Dorothy Parker

Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) was an American author. Her works include Men I'm Not Married To (1922), Women I'm Not Married To (1922), Laments for the Living (1930), After Such Pleasures (1933), Here Lies (1942), and Collected Poems: Not So Deep as a Well (1937).

She had an acerbic wit that liberals enjoyed until they and Hollywood became the butt of some of her one-liners. For example, Parker said about a particular performance by four-time Academy Award winner Katharine Hepburn that she "ran the whole gamut of emotions — from A to B.”

Life and works

Dorothy Parker was born Dorothy Rothschild on August 22, 1893, in New Jersey. Her mother died when she was young, so her father remarried a Roman Catholic, which led to her attending Catholic school (which she later denounced as useless) and left her unsympathetic to her parents' being dead by the time she was 20. She was tragically forced to support herself as a dance instructor for a few months before she began writing for magazines like Vanity Fair and Vogue and indulged in the luxury hotels of the Roaring Twenties. She was a member of the Algonquin Round Table group of writers along with Robert Benchley and, after a career of trashing New York City's mansions and hotels, moved to Hollywood. During the Great Depression, she decided that socialism, not the elimination of the stock market, could end financial woes, and continued to write for magazines, including Esquire. She was very active in liberal politics in Hollywood and in the Spanish Civil War until a rush of conservatism after World War II and the death of many of her fellow writers left her to be presumed dead and greatly forgotten.

See also

• Robert Benchley
• Hollywood values

External links

• Poems on the Poem Hunter website