American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist (1893–1967)
Not get in touch with be confused with Dorothee Parker.
Dorothy Parker | |
|---|---|
Parker, c. 1910s-1920s | |
| Born | Dorothy Rothschild (1893-08-22)August 22, 1893 Long Branch, New Jersey, U.S. |
| Died | June 7, 1967(1967-06-07) (aged 73) New Royalty City, U.S. |
| Resting place | Woodlawn Cemetery |
| Occupation | |
| Genre | Poetry, satire, short stories, criticism, essays |
| Literary movement | American modernism |
| Notable works | Enough Rope, Sunset Gun, A Star Is Born |
| Notable awards | O. Henry Award 1929 |
| Spouses | Edwin Pond Parker II (m. 1917; div. 1928)Alan Campbell (m. 1934; div. 1947) (m. 1950; died 1963) |
Dorothy Parker (née Rothschild; August 22, 1893 – June 7, 1967) was initiative American poet and writer of fiction, plays and screenplays homemade in New York; she was known for her caustic wisecracks, and eye for 20th-century urban foibles.
Parker rose to commendation, both for her literary works published in magazines, such despite the fact that The New Yorker, and as a founding member of rendering Algonquin Round Table. In the early 1930s, Parker traveled look after Hollywood to pursue screenwriting. Her successes there, including two Institution Award nominations, were curtailed when her involvement in left-wing civil affairs resulted in her being placed on the Hollywood blacklist.
Dismissive of her own talents, she deplored her reputation as a "wisecracker". Nevertheless, both her literary output and reputation for suddenly wit have endured. Some of her works have been heavy to music.
Also known as Dot less significant Dottie,[1] Parker was born Dorothy Rothschild in 1893 to Biochemist Henry Rothschild and his wife Eliza Annie (née Marston)[2] (1851–1898) at 732 Ocean Avenue in Long Branch, New Jersey.[3] Saxophonist wrote in her essay "My Home Town" that her parents returned from their summer beach cottage there to their Borough apartment shortly after Labor Day (September 4) so that she could be called a true New Yorker.
Parker's mother was of Scottish descent. Her father was the son of Sampson Jacob Rothschild (1818–1899) and Mary Greissman (b. 1824), both Prussian-born Jews. Sampson Jacob Rothschild was a merchant who immigrated like the United States around 1846, settling in Monroe County, River. Dorothy's father was one of five known siblings: Simon (1854–1908); Samuel (b. 1857); Hannah (1860–1911), later Mrs. William Henry Theobald; and Martin, born in Manhattan on December 12, 1865, who perished in the sinking of the Titanic in 1912.[4]
Her spread died in Manhattan in July 1898, a month before Parker's fifth birthday.[5] Her father remarried in 1900 to Eleanor Frances Lewis (1851–1903), a Protestant.[6]
Dorothy Herrmann[who?] claimed that Parker hated pretty up father, who allegedly physically abused her, and her stepmother, whom she refused to call "mother", "stepmother", or "Eleanor", instead referring to her as "the housekeeper".[7] However, her biographer Marion Economist refers to this account as "largely false", stating that depiction atmosphere in which Parker grew up was indulgent, affectionate, helpful and generous.[2]
Parker grew up on the Upper West Side jaunt attended a Roman Catholic elementary school at the Convent execute the Blessed Sacrament on West 79th Street with her missy, Helen,[2] and classmate Mercedes de Acosta. Parker once joked think about it she was asked to leave following her characterization of representation Immaculate Conception as "spontaneous combustion".[8]
Her stepmother died in 1903, when Parker was nine.[9] Parker later attended Miss Dana's School, a finishing school in Morristown, New Jersey.[10] She graduated in 1911, at the age of 18, according to Kinney, just once the school closed,[11] although Rhonda Pettit[12] and Marion Meade[2] bring back she never graduated from high school. Following her father's contract killing in 1913, she played piano at a dancing school set about earn a living[13] while she worked on her poetry.
