LEST WE FORGET DOROTHY PARKER
(August 22, 1893 - June 7, 1967)

When she died in 1967, she made one last strong political statement with her will: her entire estate was left to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. a man she had never met but whose cause she espoused.

As is revealed in the quote with this picture of her in 1921 at age 27, "In no way are our producers more wasteful of genius than in their disregard of negro actors."


Poet, short-story writer, critic, and playwright, she was born in New York City, and she recalled her urban childhood as unpleasant and stifling and her father and stepmother as oppressive.  She entered the world of the New York working girl ( a subject for later poems and stories) and went to work for Vogue, writing advertising copy and the following year joined the staff of Vanity Fair.  In 1919 she was promoted to drama critic but was dismissed the following year for writing damning reviews that angered the theatrical interests whose ads helped to support the magazine.

         For a few years after her dismissal from Vanity Fair, she contributed poems, stories, sketches and reviews to several magazines.  When Harold Ross founded the New Yorker in 1925, she became a member of the staff, writing drama reviews when Robert Benchley was on vacation.

It was during the 1920s that she became associated with a number of writers and other intellectuals, including
Robert Sherwood, James Thurber, Franklin P. Adams, 
Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman. With these friends and others she founded the famous Round Table at the Algonquin Hotel. They met over lunch at a table reserved for them to exchange critical views and humorous anecdotes and quick-witted repartee. She was a prime mover in the organization and is generally recognized as having been their leader until she left the circle in 1930.

This was a period of exciting career moves for her. In 1926 she published her first collection of verse, Enough Rope, which became a best seller, and she had had a play produced on Broadway.

But her personal life was extremely troubled by a failing marriage. She twice attempted suicide. Lillian Hellman, her close friend, remarked  that she had felt herself to be unworthy, inadequate, a failure.

The decade of the 1930s saw her involved with Hollywood, writing screenplays which was not to her liking but lucrative. In 1933 she married fellow screenwriter and actor Alan Campbell. Their best known efforts include:
Big Broadcast of 1936, the first A Star Is Born,
Sweethearts, and Mr. Skeffington. They also wrote some dialogue and scenes for Hellman's screenplay of The Little Foxes. 

She was heavily involved in leftist politics and openly acknowledged that she was a Communist. She was an active worker with the Screen Actors' Guild's attempt to unionize the industry. In the late 1930s she went to Spain to work for the Loyalist cause during the Civil War and demonstrated her abilities as a serious journalist.  She, like other illustrious writers of the time, was blacklisted in Hollywood in the 1950s and was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, which cited her for contempt.

Most of her best prose and poetry is distinguished by her sophisticated, caustic, tough though elegant approach.  She said what she had to say in the fewest posssible words.  Her themes involved the position of women in society she often viewed as phony and shallow, the alienation of human beings in the modern world, and the sorrow of love gone wrong (from her own experiences).

She wrote several plays, most of which were not successful. But her last contribution to American drama occurred in 1956 when, along with John La Touche and Richard Wilbur, she contributed lyrics for the momentous musical Candide, with book by Lillian Hellman and score by Leonard Bernstein.

She belongs to that group of writers---including figures as diverse as Samuel Johnson and Oscar Wilde---who are remembered more for what they said than for any piece of literature they ever produced. Her short story "Big Blonde," won the O. Henry Award.  Her memory lives on in the isolated verses like "Men seldom make passes/At girls who wear glasses." or "Brevity is the soul of lingerie."

Lillian Hellman devotes one chapter of her autobiographical An Unfinished Woman to Parker, close friend and collaborator. It contains a tribute that reveals much about the woman who hid behind the mask of barbed comments.  Dorothy Parker's "view of people" she writes, "was original and sharp, her elaborate ever-delicate manners made her a pleasure to live with. She liked books and was generous about writers, and the wit was so wonderful that neither age nor illness ever dried up the spring from which it came fresh each day."

RESOURCES:  Notable Women in the American Theatre. 1989.  W. Kenneth Holditch
Keats, John. You Might As Well Live: The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker. 1972
Kinney, Arthur F. Dorothy Parker. 1978
Gaines, James R. Wits End: Days and Nights of the Algonquin Round Table. 1977
Woollcott, Alexander. While Rome Burns (a chapter "Our Mrs. Parker") 1934.
Her papers are the property of the NAACP. Most of her letters and memorabilia are at the
Houghton Library, Harvard University.