My Virtual Reading Room

Reading The late Mrs. Dorothy Parker--The first complete biography of America's wittiest woman by Leslie Frewin.

Publisher's blurb on inside the dust jacket:

At last, the first full-scale biography of Dorothy Parker, known above all for her satiric wit and now perceived as one of the most gifted writers of her time. Poet, critic, playwright--no one epitomized the Jazz Age and its contradictions as she did.  Flippant, fast, funny, a flouter of convention, Dorothy Parker was a romantic and a sentimentalist. In the words of Brendan Gill, she was "one of the wittiest people in the world and  one of the saddest."

Her ripostes became legendary; her pen scathing. When Alexander Woolcott once asked in her presence: "After all, what's so rare as a Woolcott first edition?" Dorothy Parker shot back, "A Woolcott second edition."

In her early twenties, Parker displayed what were to become her great gifts and flamboyant character as a writer for Vanity Fair and Vogue.  After she was fired from Vanity Fair by Conde' Nast for her reviews, her two great friends Robert Sherwood and Robert Benchley quit their jobs in protest, and together with Woolcott, Franklin Pierce Adams, and Harold Ross helped to form the legendary Algonquin Round Table.

But beneath the brittle humor and bravado was a surprisingly fragile individual and serious writer dealing with the pain and sorrow of being a woman.  She displayed a consistently fatal attraction to the wrong men and three times tried to take her own life.  In many ways, her wit was the only weapon of a woman who saw the world utterly without illusion.

Dorothy Parker died in relative obscurity in New York in 1967. Many people thought she had been dead for years.  It was an irony she would have relished.