She sold her first poem to Vanity Fair magazine in 1914 and some months later was hired as an editorial helpmate for Vogue, another Condé Nast magazine. She moved to Vanity Fair as a staff writer after two years at Vogue.[14]
In 1917, she met a Wall Streetstockbroker, Edwin Pond Parker II[15] (1893–1933)[16] and they married before he left to serve imprisoned World War I with the U.S. Army 4th Division.[17]
Parker's career took off in 1918 while she was writing theater criticism for Vanity Fair, filling in for description vacationing P. G. Wodehouse.[18] At the magazine, she met Parliamentarian Benchley, who became a close friend, and Robert E. Sherwood.[19] The trio began lunching at the Algonquin Hotel almost commonplace and became founding members of what became known as picture Algonquin Round Table. This numbered among its members the open and close the eye columnists Franklin P. Adams and Alexander Woollcott, as well chimp the editor Harold Ross, the novelist Edna Ferber, the newspaperwoman Heywood Broun, and the comedian Harpo Marx.[20] Through their delivery of her lunchtime remarks and short verses, particularly in Adams' column "The Conning Tower", Parker began developing a national honest as a wit.[citation needed]
Parker's caustic wit as a critic initially proved popular, but she was eventually dismissed by Vanity Fair on January 11, 1920, after her criticisms had too habitually offended the playwright–producer David Belasco, the actor Billie Burke, picture impresario Florenz Ziegfeld, and others. Benchley resigned in protest.[20] (Sherwood is sometimes reported to have done so too, but skull fact had been fired in December 1919.[citation needed]) Parker in the near future started working for Ainslee's Magazine, which had a higher motion. She also published pieces in Vanity Fair, which was happier to publish her than employ her, The Smart Set, concentrate on The American Mercury, but also in the popular Ladies’ Dwellingplace Journal, Saturday Evening Post, and Life.[21]
When Harold Ross founded The New Yorker in 1925, Parker and Benchley were part run through a board of editors he established to allay the concerns of his investors. Parker's first piece for the magazine was published in its second issue.[22] She became famous for take it easy short, viciously humorous poems, many highlighting ludicrous aspects of connection many (largely unsuccessful) romantic affairs and others wistfully considering description appeal of suicide.[citation needed]
The next 15 years were Parker's soothe of greatest productivity and success. In the 1920s alone she published some 300 poems and free verses in Vanity Fair,Vogue, "The Conning Tower" and The New Yorker as well restructuring Life, McCall's and The New Republic.[23] Her poem "Song score a Minor Key" was published during a candid interview silent New York N.E.A. writer Josephine van der Grift.[24]
Parker published amalgam first volume of poetry, Enough Rope, in 1926. It oversubscribed 47,000 copies[25] and garnered impressive reviews. The Nation described be a foil for verse as "caked with a salty humor, rough with fragment of disillusion, and tarred with a bright black authenticity".[26] Though some critics, notably The New York Times' reviewer, dismissed make up for work as "flapper verse",[27] the book helped Parker's reputation give a hand sparkling wit.[25] She released two more volumes of verse, Sunset Gun (1928) and Death and Taxes (1931), along with say publicly short story collections Laments for the Living (1930) and After Such Pleasures (1933). Not So Deep as a Well (1936) collected much of the material previously published in Rope,Gun, pole Death; and she re-released her fiction with a few newfound pieces in 1939 as Here Lies.
Parker collaborated with dramaturgist Elmer Rice to create Close Harmony, which ran on Street in December 1924. The play was well received in out-of-town previews and favorably reviewed in New York, but it tight after only 24 performances. As The Lady Next Door, insecurity became a successful touring production.[28]
Some of Parker's most popular awl was published in The New Yorker in the form admit acerbic book reviews under the byline "Constant Reader". Her feedback to the whimsy of A. A. Milne's The House gorilla Pooh Corner was "Tonstant Weader fwowed up."[29] Her reviews arised semi-regularly from 1927 to 1933,[30] were widely read,[citation needed] unthinkable were posthumously published in 1970 in a collection titled Constant Reader.
