Dorothy Parker (née Rothschild; August 22, 1893 – June 7, 1967) was an American poet, literary critic and writer of fiction. Based in New York, she was known for her caustic wisecracks, and eye for 20th-century urban foibles.
Parker rose to acclaim, both for her literary works published in magazines, such as The New Yorker, and for her role as a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table. In the early 1930s, Parker traveled to Hollywood to pursue screenwriting. Her successes there, including two Academy Award nominations, were curtailed when her involvement in left-wing politics resulted in her being placed on the Hollywood blacklist.
Dismissive of her own talents, she deplored her reputation as a "wisecracker". Nevertheless, both her literary output and reputation for sharp wit have endured. Some of her works have been set to music.
Dorothy Parker, also known as 'Dot' or 'Dottie', was born Dorothy Rothschild in 1893, the youngest of four children of Jacob Henry Rothschild and his wife Elizabeth Annie (née Marston) (1851–1898), at 732 Ocean Avenue in Long Branch, New Jersey. Her mother was of Scottish descent. Her father was the son of Sampson Jacob Rothschild (1818–1899) and Mary Greissman (b. 1824), both Prussian-born Jews. Sampson Jacob Rothschild was a merchant who immigrated to the United States around 1846, settling in Monroe County, Alabama. Dorothy's father was one of five known siblings: Simon (1854–1908); Samuel (b. 1857); Hannah (1860–1911), later Mrs. William Henry Theobald; and Martin, born in Manhattan on December 12, 1865, who perished in the sinking of the Titanic in 1912.
Her mother died in Manhattan in July 1898, a month before Parker's fifth birthday. In 1900, her father married Eleanor Frances Lewis (1851–1903), a Protestant. Author Dorothy Herrmann claimed that Parker hated both her father, who allegedly physically abused her, and her stepmother, whom she refused to call "mother", "stepmother", or "Eleanor", instead referring to her as "the housekeeper". However, her biographer Marion Meade refers to this account as "largely false", stating that the atmosphere in which Parker grew up was indulgent, affectionate, supportive and generous. Eleanor died in 1903, when Parker was nine.
Parker was raised on the Upper West Side and attended a Roman Catholic elementary school at the Convent of the Blessed Sacrament on West 79th Street; Parker joked that she was asked to leave following her characterization of the Immaculate Conception as "spontaneous combustion".
She later attended Miss Dana's School, a finishing school in Morristown, New Jersey, graduating in 1911, at the age of 18, according to Arthur F. Kinney, although Rhonda Pettit and Marion Meade state she never graduated from high school. Following her father's death in 1913, she played piano at a dancing school to earn a living while she worked on her poetry. She sold her first poem to Vanity Fair magazine in 1914 and some months later was hired as an editorial assistant for Vogue. She moved to Vanity Fair as a staff writer after two years at Vogue.
In the winter of 1916, Parker and the writer Thorne Smith lived at the same New York boarding house. They were friends and reportedly had a sexual relationship. At the 1916 wedding of her friend Frances Heywood Billings, with whom she lived after her father's death, Parker met a Wall Street stockbroker, Edwin Pond Parker II
(1893–1933); Parker recalled him as "beautiful" but "not very smart". They married on June 30th, 1917. The match was not approved and no family members attended the wedding. On July 30th, 1917, Edwin enlisted to serve in World War I with the Army Medical Corps. He returned in 1919 and the couple divorced in 1927, with Edwin marrying a woman nine years his senior immediately after the divorce.
Parker's career took off in 1918 while she was writing theater criticism for Vanity Fair, filling in for the vacationing P. G. Wodehouse. At the magazine, she met Robert Benchley, who became a close friend, and Robert E. Sherwood. The trio lunched at the Algonquin Hotel almost daily. They were founding members of what became known as the Algonquin Round Table. Among its members were newspaper columnists Franklin P. Adams and Alexander Woollcott, as well as the editor Harold Ross, the novelist Edna Ferber, the reporter Heywood Broun, and the comedian Harpo Marx. Through their publication of her lunchtime remarks and short verses, particularly in Adams' column "The Conning Tower", Parker began developing a national reputation as a wit.
Even though many found Parker's caustic theater reviews very entertaining, she was dismissed by Vanity Fair on January 11, 1920, after her criticisms had too often offended the playwright–producer David Belasco, the actress Billie Burke, the impresario Florenz Ziegfeld, and others. Benchley, who was also a Vanity Fair columnist, resigned in protest. (Sherwood is sometimes reported to have done so too but conflicts between management and staff had been ongoing and he was fired in December 1919.) Parker soon started working for Ainslee's Magazine, which had a higher circulation. Her poems and short stories were published widely, "not only in upscale places like Vanity Fair (which was happier to publish her than employ her), The Smart Set, and The American Mercury, but also in the popular Ladies' Home Journal, Saturday Evening Post, and Life".
When Harold Ross founded The New Yorker in 1925, Parker and Benchley were part of a board of editors he established to allay the concerns of his investors. The magazine's first issue was published on February 21, 1925 and Parker wrote drama reviews for the first two issues. Her first poem in the New Yorker, "A Certain Lady", appeared in the February 28th issue. She became famous for her short, viciously humorous poems, many highlighting ludicrous aspects of her numerous and largely unsuccessful romantic affairs, and others wistfully considering the appeal of suicide.
The next 15 years were Parker's period of greatest productivity and success. In the 1920s alone she published some 300 poems and free verses in Vanity Fair, Vogue, "The Conning Tower" column, and The New Yorker as well as in Life, McCall's and The New Republic. Her poem "Song in a Minor Key" was included as part of a candid 1922 interview with N.E.A. writer Josephine Van de Grift.
Parker published her first volume of poetry, Enough Rope, in 1926. It sold 47,000 copies and garnered impressive reviews. The Nation described her verse as "caked with a salty humor, rough with splinters of disillusion, and tarred with a bright black authenticity". Enough Rope included Parker's two-line poem "News Item" – "Men seldom make passes / At girls who wear glasses" – that would remain among her most remembered epigrams. She amused readers with poems that had a surprise or trick ending, akin to an O. Henry short story, such as:
While some critics, notably The New York Times' reviewer, dismissed her work as "flapper verse", the book helped secure Parker's reputation for sparkling wit. She released two more volumes of verse, Sunset Gun (1928) and Death and Taxes (1931), along with the short story collections Laments for the Living (1930) and After Such Pleasures (1933). Not So Deep as a Well (1936) collected much of the material previously published in Rope, Gun, and Death; and she re-released her fiction with a few new pieces in 1939 as Here Lies.
In a 2000 essay, Literature Professor Wendy Martin said of Parker: "Although her sardonic poetry was extremely popular when it was published and remains readable today, her short stories are her greatest accomplishment." Parker's story "Big Blonde", published in The Bookman, won the O. Henry Award as the best short story of 1929. Several of her stories were written as soliloquies, where the narrator's voice evokes humor and pathos, such as the opening two paragraphs of "A Telephone Call":Please, God, let him telephone me now. Dear God, let him call me now. I won't ask anything else of You, truly I won't. It isn't very much to ask. It would be so little to You, God, such a little, little thing. Only let him telephone now. Please, God. Please, please, please.If I didn't think about it, maybe the telephone might ring. Sometimes it does that. If I could think of something else. If I could think of something else. Maybe if I counted five hundred by fives, it might ring by that time. I'll count slowly. I won't cheat. And if it rings when I get to three hundred, I won't stop; I won't answer it until I get to five hundred. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five, forty, forty-five, fifty…. Oh, please ring. Please.