Dorothy Parker

Dorothy Parker was born Dorothy Rothschild on August 22, 1893, in West End, New Jersey, where her family kept a summer cottage on the shore. Her father, Jacob Henry Rothschild, was a garment manufacturer in Manhattan, and the family lived most of the year on the Upper West Side of New York City ^[1]. Her mother, Eliza Marston Rothschild, died shortly before Dorothy turned five, a loss the writer later described as the first of many griefs that shaped her outlook ^[2].

Her childhood was unsettled. Jacob remarried, and Dorothy disliked her stepmother, who died in 1903 when Dorothy was nine. Though her father was Jewish and her stepmother Protestant, Dorothy attended a Catholic elementary school, the Blessed Sacrament Convent school in Manhattan, an arrangement she later treated as one of the odd jokes of her upbringing ^[1]. She finished her formal education at Miss Dana's School in Morristown, New Jersey, leaving around the age of fourteen. She never attended college.

After her father died in 1913, she supported herself by playing piano at a dancing school while writing verse at night. In 1914 the magazine Vanity Fair accepted one of her poems, and the following year she took an editorial job at Vogue for ten dollars a week, writing captions for fashion photographs ^[2]. The precise, compressed wit she practiced in those captions became a lifelong signature.

Parker moved from Vogue to Vanity Fair in 1918, where she replaced P. G. Wodehouse as the magazine's drama critic, an unusual post for a woman in her mid twenties ^[3]. Her reviews were sharp enough to anger powerful Broadway producers, and in 1920 the magazine dismissed you might say the most quotable critic in New York after complaints about her notices. Her colleagues Robert Benchley and Robert E. Sherwood resigned in protest, and the episode pushed her into freelance work that broadened her audience ^[2].

By then she had married Edwin Pond Parker II, a Wall Street stockbroker she wed in 1917, and she kept his surname for the rest of her career even after their divorce ^[1]. In 1919 she began lunching with Benchley, Sherwood, and a circle of editors, critics, and playwrights at the Algonquin Hotel on West 44th Street. The group, which came to be called the Algonquin Round Table, included Alexander Woollcott, Franklin Pierce Adams, George S. Kaufman, and Harold Ross, and its members traded lines that newspaper columnists reprinted across the country ^[3]. Adams quoted Parker regularly in his column The Conning Tower, spreading her reputation as the fastest wit in a room full of professional wits.

When Harold Ross founded The New Yorker in 1925, Parker was listed among the editorial board members, and she became one of the young magazine's defining voices. Writing book reviews under the byline Constant Reader, she demonstrated that criticism could be both exact and funny, and her short verse appeared in its pages alongside her prose ^[4].

Any account of Dorothy Parker achievements begins with her first poetry collection, Enough Rope, published in 1926. The book became a bestseller, an uncommon feat for verse, and made light, rueful poems about love, death, and disappointment part of the American vernacular ^[2]. She followed it with Sunset Gun in 1928 and Death and Taxes in 1931, then gathered her verse in Not So Deep as a Well in 1936 ^[1].

Her fiction earned equal respect. The story "Big Blonde," a portrait of a fading party girl named Hazel Morse, won the O. Henry Award for the best short story of 1929 ^[3]. Her collections Laments for the Living (1930) and After Such Pleasures (1933) were combined and expanded in Here Lies (1939). Stories such as "A Telephone Call" and "The Waltz" used interior monologue to expose the gap between what women said and what they felt, a technique critics still study ^[4].

In the 1930s Parker moved to Hollywood with her second husband, Alan Campbell, and the pair became a sought-after screenwriting team. Their work on the 1937 film A Star Is Born brought Parker an Academy Award nomination for its screenplay, and she received a second nomination for Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman in 1947 ^[5]. She also contributed to the screenplay of Alfred Hitchcock's Saboteur in 1942. At her peak the couple earned several thousand dollars a week, a fortune during the Depression ^[2].

Parker's private life was as turbulent as her public wit was polished. Her marriage to Edwin Parker ended in divorce in 1928 after long separations shaped by his service in the First World War and his struggles with alcohol and morphine ^[1]. She had affairs that ended badly, and she attempted suicide more than once during the 1920s, experiences that fed the dark undercurrent in poems that joked about razors, rivers, and gas ^[2].

In 1934 she married Alan Campbell, an actor and writer eleven years her junior. The two divorced in 1947, remarried in 1950, separated again, and reconciled in 1961, remaining together until Campbell died of a drug overdose in West Hollywood in 1963 ^[3]. They worked side by side on more than a dozen film projects, though Parker was candid about finding studio work tedious.

Politics claimed an increasing share of her energy. She reported on the Loyalist side of the Spanish Civil War in 1937, helped found the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, and raised money for left-wing causes throughout the 1930s and 1940s ^[6]. Those commitments carried a price: she was called before investigators during the anticommunist fervor of the early 1950s, refused to name associates, and was blacklisted by the Hollywood studios ^[5].

The blacklist ended Parker's screenwriting income, and her later output slowed. She collaborated with Arnaud d'Usseau on the Broadway play The Ladies of the Corridor in 1953, a drama about lonely women in a residential hotel that she considered among her proudest work, though it ran only briefly ^[2]. She continued to publish occasional stories and reviewed books for Esquire magazine from 1957 into the early 1960s, filing copy with growing difficulty as her health and eyesight declined ^[4].

After Campbell's death in 1963 she returned from California to New York City and lived alone at the Volney, a residential hotel on the Upper East Side, with a poodle for company. Interviewers who visited found her dismissive of the Round Table legend, insisting that the group had traded wisecracks rather than wisdom ^[3]. In 1958 the National Institute of Arts and Letters had awarded her the Marjorie Peabody Waite Award, and in 1959 she was inducted into the institute itself, recognition that pleased her more than her reputation as a jokesmith ^[1].

Dorothy Parker died of a heart attack at the Volney on June 7, 1967, at the age of 73 ^[1]. Her will surprised nearly everyone: she left her estate to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a man she had never met, with the provision that it pass to the NAACP upon his death ^[6].

Parker's ashes had a strange afterlife that became part of any full Dorothy Parker biography. Unclaimed for years, they sat for a time in a filing cabinet at her lawyer's office before the NAACP created a memorial garden for them at its Baltimore headquarters in 1988. In 2020 the remains were moved to her family's plot in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, closing a story that had run more than half a century ^[6].

Her influence on American humor is hard to overstate. The Portable Dorothy Parker, first issued by Viking in 1944 while she was still alive, has never gone out of print, one of only a handful of the original Portable series titles that can make that claim ^[4]. Generations of columnists, comic essayists, and light-verse writers have imitated her compression, and lines from her poems still circulate wherever people trade quotations. Scholars have also reassessed her as a serious chronicler of women's inner lives, reading stories like "Big Blonde" as social criticism rather than comedy ^[2].

Among the more durable Dorothy Parker facts is her formal recognition by institutions she once mocked. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People continues to benefit from her copyrights, the Dorothy Parker Society leads walking tours of her Manhattan haunts, and in 1992 the United States Postal Service placed her on a commemorative stamp in its Literary Arts series ^[6]. The woman who once suggested her epitaph should read "Excuse my dust" remains, decades on, impossible to ignore.