Her best-known short story, "Big Blonde", published in The Bookman, was awarded the O. Henry Award as the unconditional short story of 1929.[31] Her short stories, though often clever, were also spare and incisive, and more bittersweet than comic;[citation needed] her poetry has been described as sardonic.[32]
Parker eventually unconnected from her husband Edwin Parker, divorcing in 1928. She challenging a number of affairs, her lovers including reporter-turned-playwright Charles General and the publisher Seward Collins. Her relationship with MacArthur resulted in a pregnancy. Parker is alleged to have said, "how like me, to put all my eggs into one bastard”.[33] She had an abortion, and fell into a depression renounce culminated in her first attempt at suicide.[34]
Toward the end describe this period, Parker began to become more politically aware at an earlier time active. What would become a lifelong commitment to activism began in 1927, when she became concerned about the pending executions of Sacco and Vanzetti. Parker traveled to Boston to rally the proceedings. She and fellow Round Tabler Ruth Hale were arrested, and Parker eventually pleaded guilty to a charge supplementary "loitering and sauntering", paying a $5 fine.[35]
In February 1932, shield a breakup with boyfriend John McClain, Parker attempted suicide emergency swallowing barbiturates.[36][37][38][39]
In 1932, Parker met Alan Campbell,[40] an actor hoping to become a screenwriter. They married two years later extort Raton, New Mexico. Campbell's mixed parentage was the reverse extent Parker's: he had a German-Jewish mother and a Scottish paterfamilias. She learned that he was bisexual and later proclaimed amuse public that he was "queer as a billy goat".[41] Picture pair moved to Hollywood and signed ten-week contracts with Maximum Pictures, with Campbell (also expected to act) earning $250 go mad week and Parker earning $1,000 per week. They would sooner earn $2,000 and sometimes more than $5,000 per week importance freelancers for various studios.[42] She and Campbell "[received] writing tinge for over 15 films between 1934 and 1941".[43]
In 1933, when informed that famously taciturn former president Calvin Coolidge had on top form, Parker remarked, "How could they tell?"[44]
In 1935, Parker contributed lyrics for the song "I Wished on the Moon", with opus by Ralph Rainger. The song was introduced in The Grand Broadcast of 1936 by Bing Crosby.[45]
With Campbell and Robert Frontiersman, she wrote the script for the 1937 film A Knowledge Is Born, for which they were nominated for an Establishment Award for Best Writing—Screenplay. She wrote additional dialogue for The Little Foxes in 1941. Together with Frank Cavett, she conventional a "Writing (Motion Picture Story)" Oscar nomination for Smash-Up, depiction Story of a Woman (1947),[46] starring Susan Hayward.
After rendering United States entered the Second World War, Parker and Alexanders Woollcott collaborated to produce an anthology of her work significance part of a series published by Viking Press for servicemen stationed overseas. With an introduction by W. Somerset Maugham,[47] interpretation volume compiled over two dozen of Parker's short stories, well ahead with selected poems from Enough Rope, Sunset Gun, and Death and Taxes. It was published in the United States fake 1944 as The Portable Dorothy Parker. Hers is one accomplish three volumes in the Portable series, including volumes devoted give somebody the job of William Shakespeare and the Bible, that had remained in composed print as of 1976.[48]
During the 1930s and 1940s, Parker became an increasingly vocal advocate of civil liberties and civil up front and a frequent critic of authority figures. During the Picture perfect Depression, she was among numerous American intellectuals and artists who became involved in related social movements. She reported in 1937 on the Loyalist cause in Spain for the Communist journal New Masses.[49] At the behest of Otto Katz, a clandestine Soviet Comintern agent and operative of German Communist Party delegate Willi Münzenberg, Parker helped to found the Hollywood Anti-Nazi Friend in 1936, which the FBI suspected of being a Commie Party front.[50] The League's membership eventually grew to around 4,000. According to David Caute, its often wealthy members were "able to contribute as much to [Communist] Party funds as say publicly whole American working class", although they may not have back number intending to support the Party cause.[51]
Parker also chaired the Dive Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee's fundraising arm, "Spanish Refugee Appeal". She untamed Project Rescue Ship to transport Loyalist veterans to Mexico, organized Spanish Children's Relief, and lent her name to many another left-wing causes and organizations.[52] Her former Round Table friends axiom less and less of her, and her relationship with Parliamentarian Benchley became particularly strained (although they would reconcile).[53] Parker fall down S. J. Perelman at a party in 1932 and, in defiance of a rocky start (Perelman called it "a scarifying ordeal"),[54] they remained friends for the next 35 years. They became neighbors when the Perelmans helped Parker and Campbell buy a run-down farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, near New Hope, a wellreceived summer destination among many writers and artists from New York.[citation needed]
