A short life of the author
Dorothy Parker (22 August 1893 – 7 June 1967) was an American poet, short story writer, critic, and screenwriter who was, during the 1920s and 1930s, the wittiest woman in America — a distinction she earned through verse, prose, reviews, and conversation so brilliantly pointed that her lines have been quoted, misquoted, and attributed to her whether she said them or not for the better part of a century. She was also, beneath the wit, a serious writer whose best short stories are among the finest of the American modern period.
Early Life and the Algonquin Round Table
Parker was born Dorothy Rothschild in Long Branch, New Jersey (she was not related to the banking family), into a comfortable but unhappy household — her mother died when she was an infant, and she detested her stepmother. She attended Miss Dana’s School in Morristown, New Jersey, and began her literary career in 1915 when she sold a poem to Vanity Fair.
She became the magazine’s drama critic in 1917 and was fired in 1920 for writing reviews so scathing that theatre producers complained. This dismissal was the making of her reputation: her colleagues Robert Benchley and Robert Sherwood resigned in solidarity, and the three of them became core members of the Algonquin Round Table — the daily luncheon gathering of writers, actors, and journalists at the Algonquin Hotel that became the most famous literary salon in American history.
The Round Table — which also included Alexander Woollcott, Harold Ross, Edna Ferber, and others — was a crucible of wit, and Parker was its reigning queen. Her remarks became legend: “Men seldom make passes / At girls who wear glasses”; “If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to”; and, when told that Calvin Coolidge had died, “How can they tell?”
Poetry
Parker published three collections of verse: Enough Rope (1926), Sunset Gun (1928), and Death and Taxes (1931), later combined in Not So Deep as a Well (1936). The poems are light verse of the highest order — formally accomplished (rhymed, metred, compressed), emotionally charged, and delivered with a deadpan irony that disguises their underlying bitterness.
Her favourite subjects are love, death, and the intersection of the two. “Résumé” — her famous catalogue of suicide methods, each dismissed as impractical (“Razors pain you; / Rivers are damp; / Acids stain you; / And drugs cause cramp”) and concluding “You might as well live” — is a perfect miniature: funny, dark, and unsentimentally honest about despair.
Enough Rope was a bestseller — unusual for a volume of poetry — and made Parker one of the most famous writers in America.
Short Stories
Parker’s short stories, published in The New Yorker and other magazines and collected in Laments for the Living (1930) and After Such Pleasures (1933), are her most enduring literary achievement. The best of them — “Big Blonde” (which won the O. Henry Prize in 1929), “A Telephone Call,” “The Waltz,” “Here We Are” — are devastating portraits of loneliness, failed communication, and the comedy of gender warfare.
“Big Blonde” is Parker’s masterpiece: the story of Hazel Morse, a pretty, compliant woman who drinks too much, laughs too hard, and slowly drowns in the expectations that men and society have placed upon her. The story is unflinching in its depiction of a woman whose personality has been shaped entirely by the need to please, and it achieves a depth of characterisation that the poems, by their nature, cannot.
Hollywood
Parker worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood from the early 1930s, contributing to scripts for A Star Is Born (1937, Academy Award nomination), Saboteur (1942), and other films. She earned well but was contemptuous of the film industry — “Hollywood money isn’t money. It’s congealed snow, melts in your hand, and there you are.”
Political Activism
Parker was politically active throughout her life. She was involved in left-wing causes, supported the Loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War, was investigated by the FBI, and was blacklisted during the McCarthy era. She left the bulk of her estate to Martin Luther King Jr. and, upon his death, to the NAACP.
Legacy
Parker’s reputation rests on the wit — the one-liners, the verse, the devastating reviews — but her best prose fiction deserves to stand alongside the work of her contemporaries Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and O’Hara. “Big Blonde” alone would justify her place in the American short story canon.
Collecting Parker
Enough Rope (1926, Boni & Liveright) in first edition with dust jacket is the primary Parker collectible, valued at $500–$2,000. Sunset Gun (1928) and the story collections are also sought. The Portable Dorothy Parker (Viking, 1944, edited by Parker herself) in first edition is a particularly desirable item.