Dorothy Parker (1) (1893–1967)
Author of The Portable Dorothy Parker [1973 Deluxe Edition]
For other authors named Dorothy Parker, see the disambiguation page.
About the Author
Poet and short story writer Dorothy Parker was born in New Jersey on August 22, 1893. When she was 5, her mother died and her father, a clothes salesman, remarried. Parker had a great antipathy toward her stepmother and refused to speak to her. She attended parochial school and Miss Dana's school show more in Morristown, New Jersey, for a brief time before dropping out at age 14. A voracious reader, she decided to pursue a career in literature. She began her career by writing verse as well as captions for a fashion magazine. During the years of her greatest fame, Dorothy Parker was known primarily as a writer of light verse, an essential member of the Algonquin Round Table, and a caustic and witty critic of literature and society. She is remembered now as an almost legendary figure of the 1920s and 1930s. Her reviews and staff contributions to three of the most sophisticated magazines of this century, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, and Esquire, were notable for their put-downs. For all her highbrow wit, however, Dorothy Parker was liberal, even radical, in her political views, and the hard veneer of brittle toughness that she showed to the world was often a shield for frustrated idealism and soft sensibilities. The best of her fiction is marked by a balance of ironic detachment and sympathetic compassion, as in "Big Blonde," which won the O. Henry Award for 1929 and is still her best-remembered and most frequently anthologized story. The best of Dorothy Parker is readily and compactly accessible in The Portable Dorothy Parker. Her own selection of stories and verse for the original edition of that compilation, published in 1944, remains intact in the revised edition, but included also are additional stories, reviews, and articles. Parker died of a heart attack at the age of 73 in 1967. In her will, she bequeathed her estate to the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. foundation. Following King's death, her estate was passed on to the NAACP. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Works by Dorothy Parker
Dorothy Parker : Selected Stories (Big Blonde, Too Bad, Song of Shirt, Mr. Durant, Diary of a New York Lady, Standard… (1995) 15 copies
Alpine Giggle Week: How Dorothy Parker Set Out to Write the Great American Novel and Ended Up in a TB Colony Atop an… (2014) 9 copies
Here We Are 5 copies
Spreekt u maar 3 copies
The Standard of Living 3 copies
The Indispensable Dorothy Parker 3 copies
The Algonquin Wits: A Crackling Collection of Bon Mots, Wisecracks, Epigrams and Gags (1968) 2 copies
Arrangement in Black and White 2 copies
You Were Perfectly Fine 2 copies
Glory in the Daytime 2 copies
Clothe the Naked 2 copies
Soldiers of the Republic 2 copies
The Last Tea 2 copies
New York To Detroit 2 copies
Little Curtis 2 copies
The Sayings of Dorothy Parker (Duckworth Sayings Series) by Dorothy Parker (1995-04-06) (1726) 1 copy
Trade Winds [1938 film] — Screenwriter — 1 copy
Bohemia [poem] 1 copy
Suzy [1936 film] — Screenwriter — 1 copy
The Garter (Short Stories) 1 copy
Comment [poem] 1 copy
Parker Dorothy 1 copy
The Little Hours 1 copy
The Lovely Leave 1 copy
Mr. Durant 1 copy
One Perfect Rose [poem] 1 copy
The Wonderful Old Gentleman 1 copy
Song of the Shirt, 1941 1 copy
Too Bad 1 copy
Lady With A Lamp 1 copy
Just a Little One 1 copy
Horsie 1 copy
Cousin Larry 1 copy
Sentiment 1 copy
I Live on Your Visits 1 copy
Lolita 1 copy
The Bolt Behind the Blue 1 copy
But The One On The Right 1 copy
Story {poem} 1 copy
The Waltz 1 copy
Associated Works
American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, Volume One: Henry Adams to Dorothy Parker (2000) — Contributor — 424 copies
The 50 Funniest American Writers: An Anthology of Humor from Mark Twain to The Onion (2011) — Contributor — 237 copies
First Fiction: An Anthology of the First Published Stories by Famous Writers (1994) — Contributor — 182 copies
Poetry Speaks Expanded: Hear Poets Read Their Own Work from Tennyson to Plath (2007) — Contributor — 147 copies
The Vicious Circle: Mystery and Crime Stories by Members of the Algonquin Round Table (2007) — Contributor — 86 copies
The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present (2020) — Contributor — 79 copies
Out of the Best Books: An Anthology of Literature, Vol. 3: Intelligent Family Living (1967) — Contributor — 33 copies
Fifty Years of the American Short Story from the O. Henry Awards 1919-1970 (1970) — Contributor — 13 copies
Great American Short Stories: O. Henry Memorial Prize Winning Stories, 1919-1934 (1935) — Contributor — 10 copies
The Best Short Stories of 1931 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story (1931) — Contributor — 7 copies
The Best from Cosmopolitan — Contributor — 4 copies
Fifty Years of the American Short Story from the O. Henry Awards 1919-1970, Volume II (1970) — Contributor — 3 copies
The Best Short Stories of 1928 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story — Contributor — 3 copies
Schöne Ferien — Contributor — 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Parker, Dorothy
- Legal name
- Rothschild, Dorothy (birth name)
- Other names
- Dot
Dottie - Birthdate
- 1893-08-22
- Date of death
- 1967-06-07
- Burial location
- NAACP Headquarters, Baltimore, Maryland, USA
- Gender
- female
- Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Long Branch, New Jersey, USA
- Place of death
- New York, New York, USA
- Cause of death
- heart attack
- Places of residence
- Morristown, New Jersey, USA
Hollywood, California, USA
New York, New York, USA - Education
- convent
- Occupations
- journalist
writer
satirist
drama critic
screenwriter
poet (show all 8)
short story writer
columnist - Relationships
- Rothschild, Martin (uncle)
Campbell, Alan (husband)
Hellman, Lillian (friend, executor) - Organizations
- Algonquin Round Table
Vogue
Vanity Fair
The New Yorker
Paramount Pictures - Awards and honors
- American Academy of Arts and Letters (Literature ∙ 1959)
New Jersey Hall of Fame (2014) - Short biography
- Dorothy Parker, née Rothschild, was born in the West End section of Long Branch, New Jersey, to J. Henry and Elizabeth Rothschild. Her mother died when she was four years old. She attended a Catholic grammar school and a finishing school in Morristown, NJ, and her formal education ended when she was 14.
In 1914, she sold her first poem to Vanity Fair. At age 22, she took an editorial job at Vogue, and continued to write poems for newspapers and magazines. In 1917, she joined Vanity Fair. That same year, she married Edwin P. Parker, a stockbroker, but they divorced in 1928.
S In 1919, she became a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table, the informal gathering of writers who lunched at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City. In 1922, Parker published her first short story and over the years, she contributed poetry, fiction and book reviews as the "Constant Reader" columnist.
In 1934, Parker married actor-writer Alan Campbell and the couple relocated to Los Angeles. They divorced in 1947, and remarried in 1950, but their relationship deteriorated.
She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1959 and was a visiting professor at California State College in Los Angeles in 1963. She returned to Manhattan and lived in the Volney Hotel on the Upper East Side for the last 15 years of her life.
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Statistics
- Works
- 128
- Also by
- 70
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- 9,099
- Popularity
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- Rating
- 4.0
- Reviews
- 116
- ISBNs
- 222
- Languages
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- Favorited
- 139
- Touchstones
- 190