Life and Work of Dorothy Parker
Dorothy Parker was an American writer with a sharp tongue and biting wit who lived through one of the most vibrant times in American History. Despite her satirical style, Parker’s life was filled with misfortune and struggle that is reflected in her work. Even though history remembers her as a humor writer, her work extends to social criticism, civil rights activism, war reporting and brutally honest life reflections.
s1) Dorothy Parker, born August 22 1893 New Jersey. Died June 7th, 1967.
Journalist, writer, and poet, civil rights activist.
- Wrote for the The New Yorker Magazine, Vogue, Vanity Fair,
- Formed a group called the Algonquin Round Table with writer Robert Benchley and playwright Robert Sherwood
- After Hollywood, still a well-regarded writer and poet, wrote a play entitled Ladies of the Corridor in 1953
Early Life
Despite her legacy as a humorist, Dorothy Parker was born into a tragedy riddled family. Her life filled with sudden catastrophe inspired her signature telephone greeting, “What fresh Hell is this?”.
- Born August 22 1893 New Jersey. 3 much older siblings .
- Parents Jacob Henry Rothschild & Annie Eliza (Maston) Rothschild
-Mother dies 1897,father married Eleanor Frances Lewis 1899
- Never close with stepmother, dies 1903
- Attended Blessed Sacrament Academy because of Stepmother even though she was Jewish
-At age fourteen, Dorothy dropped out of school never receiving a High School diploma although she was an avid reader.
-An uncle was killed on the Titanic
-Father died 1913, broke after a decline in business as a garment manufacturer, Dorothy was 20, began playing piano and taught at a ballet school.
-Within a year she broke into the magazine business by selling her poem “Any Porch” to Frank Crowninshield, editor of Vanity Fair. He later helped her get a job writing captions for Vogue in 1914.
-1917 she married Edwin Parker, a stock broker. Married for ten years until Parker returned from WWI an alcohol and morphine addiction. Kept the last name ‘Parker’.
Career
-At Vanity Fair she became New York's only female drama critic at the time
-Critic job led to her invitation and the creation of the Algonquin Round Table at the Algonquin Hotel
-The Algonquin Round Table was a group of famed New York writers who gathered at the Algonquin Hotel to meet and discuss events for over a decade. Notable members included: Dorothy Parker, Harold Ross,Robert Benchley; columnists Franklin Pierce Adams and Heywood Broun, and Broun’s wife Ruth Hale; critic Alexander Woollcott; comedian Harpo Marx; and playwrights George S. Kaufman, Marc Connelly, Edna Ferber, and Robert Sherwood
-ART came to define American humor of the era.
-Throughout the 1920s, her life took on the surface glamour of the Jazz Age
-Despite her surface success, Parker had a troubled personal life, unsuccessful love affairs, suicide attempts . (This parallels the characteristics of Jazz Age).
-The most intense of these, with writer Charles MacArthur, ended in pregnancy, abortion, and a suicide attempt
-Married Alan Campbell, a writer and former actor who shared her Jewish-Gentile heritage, he was also speculated to be bisexual. Moved to Hollywood and wrote or contributed to scripts for thirty-nine films. (2)
-Poem Unfortunate Coincidence reflects on Parker’s failed relationships.
-As the popularity in sound motion pictured increased, so did the demand hollywood script writers. Many members of the Algonquin migrated west. Parker followed reluctantly because of her, “deep distrust of any place outside the borough of Manhattan.”
--1930s and 1940s, spent time in Hollywood, California writing screenplays with her second husband Alan Campbell, including the 1937 adaptation of A Star Is Born (Academy Award Nomination) and the 1942 Alfred Hitchcock film Saboteur. In 1937, Campbell and Parker had a combined salary of $5,000 a week, unheard of during the Great Depression.
Later Years: (Source 3)
A political activist, Parker supported the Actor's Equity Strike in 1919, criticized pretentious and hypocritical men who hid behind leftist politics and art in several of her poems, and was arrested for protesting the Sacco and Vanzetti executions in 1927. (2)
-She traveled to Spain during its civil war and returned to write two of her war stories, "Soldier's of the Republic" and "Who Might Be Interested".
-"The Lovely Leave" and "Song of a Shirt, 1941," examine war from a domestic point of view
-Her pro-communist sympathies were noted by the F.B.I.; the agency kept a nine hundred page file on her.
-She and Campbell divorced in 1947, and remarried in 1950. Separated 1952-1961. Campbell dies of a sleeping pill overdose in 1963
-Moved back to New York in 1964
-Died of a heart attack in 1967 at age 73. She left her estate to the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. foundation.
Writing Style
Dorothy Parker wrote from experience and often followed themes of female life including love, men, their unreliability, social standards and of course death. Death in Parker’s work is most often characterized as untimely or prospective. One of her most well known pieces describes various methods of killing oneself, several she had tested personally.
Resume Analysis
Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.
- A her matter-of-fact view of life and death
-Ambiguity in title. Without accents, it means to carry on despite obstacles, a message evident in the poem. With the meaning of a sort of summary, it is a statement of her experience towards the struggles in her personal life including four suicide attempts. (1)
-When "Resume" was published, some people admired the way she had transformed a near-fatal experience into dark humor.
Humor: “Humor to me, Heaven help me, takes in many things. There must be courage; there must be no awe. There must be criticism, for humor, to my mind, is encapsulated in criticism. There must be a disciplined eye and a wild mind. There must be a magnificent disregard of your reader, for if he cannot follow you, there is nothing you can do about it. There must be some lagniappe in the fact that the humorist has read something written before 1918.” Dorothy Parker, The Most of S. J. Perelman, by S. J. Perelman (1).
- Parker’s poems function as a vehicle for social criticism
-Her wit was her weapon, used to tell truths close to her experience
-Satirized stereotypical female characters, more bitterly than playfully.There were limited occupations available to American women during the Twenties and Thirties, decades when the predominant image of the American woman was the sexually free, even promiscuous, flapper. (1)
-Her humor is explores the bittersweet, serio-comic, a depiction of the sexual double standard and uneasy relations between men and women.
-An example of work that follows the style of the time is 1927’s “Arranged in Black and White.”
- “Big Blonde” is one of Parker’s most celebrated pieces. It won the O. Henry Prize in 1929 for best short story. The story reflects much of Parker’s personal life including tumultuous relationships, career struggles and a suicide attempt by the main character similar to her own. (2)
Works Cited
Source 1)
"Dorothy Parker Biography." Bio.com. A&E Networks Television, n.d. Web. 20 Mar. 2014. <http://www.biography.com/people/dorothy-parker-9433450>
Source 2)
Source 3)
Pettit, Rhonda . "Bio-Critical Summary and Selected Bibliography: Dorothy Parker." Bio-Critical Summary and Selected Bibliography. Modern American Poetry, n.d. Web. 21 Mar. 2014. <http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets
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