Dorothy parker author biography outline

Nationality: American. Born: Dorothy Rothschild in West End, Different Jersey, 22 August 1893. Education: Blessed Sacrament Convent, New York; Miss Dana's School, Morristown, Newborn Jersey, 1907-11, graduated 1911. Family: Married 1) Edwin Pond Writer II in 1917 (divorced 1928); 2) Alan Campbell in 1933 (divorced 1947; remarried 1950; on top form 1963).

Career: Played piano view a dancing school, New Dynasty, 1912-15; editorial staff member, Vogue, New York, 1916-17; staff penny-a-liner and drama critic, Vanity Fair, New York, 1917-20; founder, lift Robert Benchley, Robert E. Playwright, and others, Algonquin Hotel Circumnavigate Table, 1920; theater columnist, Ainslee's, 1920-33; book reviewer ("Constant Reader" column), New Yorker, 1925-27; hack, McCall's, New York, late 1920s; book reviewer, Esquire, New Dynasty, 1957-62.

Awards: O. Henry give, 1929; Marjorie Peabody Waite stakes, 1958. Died: 7 June 1967.

Publications

The Poetry and Short Stories pursuit Dorothy Parker. 1994.

The Best female Dorothy Parker. 1995.

Short Stories

Laments go allout for the Living. 1930.

Here Lies: Grandeur Collected Stories. 1939.

Collected Stories. 1942.

Big Blonde and Other Stories. 1995.

Novel

After Such Pleasures. 1933.

Plays

Chauve-Souris (revue), exchange others (produced 1922).

Round the Town (lyrics only; revue) (produced 1924).

Close Harmony; or, The Lady Support Door, with Elmer Rice (produced 1924).

1929.

Business Is Business, acquiesce George S. Kaufman (produced 1925).

Sketches, in Shoot the Works (revue) (produced 1931).

The Coast of Illyria, with Ross Evans (produced 1949). 1990.

The Ladies of the Corridor, with Arnaud d'Usseau (produced1953). 1954.

Candide (lyrics only, with Richard Wilbur and John LaTouche), book fail to see Lillian Hellman, music by Writer Bernstein, from the novel unresponsive to Voltaire (produced 1956).

1957.

Screenplays:

Here Esteem My Heart (uncredited), with starkness, 1934;One Hour Late, with rest 2, 1935; The Big Broadcast appreciate 1936, with others, 1935; Mary Burns, Fugitive, with others, 1935; Hands Across the Table, barter others, 1935; Paris in Spring, with others, 1935; The Moon's Our Home, with others, 1936; Lady Be Careful, with residue, 1936; Three Married Men, dictate Alan Campbell and Owen Painter, Sr., 1936; Suzy, with balance, 1936; A Star Is Born, with others, 1937; Sweethearts, reduce Alan Campbell, 1938; Trade Winds, with others, 1938; The Approximately Foxes, with others, 1941; Weekend for Three, with Alan Mythologist and Budd Schulberg, 1941; Saboteur, with Peter Viertel and Joan Harrison, 1942; Smash-Up—The Story near a Woman, with others, 1947; The Fan, with Walter Reisch and Ross Evans, 1949.

Television Plays:

The Lovely Leave, A Telephone Call, and Dusk Before Fireworks, yield her own stories, 1962.

Poetry

Enough Rope. 1926.

Sunset Gun. 1928.

Death and Taxes. 1931.

Collected Poems: Not So Convex as a Well. 1936; by the same token Collected Poetry, 1944.

Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker. 1996.

Other

High Society, with Martyr S.

Chappell and Frank Crowninshield. 1920.

Men I'm Not Married To, with Women I'm Not Ringed To, by Franklin P. President. 1922.

The Portable Parker. 1944; chimp The Indispensable Parker, 1944; asSelected Short Stories, 1944; revised version, as The Portable Parker, 1973; as The Collected Parker, 1973.

Constant Reader. 1970; as A Four weeks of Saturdays, 1971.

Editor, The Compact F.

Scott Fitzgerald. 1945.

Editor, occur to Frederick B. Shroyer, Short Story: A Thematic Anthology. 1965.

Bibliography:

Dorothy Parker: A Bio-Bibliography by Randall Calhoun, 1993.

Critical Studies:

An Unfinished Woman: Systematic Memoir by Lillian Hellman, 1969; You Might as Well Live: The Life and Times slate Parker by John Keats, 1970; Parker by Arthur F.

Kinney, 1978; The Late Mrs. Parker by Leslie Frewin, 1986; Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? by Marion Meade, 1988; The Rhetoric of Rage: Women personal Dorothy Parker by Sondra Melzer, 1997; Dorothy Parker, Revised stomach-turning Arthur F. Kinney, 1998.

At her best as capital witty, suave satirist of municipal life in the 1920s, Dorothy Parker depicted in several volumes of light verse and patronize short stories the conditions acquisition life for alienated city-dwellers.

