Selected Readings From The Portable Dorothy Parker
by Dorothy Parker, Marion Meade (Editor)
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When it comes to expressing the pleasure and pain of being just a touch too smart to be happy, Dorothy Parker is still the champion, after all these years. Along with Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, and the rest of the Algonquin Round Table, she dominated American popular literature in the 1920s and 1930s.These unabridged selections of more than thirty short stories and poems is essential for any Parker fan and an excellent way for new readers to make the acquaintance of one of the show more twentieth century's most quotable authors, whose memorable lines include: "She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B," "This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force," and "Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses." Parker's ability to lay bare the follies, myths, and hypocrisies of her characters in such a wickedly funny—sometimes sad—manner is unmatched, and her attention to language, quirks, and the other little details of life make her stories come vividly to life.
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If you've never read any Dorothy Parker, you've missed a great deal of sharp observation, trenchant wit and a talent for the caustic one-liner that is rarely equaled. This is a nice collection of 30 or so pieces that provide a representative sampling of her work from The New Yorker, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Life, and the host of other places that published her work. It includes her O. Henry Award-winning "The Big Blonde".
The thing about her writing is that, while it's bitingly funny, it usually exposes an underlying sadness in people or society. A too steady diet of it leaves me a bit cheerless. Therefore, I suggest sipping from this, keeping in on the nightstand and mixing in a story or review with your other reading.
The thing about her writing is that, while it's bitingly funny, it usually exposes an underlying sadness in people or society. A too steady diet of it leaves me a bit cheerless. Therefore, I suggest sipping from this, keeping in on the nightstand and mixing in a story or review with your other reading.
Thank god that's over with. I believe that Parker's legacy as an extemporaneous wit far exceeds that of her prose. It is as a poet that she really shines.
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147+ Works 10,284 Members
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 in Morristown, New Jersey, for a brief time before show more 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
Marion Meade is the author of Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? and Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties. She has also written biographies of Woody Allen, Buster Keaton, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Madame Blavatsky, and Victoria Woodhull, as well as two novels about medieval France.
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Awards
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Selected Readings From The Portable Dorothy Parker
- Original title
- Selected Readings From The Portable Dorothy Parker
- Original publication date
- 2007
- Important places
- New York, New York, USA; Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, USA
Classifications
- Genres
- Fiction and Literature, Poetry
- DDC/MDS
- 818.5209 — Literature & rhetoric American literature in English American miscellaneous writings in English 20th Century 1900-1945 Biography
- LCC
- PS3531 .A5855 .A6 — Language and Literature American literature American literature Individual authors 1900-1960
- BISAC
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- 23
- Popularity
- 1,105,408
- Reviews
- 2
- Rating
- (3.25)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 7
- ASINs
- 1
