Dorothy Parker

Dorothy Parker, born Dorothy Rothschild on August 22, 1893, in Long Branch, New Jersey, was an American poet, fiction writer, literary critic, and Broadway performer whose career spanned the stage, print journalism, and Hollywood screenwriting. She died on June 7, 1967.

Parker was born to Jacob Henry Rothschild and his wife Eliza Annie, née Marston, at 732 Ocean Avenue. Her mother, of Scottish descent, died in Manhattan in July 1898, shortly before Parker turned five. Her father, whose own father Sampson Jacob Rothschild had emigrated from Prussia around 1846 and settled in Monroe County, Alabama, remarried in 1900 to Eleanor Frances Lewis, who died in 1903. Parker grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and attended the Convent of the Blessed Sacrament on West 79th Street alongside her sister Helen and classmate Mercedes de Acosta. She later enrolled at Miss Dana's School, a finishing school in Morristown, New Jersey. Following her father's death in 1913, she supported herself by playing piano at a dancing school while continuing to write poetry.

Her writing career began in earnest when she sold her first poem to Vanity Fair in 1914 and was subsequently hired as an editorial assistant at Vogue. She transferred to Vanity Fair as a staff writer after two years. In 1917, she married Wall Street stockbroker Edwin Pond Parker II before he departed for service in World War I with the U.S. Army 4th Division, and she retained his surname professionally throughout her life.

During the same decade, Parker maintained an active presence on the Broadway stage. Between 1909 and 1919, she appeared in a number of productions, among them La Belle Paree, Bow-Sing, The Highway of Life, the play Experience, and The Woman in Room 13. Her theatrical work overlapped with her emergence as a critic: in 1918 she began writing theater reviews for Vanity Fair, initially filling in for P. G. Wodehouse during his vacation. That role brought her into contact with Robert Benchley and Robert E. Sherwood, and the three became founding members of the Algonquin Round Table, a circle of writers and intellectuals that gathered almost daily at the Algonquin Hotel and also included Franklin P. Adams, Alexander Woollcott, Harold Ross, Edna Ferber, Heywood Broun, and Harpo Marx. Adams in particular helped build Parker's national reputation by publishing her witticisms and short verses in his column "The Conning Tower." Parker was dismissed from Vanity Fair on January 11, 1920, after her theater criticism repeatedly offended figures including playwright-producer David Belasco, actress Billie Burke, and impresario Florenz Ziegfeld. Benchley resigned from the magazine in protest.

Parker subsequently contributed to Ainslee's Magazine and published widely across both literary and popular outlets, including The Smart Set, The American Mercury, the Ladies' Home Journal, the Saturday Evening Post, and Life. When Harold Ross founded The New Yorker in 1925, Parker served on its founding editorial board, and her work appeared as early as the magazine's second issue. Her first poetry collection, Enough Rope, was published in 1926, sold 47,000 copies, and earned substantial critical attention. It contained the frequently quoted two-line poem "News Item." Two further poetry collections followed — Sunset Gun in 1928 and Death and Taxes in 1931 — along with the short story collections Laments for the Living in 1930 and After Such Pleasures in 1933. A collected edition of her verse, Not So Deep as a Well, appeared in 1936, and a revised fiction collection, Here Lies, followed in 1939. Her short story "Big Blonde," published in The Bookman, received the O. Henry Award for best short story of 1929.

In the early 1930s Parker moved to Hollywood to pursue screenwriting, earning two Academy Award nominations for her work there. Her career in the film industry was curtailed when her involvement in left-wing political causes led to her being placed on the Hollywood blacklist. Throughout her life Parker was known for her sharp wit, though she herself was dismissive of her reputation as a wisecracker. Her literary output, encompassing roughly 300 poems and free verses published in the 1920s alone, as well as her fiction and criticism, has continued to be read and discussed long after her death.