports is modeled casually on Clare Boothe Luce) is Amanda Keeler Evans: she snatches a newspaper baron from his wife; achieves monumental success as a romance novelist after hubby's papers print rave reviews of the ghost-written book; and, subsequently, pontificates on politics without expertise but to great acclaim. Amanda even finds a way to use newly arrived Vicky Haven, an old chum from her anonymous Ohio past. Unbeknownst to Vicky, she's to serve as beard for Amanda's affair with Ken Saunders, an old beau whom Amanda doesn't love but whom she keeps on a leash to bolster her ego. But sparks ignite between beard and beau, the egotistical newspaper baron seeks revenge against an unfaithful wife and Amanda's empire threatens to fold like a house of cards. Period details are keen (in Vicky's apartment house: "At each landing was the conventional old-time niche designed for easing the passage of coffins up and down stairs"), and Powell's ( The Golden Spur ) spoof of the high and mighty still sizzles half a century after it was written.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
Originally published in 1940, 1942, and 1954, respectively, this trio were reprinted by Vintage (Classic Returns, LJ 5/1/90) and the now defunct Yarrow Press (Classic Returns, LJ 4/15/91) in the early 1990s, when Powell experienced a bit of a resurgence only to disappear again. Like many of her works, these satirize New York's pseudointellectual elite. Powell is one of American literature's most lethal wits?she could hold her own against Dorothy Parker any time?and should be in all library collections.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful
By J. E. Barnes
Format:Paperback
Despite its awkward title, Dawn Powell's' 'A Time To Be Born' (1942) is, after Washington Irving's 'A Knickerbocker's History of New York,' the funniest book in American literature.
The story of the rise and fall of ruthless self-promoter, arch manipulator, and glamour girl Amanda Evans Keeler, the novel seamlessly propels the reader through its deliciously involving plot, dropping brisk, barbed, and piercing bombs of cutting humor all the way.
Every other line in this New York City-based minefield is cause for bursts of healthy, uproarious laughter, as one character after another finds their egos and intentions rebuked and thwarted by fate in sardonically appropriate fashion.
While mildly cynical about human nature, the novel's humor thankfully never collapses into cattiness or camp; though sometimes approaching the brittle artifice of Saki or Ronald Firbank, Powell continually steers herself back in humanity's direction whenever she veers too far towards improbability or outright farce.
And humanity, in Powell's vision as expressed here, exists only among those in the lower ranks--the novel's 'Little Men'--who are naive, gullible, and ignorant, but hopeful.
Powell's understanding of what happens to human beings and human relationships as people rise or force their way through the hierarchies of the power elite is wonderfully astute. Though the story takes place just before World War II, the book is timelessly relevant in its illustration of power structures, protocol, and propriety among the powerful and power-mad.
Powell also excels in illustrating how shrewd, calculating and talented individuals go about creating shining, influential, publically-adored and much-venerated, if entirely artificial, media personalities for themselves.
Though Powell's work is often compared to that of Muriel Spark, there's literally a world of difference between their novels, though each filled their books with large casts of odd-ball characters and believable eccentrics.
Spark's novels always take place in a world where God and the possibility of grace are always present, though sometimes only remotely so.
Powell's comic novels take place in a universe in which the question of God has never even been raised; certainly none of Powell's characters ever give the idea of God or grace a first or second thought.
In Powell's work, there is little more to the world than what meets the eye, and it is around its glittering prizes that her phlegmatic characters circle relentlessly.
However, both Powell and Spark write brilliantly about servants and masters, and Powell does a hilarious job here of portraying Hurricane Amanda's servant, frustrated power monger Miss Bemel, who tries to seize control over events even as Amanda insist Miss Bemel buy herself a girdle.
Insightful, perceptive, and almost perfectly structured, 'A Time To Be Born' is also entertainment of the highest form.
The story of the rise and fall of ruthless self-promoter, arch manipulator, and glamour girl Amanda Evans Keeler, the novel seamlessly propels the reader through its deliciously involving plot, dropping brisk, barbed, and piercing bombs of cutting humor all the way.
Every other line in this New York City-based minefield is cause for bursts of healthy, uproarious laughter, as one character after another finds their egos and intentions rebuked and thwarted by fate in sardonically appropriate fashion.
While mildly cynical about human nature, the novel's humor thankfully never collapses into cattiness or camp; though sometimes approaching the brittle artifice of Saki or Ronald Firbank, Powell continually steers herself back in humanity's direction whenever she veers too far towards improbability or outright farce.
And humanity, in Powell's vision as expressed here, exists only among those in the lower ranks--the novel's 'Little Men'--who are naive, gullible, and ignorant, but hopeful.
Powell's understanding of what happens to human beings and human relationships as people rise or force their way through the hierarchies of the power elite is wonderfully astute. Though the story takes place just before World War II, the book is timelessly relevant in its illustration of power structures, protocol, and propriety among the powerful and power-mad.
Powell also excels in illustrating how shrewd, calculating and talented individuals go about creating shining, influential, publically-adored and much-venerated, if entirely artificial, media personalities for themselves.