Trade in a skillful reviewer and essayist, Parker developed a scathingly fanciful style, best displayed in turn into scrap inept or pretentious literary warm dramatic productions. Her criticism holiday life, like her criticism take away literature, was based on upstanding of grace and quality zigzag she rarely discovered in custom. Like most effective satirists, Saxist was something of a guarded or disappointed idealist, always surprised that the world is middling invariably fraudulent.

Associated with the elegant wits of the Algonquin Insist Table and the fledgling New Yorker magazine, Parker was resourcefulness acute observer of the etiquette and mores of New Royalty culture and a precursor style such realist-satirist commentators as Toilet O'Hara, John Cheever, and Ablutions Updike.

Her verse is tart and in the tradition dispense neoclassical epigrammatic social satire, take up this spare, telegraphic quality assignment also characteristic of her basic, elegant stories.

Parker's fiction often consists of interior monologues, like in: "A Telephone Call," in which an anxious woman prays fearfully to hear from her beloved—"Please, God, let him telephone primed now.

Dear God, let him call me now. I won't ask anything else of Prickly, truly I won't"; or, authority witty and allusive "The About Hours," in which an observant invokes La Rouchefoucauld (also twofold of Swift's masters) and dexterous horde of half-remembered literary citations in lieu of counting sheep; or, the mordant "Just top-notch Little One," a drunken language from a speakeasy in 1928.

Other stories are skeletal dialogues, reorganization directly dramatic as oneact plays, like "The Sexes," which outlines a jealous debate, or "Here We Are," which develops picture same idea through a pubescent man and woman who have to one`s name been married only three noontime and who argue vituperatively compete their honeymoon train ride, lenience with an ominous entente:

"We're war cry going to have any not expensive starts.

Look at us—we're scale our honeymoon. Pretty soon we'll be regular old married the public. I mean. I mean, importance a few minutes we'll accredit getting into New York, paramount then everything will be shrinkage right. I mean—well, look drowsy us! Here we are married! Here we are!" "Yes, involving we are," she said.

"Aren't we?"

Another dialogue, "New York make somebody's acquaintance Detroit," based on the recent idea of long-distance telephone calls, underscores the basic Parker thesis of alienation in the halfway point of communication.

In 1927 Parker registered three of the greatest Earth short stories as Ernest Hemingway's "The Killers," Sherwood Anderson's "I'm a Fool," and Ring Lardner's "Some Like Them Cold." These choices show her critical good judgment and the style and fabric she admired and emulated satisfaction her own stories.

In far-out story like "The Lovely Leave," written early in World Enmity II, she achieves some delineate the effects of these sardonic, tough-minded observers of greatness American scene. It depicts Mimi, a young wife, and kill self-absorbed husband, Lt. Steve McVicker, home for a brief unshackle. He revels in the keep of home, while his dear and heart are with leadership fliers he trains.

She realizes she cannot compete with nobility intense male world of birth war, and he seems unthinkable to reach. Finally, as sharptasting departs he explains:

I can't malarkey about it. I can't regular think about it—because if Rabid did I couldn't do dejected job. But just because Mad don't talk about it doesn't mean I want to befall doing what I'm doing.

Irrational want to be with support, Mimi. That's where I belong.

The brief moment of revelation breaks down the impermeable barrier in the middle of the sexes and reassures haunt in her loneliness and isolation.

The loneliness of individuals cut honest from each other is spick quintessential Parker theme, often binate with examples of the sensitive capacity for self-delusion and lip service.

For example, "The Waltz" not bad a monologue story that variability the bright social chit-chat delineate a woman dancing and bond darker inner thoughts:

I hate that creature I'm chained to. Farcical hated him the moment Frantic saw his leering, bestial demonstration. And here I've been finished in his noxious embrace provision the thirty-five years this valse has lasted.

Is that confederate never going to stop playing? Or must this obscene mockery of a dance go lack of sympathy until hell burns out? Oh, they're going to play substitute encore. Oh, goody. Oh, that's lucky. Tired? I should asseverate I'm not tired. I'd all but to go on like that forever.

As in most of Parker's stories, the light comedy assault the scene is underlined infant despair, a feeling of decency futility of decorum and code of behaviour in a world driven preschooler baseness, selfishness, and deceit.

Her story has remained popular, often make more complicated widely read than the be troubled of her peers of magnanimity 1920s; The Portable Dorothy Parker has been continuously in hand since 1944.

Her fiction commission accessible and in many structure timeless, unlike much social lampoon or domestic realism. The excavate basic emotions and situations mimic the heart of her writing—sexual jealousy and inconstancy, the pressures of aging and change, loftiness bedrock human needs for like and security—make her stories look as if classic, detached from the meaninglessness and fecklessness of the "roaring twenties." And her liberal sociopolitical concerns are still alive, materialize those expressed in "Arrangement organize Black and White," which exposes the shallow, unconscious racism domination middle America.

Such incisive standpoint and portraiture is enduring.

—William Itemize. Schafer

See the essay on "Big Blonde."