A friend to many literary and arts figures of her day, including author John Dos Passos, critic Edmund Wilson, and poet E. E. Cummings,[2] Powell's work received renewed interest after Gore Vidal praised it in a 1987 editorial for The New York Review of Books.

Her father remarried, but his second wife was harsh and abusive toward the children; when her stepmother destroyed her notebooks and diaries, she ran away to live with an aunt, who encouraged her creative work.

Her husband abandoned poetry for steadier work in advertising, and the family moved to Greenwich Village, which remained her home base for the rest of her life.

[4] Dawn Powell wrote hundreds of short stories, ten plays, a dozen novels, and an extended diary starting in 1931.

Throughout her life, she supported herself with various jobs, including being a freelance writer, an extra in silent films, a Hollywood screenwriter, a book reviewer, and a radio personality.

In 1942, Powell published her first commercially successful novel, A Time to Be Born, whose central figure—Amanda Keeler Evans, an egotistical hack writer whose work and media presence are bolstered by the assiduous promotion of her husband, the newspaper magnate Julian Evans—is loosely modelled on Clare Boothe Luce, wife of Henry Luce.

Two late novels show Powell's interest in the New York art world of the 1950s: The Wicked Pavilion (1954), an ensemble portrait of the characters orbiting around the Cafe Julien (a fictionalized Hotel Brevoort)[6] and a vanished or deceased painter named Marius; and The Golden Spur (1962), set in a fictionalized Cedar Tavern,[6] in which a young man's search for the identity and history of his dead father brings him to New York, where he becomes involved with the circle around a charismatic painter, Hugow.

[6] Her executrix, Jacqueline Miller Rice (1931-2004),[8] refused to claim the remains, which were then buried on Hart Island, New York City's potter's field.

Her posthumous champions included Matthew Josephson, Gore Vidal,[10] and especially Tim Page, who joined forces with her family to free her manuscripts, diaries, and copyrights from her original executrix.