Though Powell's work is often compared to that of Muriel Spark, there's literally a world of difference between their novels, though each filled their books with large casts of odd-ball characters and believable eccentrics.
Spark's novels always take place in a world where God and the possibility of grace are always present, though sometimes only remotely so.
Powell's comic novels take place in a universe in which the question of God has never even been raised; certainly none of Powell's characters ever give the idea of God or grace a first or second thought.
In Powell's work, there is little more to the world than what meets the eye, and it is around its glittering prizes that her phlegmatic characters circle relentlessly.
However, both Powell and Spark write brilliantly about servants and masters, and Powell does a hilarious job here of portraying Hurricane Amanda's servant, frustrated power monger Miss Bemel, who tries to seize control over events even as Amanda insist Miss Bemel buy herself a girdle.
Insightful, perceptive, and almost perfectly structured, 'A Time To Be Born' is also entertainment of the highest form.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
**********
Dawn Powell, Ohioan by birth, sophisticated Manhattanite by choice, is one of America's biggest cultural hang-fires. This unfortunately still-too-little known writer who died in 1962 deserves a far wider audience; pity that the publishing of most of her novels in a two-volume set by the Library of America in 2001 didn't put her in the cultural Panetheon where she belongs.
"A Time to be Born" is a good starter piece. Powell's novels tend to break into two camps--sentimental and sharp--and this 1941 novel, set among Manhattan's cultural elite just before World War II broke out in 1939--is a great introduction to the latter, more satirical work.
The core of the plot deals with the curious relationship between two women who grew up in the same fictional Ohio small town. Amanda Keeler Evans is a thinly disguised version of Clare Booth Luce, she who authored numerous Broadway plays, one of which became the 1940 MGM classic, THE WOMEN, and who married TIME magazine's publisher and then quickly became a nationally known journalist. Fictional Amanda is more than happy to let her provincial Midwestern past lie in the past but, though a mutual hometown acquaintance, plays Lady Bountiful to her naive high-school acquaintance Vicky Haven, who is about to move to the Big Apple.
Amanda secures Vicky an entry-level job at a publishing house with her big-time bullying and clout. Although she and Vicky are definitely not of the same social set, she wants to keep Vicky close--we suspect that in her cynicism Amanda is so nice to Vicky as a matter of spin control; she doesn't want Vicky blabbing too intimately about their hick background.
Well, it couldn't happen to a nicer bully: Amanda's every good deed never goes unpunished. Amanda, on the sly, rents a studio apartment for a trysting place with her twentysomething lover, but tries to justify this pied-a-terre to her vapid husband by saying she rented it for Vicky so that her pseudo-protegee could have a ready-made place to hang her hat upon arrival in the Big City--while Amanda cunningly retains daytime-hours occupancy privilege for her "work."
During a routine dinner party, to which Vicky has been invited as a matter of protocol, Vicky meets Amanda's lover (not knowing he is anything other than a professional contact); and eventually, to save her hide, Amanda is forced to offer Vicky the flat for real while keeping her right to its daytime use.
When boyfriend drops by the flat Amanda rented for Vicky, Vicky wonders why he's so familiar with the place and assumes all Manhattan studio apartments follow a common scheme . . .
Dawn Powell is truly an American original but a few comparative metaphors won't hurt. Think of her as a midcentury Jane Austen with a sharp, Dorothy Parkerish writing style and an appalling, almost Evelyn Waugh-type perspective on human greed and folly.
All this makes A TIME TO BE BORN first-rate social comedy (not just routine satire), a great view into the protocol of that era's Manhattan networking professional life; and a darn good farce where almost everyone except clueless Vicky is living a lie and struggling to maintain it all despite the inevitable cognitive dissonance.
I strongly recommend this book--and if it isn't available by itself, the first volume of Powell's novels as collected by the Library of America contains it and four other gems.
For further background on Powell, look up a feature piece in the September 2001 Atlantic concurrent with the Library of America's publication of the two-work set.
********************
UPDATE (March 2012): Apparently this particular novel is out of print as a single volume, but note that the Library of America still has available practically all of Dawn Powell's novels in two volumes: 1930-42 and 1944-62. A TIME TO BE BORN is in the first volume.
Dawn Powell, Ohioan by birth, sophisticated Manhattanite by choice, is one of America's biggest cultural hang-fires. This unfortunately still-too-little known writer who died in 1962 deserves a far wider audience; pity that the publishing of most of her novels in a two-volume set by the Library of America in 2001 didn't put her in the cultural Panetheon where she belongs.
"A Time to be Born" is a good starter piece. Powell's novels tend to break into two camps--sentimental and sharp--and this 1941 novel, set among Manhattan's cultural elite just before World War II broke out in 1939--is a great introduction to the latter, more satirical work.
The core of the plot deals with the curious relationship between two women who grew up in the same fictional Ohio small town. Amanda Keeler Evans is a thinly disguised version of Clare Booth Luce, she who authored numerous Broadway plays, one of which became the 1940 MGM classic, THE WOMEN, and who married TIME magazine's publisher and then quickly became a nationally known journalist. Fictional Amanda is more than happy to let her provincial Midwestern past lie in the past but, though a mutual hometown acquaintance, plays Lady Bountiful to her naive high-school acquaintance Vicky Haven, who is about to move to the Big Apple.
