Dorothy Parker (née Rothschild; August 22, 1893 – June 7, 1967) was an American poet, writer, critic, and satirist based in New York; she was best known for her wit, wisecracks, and eye for 20th-century urban foibles.
Her successes in Hollywood include two Academy Award nominations, but her work there was curtailed when her involvement in left-wing politics resulted in the being placed on the Hollywood blacklist.
In 1917, she met and married a Wall Street stockbroker, Edwin Pond Parker II, but they were soon 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 later joked that she married to escape her name.
Parker’s career took off in 1918 while she was writing theatre criticism for Vanity Fair, where she met Robert Benchley and Robert E. Sherwood. The trio began lunching at the Algonquin Hotel on a near-daily basis and became founding members of what became known as the Algonquin Round Table, which included the newspaper columnists Franklin Pierce Adams and Alexander Woollcott.
Through their publication of Parker’s lunchtime remarks and short verses, Dorothy began developing a national reputation as a wit. When the group was informed that famously taciturn former president Calvin Coolidge had died, Parker remarked, “How could they tell?”
When Harold Ross founded The New Yorker in 1925, Parker and Benchley were part of a “board of editors.”
Her best-known short story, “Big Blonde,” published in The Bookman magazine, was awarded the O. Henry Award as the best short story of 1929.
During the 1930s and 1940s, Parker became an increasingly vocal advocate of civil liberties and civil rights, and a frequent critic of authority figures. During the Great Depression, she was among numerous American intellectuals and artists who became involved in related social movements. She reported in 1937 on the Loyalist cause in Spain for the Communist magazine, The New Masses, and she helped to found the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League in 1936, which the FBI suspected of being a Communist Party front.
Parker was listed as a Communist by the publication Red Channels in 1950. Movie studio bosses placed her on the Hollywood blacklist. [PLEASE REVIEW OUR PODCAST: “LARRY PARKS’ DAY IN COURT”]
Parker died on June 7, 1967, of a heart attack. In her will, she bequeathed her estate to Martin Luther King Jr. Following King’s death, her estate was bequeathed by his family to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Her ashes remained unclaimed in various places, including her attorney Paul O’Dwyer’s filing cabinet, for approximately 17 years. They are now in an urn buried beneath the floor of NAACP headquarters.
Her self-described obituary: “Pardon my dust.”
Here We Are, by Dorothy Parker (Playing time: 19:33)
Starring David Courtenay and Jamie Hixon
(When the wedding bells fade, the great adventure begins!)
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Luigi Pirandello (28 June 1867 – 10 December 1936) was an Italian dramatist, novelist, poet, and short story writer whose greatest contributions were his plays.