Dawn Powell was an American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and short story writer. Known for her acid-tongued prose, "her relative obscurity was likely due to a general distaste for her harsh satiric tone." Nonetheless, Stella Adler and author Clifford Odets appeared in one of her plays. Her work was praised by Robert Benchley in The New Yorker and in 1939 she was signed as a Scribner author where Maxwell Perkins, famous for his work with many of her contemporaries, including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe, became her editor. A 1963 nominee for the National Book Award, she received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Marjorie Peabody Waite Award for lifetime achievement in literature the following year. A friend to many literary and arts figures of her day, including author John Dos Passos, critic Edmund Wilson, and poet E.E. Cummings, Powell's work received renewed interest after Gore Vidal praised it in an 1987 editorial for The New York Review of Books. Since then, the Library of America has published two collections of her novels.

Mount Gilead is a village and the county seat of Morrow County, Ohio, United States. It is located 41 miles (66 km) northeast of Columbus. The population was 3,503 at the 2020 census. It is the center of population of Ohio. The village was established in 1832, eight years after white settlers arrived in the region. Before their arrival, the forest was a hunting area for the Shawnee tribe.