Dorothy Parker (1893–1967), born Dorothy Rothschild in New Jersey, was an American poet, short-story writer, critic and screenwriter, famous for her wit as a member of the Algonquin Round Table. She wrote verse and reviews for Vanity Fair, Vogue and The New Yorker, won the O. Henry Award for the story 'Big Blonde' (1929), and co-wrote screenplays in Hollywood, including A Star Is Born (1937). Her left-wing activism led to her blacklisting in the 1950s; she left her estate to Martin Luther King Jr.
1926–1936 (collections) · Early 20th Century · Poetry
Parker's Complete Poems gathers the light verse that made her one of the best-selling poets of the 1920s and 1930s. The core of the volume is her three collections, Enough Rope (1926), Sunset Gun (1928) and Death and Taxes (1931), which were combined in Not So Deep as a Well (1936), together with uncollected and early verse published in magazines from the 1910s onward.
1944 (collection) · Early 20th Century · Collection
The Portable Dorothy Parker collects poems, stories, sketches, reviews and occasional pieces that display Parker's distinctive mixture of speed, polish, cruelty and pain. The volume is not a single narrative but a portable career: the brittle lyrics of disappointed love, the dramatic monologues of women waiting for calls or managing humiliation, the social comedies of parties and hotel rooms, the criticism that makes taste sound conversational, and the political pieces that reveal moral seriousness beneath the pose of urban detachment.