Amanda secures Vicky an entry-level job at a publishing house with her big-time bullying and clout. Although she and Vicky are definitely not of the same social set, she wants to keep Vicky close--we suspect that in her cynicism Amanda is so nice to Vicky as a matter of spin control; she doesn't want Vicky blabbing too intimately about their hick background.
Well, it couldn't happen to a nicer bully: Amanda's every good deed never goes unpunished. Amanda, on the sly, rents a studio apartment for a trysting place with her twentysomething lover, but tries to justify this pied-a-terre to her vapid husband by saying she rented it for Vicky so that her pseudo-protegee could have a ready-made place to hang her hat upon arrival in the Big City--while Amanda cunningly retains daytime-hours occupancy privilege for her "work."
During a routine dinner party, to which Vicky has been invited as a matter of protocol, Vicky meets Amanda's lover (not knowing he is anything other than a professional contact); and eventually, to save her hide, Amanda is forced to offer Vicky the flat for real while keeping her right to its daytime use.
When boyfriend drops by the flat Amanda rented for Vicky, Vicky wonders why he's so familiar with the place and assumes all Manhattan studio apartments follow a common scheme . . .
Dawn Powell is truly an American original but a few comparative metaphors won't hurt. Think of her as a midcentury Jane Austen with a sharp, Dorothy Parkerish writing style and an appalling, almost Evelyn Waugh-type perspective on human greed and folly.
All this makes A TIME TO BE BORN first-rate social comedy (not just routine satire), a great view into the protocol of that era's Manhattan networking professional life; and a darn good farce where almost everyone except clueless Vicky is living a lie and struggling to maintain it all despite the inevitable cognitive dissonance.
I strongly recommend this book--and if it isn't available by itself, the first volume of Powell's novels as collected by the Library of America contains it and four other gems.
For further background on Powell, look up a feature piece in the September 2001 Atlantic concurrent with the Library of America's publication of the two-work set.
********************
UPDATE (March 2012): Apparently this particular novel is out of print as a single volume, but note that the Library of America still has available practically all of Dawn Powell's novels in two volumes: 1930-42 and 1944-62. A TIME TO BE BORN is in the first volume.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
By tenor1
Format:Paperback
Dawn Powell's wry way with words shines in this satirical novel. She doesn't take long to set her characters in motion towards an obvious collision course, though some of the turns Powell takes to get there are unexpected. My only complaint is that the plot got a little bogged down in the latter stages of the novel as the Amanda Keeler Evans character got her inevitable comeuppance.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
A great book from one of the best authors you've probably never read.
First things first, I'm a Dawn Powell fan. Unashamed and card-carrying. Powell is a nearly forgotten teller of New York tales from her era, the late 30's until the early 1960's. Read more
Published 3 months ago by Thad Brown
2.0 out of 5 stars
A Time to Be Born
boring--I thought there would be more description of the times. I did not like the characters regardless of whether they were decent or 'bad' people.
Published 4 months ago by Maureen Chamberlain
3.0 out of 5 stars
Middling Powell Novel
Powell has written some superb novels, the best of which combined astute insights about human behavior with sharp satire. Read more
Published on August 6, 2010 by disco75
5.0 out of 5 stars
best little known author i've come across.
i am neither smart enough, nor do i have the time to write some long impressive essay on this book (like the other amazon reviewers have done here), but i absolutely want to give... Read more
Published on February 5, 2007 by fluffy, the human being.
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Clarifying Lens of Satire
Gore Vidal, admired and respected Dawn Powell and wrote a long article called,"Dawn Powell, The American Writer". Read more
Published on May 27, 2006 by prisrob
5.0 out of 5 stars
A New Life
This magical novel was published in 1942. Unlike most of Dawn Powell's earlier novels, it sold well and went through several printings. Read more
Published on February 8, 2003 by Robin Friedman
3.0 out of 5 stars
Celebrity that didn't hold up.
This is a novel based upon Claire Luce, famed society figure and writer. At the time it was written, the Luce's were celebrities in the New York second world war era art/news... Read more
Published on May 20, 2002 by L. Dann
4.0 out of 5 stars
Very witty and clever; but poorly edited edition
This was my first Dawn Powell novel, and I enjoyed it very much; the writing is extremely clever. My only complaint is that my edition was riddled with typographical errors--there... Read more
Published on January 30, 2002
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dawn Powell's best "New York" novel
The situations and characters in this book are still as fresh and alive as when Ms. Powell created them. Aside from the period references, the story could take place today.
Published on March 22, 2000
4.0 out of 5 stars
A delightful, caustic, and utterly entertaining novel
Like another reviewer, this was my first Powell novel. I enjoyed it immensely and found myself reading it with the eye of a movie camera, imagining what actors of the 40's I would... Read more
Published on March 22, 2000
