Dorothy Parker was born 128 years ago today.
Parker was an American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist, best known for her wit, wisecracks and eye for 20th century urban foibles.
From a conflicted and unhappy childhood, Parker rose to acclaim — both for her literary output in such venues as The New Yorker and as a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table. Following the breakup of the circle, Parker traveled to Hollywood to pursue screenwriting.
Her successes there, including two Academy Award nominations, were curtailed as her involvement in left wing politics led to a place on the Hollywood blacklist. Dismissive of her own talents, she deplored her reputation as a "wisecracker." Nevertheless, her literary output and reputation for her sharp wit have endured.
Also known as Dot or Dottie, Parker was born Dorothy Rothschild to Jacob Henry and Eliza Annie Rothschild at 732 Ocean Avenue in Long Branch, New Jersey, where her parents had a summer beach cottage.
Parker wrote in her essay, "My Hometown," that her parents got her back to their Manhattan apartment shortly after Labor Day so she could be called a true New Yorker.
She grew up on the Upper West Side and attended Roman Catholic elementary school at the Convent of the Blessed Sacrament on West 79th Street with sister Helen, despite having a Jewish father and Protestant stepmother. Parker once joked that she was asked to leave following her characterization of the Immaculate Conception as "spontaneous combustion."
Parker sold her first poem to Vanity Fair magazine in 1914 and, some months later, was hired as an editorial assistant for another Condé Nast magazine, Vogue. She moved to Vanity Fair as a staff writer after two years at Vogue.
In 1917, she met and married a Wall Street stockbroker, Edwin Pond Parker II, but they were separated by his army service in World War I. She had ambivalent feelings about her Jewish heritage given the strong antisemitism of that era and joked that she married to escape her name.
Her career took off while she was writing theatre criticism for Vanity Fair, which she began to do in 1918 as a stand-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 began lunching at the Algonquin Hotel on a near-daily basis and became founding members of the Algonquin Round Table.
The Round Table numbered among its members the newspaper columnists Franklin Pierce Adams and Alexander Woollcott. Through their re-printing of her lunchtime remarks and short verses, particularly in Adams' column, "The Conning Tower,” Dorothy began developing a national reputation as a wit.
One of her most famous comments was made when the group was informed that former president Calvin Coolidge had died. Parker remarked, "How could they tell?" Parker's caustic wit as a critic initially proved popular, but she was eventually terminated by Vanity Fair in 1920 after her criticisms began to offend powerful producers too often.
In solidarity, both Benchley and Sherwood resigned in protest. When Harold Ross founded The New Yorker in 1925, Parker and Benchley were part of a "board of editors" established by Ross to allay concerns of his investors.
Parker's first piece for the magazine appeared in its second issue. Parker became famous for her short, viciously humorous poems, many about the perceived ludicrousness of her many (largely unsuccessful) romantic affairs and others wistfully considering the appeal of suicide. The next 15 years were Parker's greatest period of productivity and success.
In the 1920s alone, she published some 300 poems and free verses in Vanity Fair, Vogue, "The Conning Tower" and The New Yorker as well as Life, McCall's and The New Republic.
Parker died on June 7, 1967 of a heart attack at the age of 73.
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. Her executor, Lillian Hellman, bitterly but unsuccessfully contested this disposition. Her ashes remained unclaimed in various places, including her attorney Paul O'Dwyer's filing cabinet, for approximately 17 years.
In 1988, the NAACP claimed Parker's remains and designed a memorial garden for them outside their Baltimore headquarters. The plaque reads:
Here lie the ashes of Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) humorist, writer, critic. Defender of human and civil rights.
For her epitaph she suggested, “Excuse my dust”
Above, Parker works at her typewriter in 1941