DAWN POWELL.

By Tim Page. Holt. 362 pp. $30

In 1940, a week before the publication of her novel Angels on Toast, Dawn Powell wrote in her diary: "A new book coming out no longer rouses any hope. As the day approaches, I look at the book section and think with a sudden horror that this is the last Sunday I will be able to look at a book review without sick misgiving—no review, bad review, or patronizing review... and after that the nervous, weary effort to pick up and begin again after another disappointment." Powell was in her forties at the time, and had been writing for 20 years. She knew whereof she spoke.

Coming to New York at 22 from a miserable Ohio childhood, armed only with courage and ambition, she became known as a good-time drinker and a prodigious wit. From the 1920s on, nearly everyone who met her thought her the funniest woman they had ever known, and many (among them John Dos Passos and Edmund Wilson) considered her a social satirist of the first order. A great future loomed. She began to write novels—The Tenth Moon (1932) and Turn, Magic Wheel (1936), among others. Half of them provided a dark view of the midwestern small-town life she had come from, but the other half were witty send-ups of social climbers in New York. It was the big-city novels that made sophisticated readers say Dawn Powell was going to do for New York what Balzac had done for Paris.

Somehow, it never came off. Success eluded her, the novels did not get stronger, the promised career died aborning. Powell’s spirit, however, proved as tough and enduring as that of the city she loved. Life was hard—her only child was autistic, she and her husband drank too much, the money evaporated, and one day she was old and poor, with no more parties to go to. But, inevitably, there would come a moment when she would see the unexpected humor or poignancy or treachery of some situation or other, and the next thing you knew she was writing another novel. When she died in 1965, her books long out of print and she herself a largely forgotten figure, she was still writing.

In 1987 Gore Vidal, who had known her when he was young, wrote a celebratory piece about Powell, and soon she was being rediscovered. Tim Page, a music critic at the Washington Post, became a one-man "Save Dawn Powell" operation, working relentlessly to have her novels reprinted and her diaries published. Now he has written her biography.

When we assess this renewed literary presence in our midst, it is the diaries that seem to compel. The fiction feels painfully dated now—the satire thin, the writing brittle, the characters without intrinsic interest—but in the diaries we have the live spirit of the woman for whom writing and New York were so marvelously one. Here, Powell is literate and hilarious, wise and heartbreaking, and endlessly self-renewing. In 1950, in a moment of exhaustion, she writes in her diary: "The reason friends in late middle-age appear inadequate is that one expects them to give back one’s youth—everything one once had with them—and one charges them with the lack that is in oneself, for even if they could give, your container is now a sieve and can hold no gifts for long." Six years later, she’s writing: "Just thought why I don’t sell stories to popular magazines. All have subtitles—‘Last time Gary saw Cindy she was a gawky child; now she was a beautiful woman....’ I can’t help writing, ‘Last time Fatso saw Myrt she was a desirable woman; now she was an old bag.’ " The insight of the first entry juxtaposed against the irrepressibility of the second is Dawn Powell at her most characteristic—vital, gallant, urban—and that characteristic self is more consistently there in the diaries than in the novels.

Page’s biography is what is known as serviceable. The perspective is devoted, the take uncritical, the prose pedestrian. Yet it captures admirably the rough-and-tumble spirit of a writer who deserves a place at the American table.

—Vivian Gornick