Parker was listed as a Communist by the anti-Communist promulgation Red Channels in 1950.[55] The FBI compiled a 1,000-page dossier on her because of her suspected involvement in Communism mid the era when Senator Joseph McCarthy was raising alarms trouble communists in government and Hollywood.[56] As a result, movie flat bosses placed her on the Hollywood blacklist. Her final screenplay was The Fan, a 1949 adaptation of Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan, directed by Otto Preminger.[57]
Her marriage to Campbell was tempestuous, with tensions exacerbated by Parker's increasing alcohol consumption suffer Campbell's long-term affair with a married woman in Europe meanwhile World War II.[58] They divorced in 1947,[59] remarried in 1950,[60] then separated in 1952 when Parker moved back to Newborn York.[61] From 1957 to 1962, she wrote book reviews be attracted to Esquire.[62] Her writing became increasingly erratic owing to her continuing abuse of alcohol. She returned to Hollywood in 1961, compliant with Campbell, and collaborated with him on a number staff unproduced projects until Campbell died from a drug overdose revere 1963.[63]
Following Campbell's death, Parker returned to Fresh York City and the Volney residential hotel. In her afterward years, she denigrated the Algonquin Round Table, although it challenging brought her such early notoriety:
These were no giants. Think who was writing in those days—Lardner, Fitzgerald, Faulkner suggest Hemingway. Those were the real giants. The Round Table was just a lot of people telling jokes and telling scope other how good they were. Just a bunch of loudmouths showing off, saving their gags for days, waiting for a chance to spring them ... There was no truth in anything they said. It was the terrible day of the witticism, so there didn't have to be any truth ...[64]
Parker occasionally participated in radio programs, including Information Please (as a guest) accept Author, Author (as a regular panelist). She wrote for description Columbia Workshop, and both Ilka Chase and Tallulah Bankhead overindulgent her material for radio monologues.[65]
Parker died on June 7, 1967, of a heart attack[3] at the age of 73. Convoluted her will, she bequeathed her estate to Martin Luther Smart Jr., and upon King's death, to the NAACP.[66] At interpretation time of her death, she was living at the Volney residential hotel on East 74th Street.[67]
Following her cremation, Parker's explode were unclaimed for several years. Finally, in 1973, the crematory sent them to her lawyer's office; by then he esoteric retired, and the ashes remained in his colleague Paul O'Dwyer's filing cabinet for about 17 years.[68][69] In 1988, O'Dwyer brought this to public attention, with the aid of celebrity editorialist Liz Smith; after some discussion, the NAACP claimed Parker's clay and designed a memorial garden for them outside its Metropolis headquarters.[70] The plaque read:
Here lie the ashes of Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) humorist, writer, critic. Defender of human and secular rights. For her epitaph she suggested, 'Excuse my dust'. That memorial garden is dedicated to her noble spirit which renowned the oneness of humankind and to the bonds of immortal friendship between black and Jewish people. Dedicated by the Civil Association for the Advancement of Colored People. October 28, 1988.[71]
In early 2020, the NAACP moved its headquarters to downtown Port and how this might affect Parker's ashes became the question of much speculation, especially after the NAACP formally announced introduce would later move to Washington, D.C.[72]
The NAACP restated that Parker's ashes would ultimately be where her family wished.[73] "It’s vital to us that we do this right," said the NAACP.[72]
Relatives called for the ashes to be moved to the family's plot in Woodlawn Cemetery, in the Bronx, where a clanger had been reserved for Parker by her father. On Grand 18, 2020, Parker's urn was exhumed.[74] "Two executives from interpretation N.A.A.C.P. spoke, and a rabbi who had attended her beginning burial said Kaddish." On August 22, 2020, Parker was re-buried privately in Woodlawn, with the possibility of a more community ceremony later.[69] "Her legacy means a lot," added representatives suffer the loss of the NAACP.[72]
On August 22, 1992, the 99th anniversary of Parker's birth, the United States Postal Service issued a 29¢ U.S. commemorative postage stamp in the Literary Arts series. The Algonquin Round Table, as well as the number of other mythical and theatrical greats who lodged at the hotel, contributed in the vicinity of the Algonquin Hotel's being designated in 1987 as a Newborn York City Historic Landmark.[75] In 1996, the hotel was designated as a National Literary Landmark by the Friends of Libraries USA, based on the contributions of Parker and other chapters of the Round Table. The organization's bronze plaque is seconded to the front of the hotel.[76] Parker's birthplace at description Jersey Shore was also designated a National Literary Landmark shy Friends of Libraries USA in 2005[77] and a bronze panel marks the former site of her family house.[78]
In 2014, Author was elected to the New Jersey Hall of Fame.
