The phrase "a time when author" is not correct and usable in written English as it is incomplete and lacks clarity.
It could be used in a context discussing a specific period related to an author's work or life, but it needs additional information to be meaningful.
Example: "There was a time when author J.K. Rowling was struggling to get her first book published."
Alternatives: "a period when the author" or "an era in which the author".
"Let's go back to a time when authors were gentleman amateurs with private incomes," she tweeted.
At a time when authors were beginning to look to booksellers rather than aristocratic patrons for financial support, Johnson had mixed feelings about the literary marketplace.
Johnson issued Cowper's Poems (1782) and The Task (1784) at his own expense (a generous action at a time when authors were often forced to take on the risk of publication), and was rewarded with handsome sales of both volumes.
The last time, when author James Frey was busted for making stuff up after Oprah blessed him on her show, she made Frey come back on the air and whipped him for it.
"There comes a time when an author just can't write anymore," gouged one critic about "Closing Time", a controversial sequel to "Catch-22".
Take All's Well that Ends Well, which "features a young Frenchman being pressed into marriage, written at a time when the author was himself pressing a young Frenchman into marriage".
Like most of Wolf's other fiction, this was an autobiographical story; it dealt above all with Wolf's residency in Los Angeles in 1992, two years after German reunification, at a time when the author's complicity with the GDR's Ministry of State Security, the so-called Stasi, became a controversial issue in Germany.
His storytelling soon earned him dedicated spectators, who deemed Creangă's fictional universe a "sack of wonders" at a time when the author himself had started casually using the pseudonym Ioan Vântură-Țară ("Ioan Gadabout").
Sometimes they leave the company on the eve of a book release - moving on to greener pastures at the exact time when authors need them to push hard on the publicity.
The time when authors had to pass tests of social and political suitability before being published are over.
