Locusts Have No King

Dawn Powell (1896-1965) was an American novelist and playwright known for her incisive satires of New York's cultural and literary circles. Born in Mount Gilead, Ohio, she endured a tumultuous childhood before running away at thirteen to live with an aunt who later supported her studies at Lake Erie College. After graduating, Powell moved to New York City, immersing herself in the bohemian atmosphere of Greenwich Village as a "permanent visitor" to the metropolis.She gained early recognition for her witty, often risqué pieces in The New Yorker and Esquire, and 1939 became a Scribner author, sharing legendary editor Maxwell Perkins with Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Although Powell enjoyed a devoted circle of admirers, her work drifted into obscurity after her death. Interest in her novels was revived decades later through Gore Vidal's appraisal in The New York Review of Books, as well as championing from Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Tim Page, who as executor of her estate has worked tirelessly to keep Powell in print.

A huge talent, Dawn Powell. Sentence by sentence, among the greatest writers of her time