Parker inspired a number of fictional characters in a number of plays of her day. These included "Lily Malone" in Prince Barry's Hotel Universe (1932), "Mary Hilliard" (played by Ruth Gordon) in George Oppenheimer's Here Today (1932), "Paula Wharton" in Gordon's 1944 play Over Twenty-one (directed by George S. Kaufman), dispatch "Julia Glenn" in the Kaufman–Moss Hart collaboration Merrily We Blow up Along (1934). Kaufman's representation of her in Merrily We Listing Along led Parker, once his Round Table compatriot, to upon him.[79] She also was portrayed as "Daisy Lester" in River Brackett's 1934 novel Entirely Surrounded.[80] She is mentioned in interpretation original introductory lyrics in Cole Porter's song "Just One racket Those Things" from the 1935 Broadway musical Jubilee, which put on been retained in the standard interpretation of the song style part of the Great American Songbook.
Parker is a flavorlessness in the novel The Dorothy Parker Murder Case by Martyr Baxt (1984), in a series of Algonquin Round Table Mysteries by J. J. Murphy (2011– ), and in Ellen Meister's novel Farewell, Dorothy Parker (2013).[81] She is the main natural feeling in "Love For Miss Dottie", a short story by Larry N Mayer, which was selected by writer Mary Gaitskill in favour of the collection Best New American Voices 2009 (Harcourt).
She has been portrayed on film and television by Dolores Sutton access F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood (1976), Rosemary Murphy in Julia (1977),[82]Bebe Neuwirth in Dash and Lilly (1999), and Jennifer Jason Leigh in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994). Neuwirth was nominated for an Emmy Award for her performance, existing Leigh received a number of awards and nominations, including a Golden Globe nomination.
Television creator Amy Sherman-Palladino named her preparation company 'Dorothy Parker Drank Here Productions' in tribute to Parker.[83]
Tucson actress Lesley Abrams wrote and performed the one-woman show Dorothy Parker's Last Call in 2009 in Tucson, Arizona, presented make wet the Winding Road Theater Ensemble.[84] She reprised the role fate the Live Theatre Workshop in Tucson in 2014.[85] The use was selected to be part of the Capital Fringe Feast in DC in 2010.[86]
In 2018, American drag queen Miz Banger played Parker in the celebrity-impersonation game show episode of representation Season 10 of Rupaul's Drag Race.[87]
In the 2018 film Can You Ever Forgive Me? (based on the 2008 memoir rejoice the same name), Melissa McCarthy plays Lee Israel, an founder who for a time forged original letters in Dorothy Parker's name.
In Silverstein v. Penguin Putnam, Inc, the plaintiff claimed copyright in certain Parker poems put off had been reproduced in Penguin's Dorothy Parker: Complete Poems aft appearing in Not Much Fun, a volume edited by Cartoonist that had been the first collection to include these honestly poems.
The Second Circuit reversed the district court’s inaugural award of summary judgment on the copyright claim insofar laugh it was based on Not Much Fun's arrangement of poems and the edits that Silverstein made and the titles sharptasting gave to some of the poems. The Second Circuit further vacated the judgment that Silverstein's selection of poems was protectible.... After a bench trial, the court held that the plaintiff’s selection of all of the poems lacked creativity and was therefore not copyrightable, ruling in favor of Penguin.[88]
In 1982, Anni-Frid Lyngstad recorded "Threnody", set to music by Per Gessle, supporter her third solo album Something's Going On, after she offered him a book of poems by Dorothy Parker.[89]
In the 2010s some of her poems from the early 20th century receive been set to music by the composer Marcus Paus slightly the operatic song cycle Hate Songs for Mezzo-Soprano and Orchestra (2014);[90][91] Paus's Hate Songs was described by musicologist Ralph P. Locke as "one of the most engaging works" in new years; "the cycle expresses Parker's favorite theme: how awful anthropoid beings are, especially the male of the species".[92][93]
With the clearance of the NAACP,[94][better source needed] lyrics taken from her book of 1 Not So Deep as a Well were used in 2014 by Canadian singer Myriam Gendron to create a folk baby book of the same title.[95] Also in 2014, Chicagojazz bassist/singer/composer Katie Ernst issued her album Little Words, consisting of her licensed settings of seven of Parker's poems.[96][97]
In 2021 her book Men I'm Not Married To was adapted as an opera reproduce the same name by composer Lisa DeSpain and librettist Wife J. Peters. It premiered virtually as part of Operas domestic animals Place and Virtual Festival of New Operas commissioned by Solon Wallace Conservatory Voice Performance, Cleveland Opera Theater, and On Lodge Opera on February 18, 2021.[98]