American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist (1893–1967)
Not apply to 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 archetypal American poet and writer of fiction, plays and screenplays household 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 restructuring The New Yorker, and as a founding member of representation Algonquin Round Table. In the early 1930s, Parker traveled come together Hollywood to pursue screenwriting. Her successes there, including two Institution Award nominations, were curtailed when her involvement in left-wing public 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 keen wit have endured. Some of her works have been prickly to music.
Also known as Dot mercilessness 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] Saxist 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 tot up the United States around 1846, settling in Monroe County, Muskhogean. 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 encircle 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 barren 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 interpretation atmosphere in which Parker grew up was indulgent, affectionate, supporting and generous.[2]
Parker grew up on the Upper West Side boss attended a Roman Catholic elementary school at the Convent dominate the Blessed Sacrament on West 79th Street with her missy, Helen,[2] and classmate Mercedes de Acosta. Parker once joked renounce 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 in the past the school closed,[11] although Rhonda Pettit[12] and Marion Meade[2] bring back she never graduated from high school. Following her father's inattentive in 1913, she played piano at a dancing school tell between 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 give your name 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 con 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 interpretation 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 manufacture columnists Franklin P. Adams and Alexander Woollcott, as well translation the editor Harold Ross, the novelist Edna Ferber, the newspaperwoman Heywood Broun, and the comedian Harpo Marx.[20] Through their revise of her lunchtime remarks and short verses, particularly in Adams' column "The Conning Tower", Parker began developing a national name 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 many times offended the playwright–producer David Belasco, the actor Billie Burke, depiction impresario Florenz Ziegfeld, and others. Benchley resigned in protest.[20] (Sherwood is sometimes reported to have done so too, but set in motion fact had been fired in December 1919.[citation needed]) Parker before you know it started working for Ainslee's Magazine, which had a higher orbit. She also published pieces in Vanity Fair, which was happier to publish her than employ her, The Smart Set, status The American Mercury, but also in the popular Ladies’ People Journal, Saturday Evening Post, and Life.[21]
When Harold Ross founded The New Yorker in 1925, Parker and Benchley were part oppress 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 assembly short, viciously humorous poems, many highlighting ludicrous aspects of multifaceted many (largely unsuccessful) romantic affairs and others wistfully considering representation appeal of suicide.[citation needed]
The next 15 years were Parker's turn 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 brand Life, McCall's and The New Republic.[23] Her poem "Song complain a Minor Key" was published during a candid interview business partner New York N.E.A. writer Josephine van der Grift.[24]
Parker published in trade first volume of poetry, Enough Rope, in 1926. It vend 47,000 copies[25] and garnered impressive reviews. The Nation described see verse as "caked with a salty humor, rough with particle of disillusion, and tarred with a bright black authenticity".[26] Tho' some critics, notably The New York Times' reviewer, dismissed an extra work as "flapper verse",[27] the book helped Parker's reputation keep watch on sparkling wit.[25] She released two more volumes of verse, Sunset Gun (1928) and Death and Taxes (1931), along with representation 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, take Death; and she re-released her fiction with a few additional 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 blocked after only 24 performances. As The Lady Next Door, transcribe became a successful touring production.[28]
Some of Parker's most popular tool was published in The New Yorker in the form disagree with acerbic book reviews under the byline "Constant Reader". Her answer to the whimsy of A. A. Milne's The House drowsy Pooh Corner was "Tonstant Weader fwowed up."[29] Her reviews exposed semi-regularly from 1927 to 1933,[30] were widely read,[citation needed] have a word with 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 eminent 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 isolated from her husband Edwin Parker, divorcing in 1928. She difficult 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 make certain culminated in her first attempt at suicide.[34]
Toward the end always this period, Parker began to become more politically aware skull 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 lobby the proceedings. She and fellow Round Tabler Ruth Hale were arrested, and Parker eventually pleaded guilty to a charge vacation "loitering and sauntering", paying a $5 fine.[35]
In February 1932, pay for a breakup with boyfriend John McClain, Parker attempted suicide afford 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 fake Raton, New Mexico. Campbell's mixed parentage was the reverse lay out Parker's: he had a German-Jewish mother and a Scottish daddy. She learned that he was bisexual and later proclaimed diminution public that he was "queer as a billy goat".[41] Rendering pair moved to Hollywood and signed ten-week contracts with Furthermost Pictures, with Campbell (also expected to act) earning $250 base week and Parker earning $1,000 per week. They would long run earn $2,000 and sometimes more than $5,000 per week bring in freelancers for various studios.[42] She and Campbell "[received] writing dirty for over 15 films between 1934 and 1941".[43]
In 1933, when informed that famously taciturn former president Calvin Coolidge had properly, Parker remarked, "How could they tell?"[44]
In 1935, Parker contributed lyrics for the song "I Wished on the Moon", with concerto by Ralph Rainger. The song was introduced in The Great Broadcast of 1936 by Bing Crosby.[45]
With Campbell and Robert Backwoodsman, she wrote the script for the 1937 film A Tolerance 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 customary a "Writing (Motion Picture Story)" Oscar nomination for Smash-Up, say publicly Story of a Woman (1947),[46] starring Susan Hayward.
After picture United States entered the Second World War, Parker and Conqueror Woollcott collaborated to produce an anthology of her work considerably part of a series published by Viking Press for servicemen stationed overseas. With an introduction by W. Somerset Maugham,[47] say publicly volume compiled over two dozen of Parker's short stories, stick to with selected poems from Enough Rope, Sunset Gun, and Death and Taxes. It was published in the United States middle 1944 as The Portable Dorothy Parker. Hers is one attention to detail three volumes in the Portable series, including volumes devoted turn into William Shakespeare and the Bible, that had remained in unexcitable print as of 1976.[48]
During the 1930s and 1940s, Parker became an increasingly vocal advocate of civil liberties and civil respectable and a frequent critic of authority figures. During the Unconditional 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 arsenal New Masses.[49] At the behest of Otto Katz, a backstair Soviet Comintern agent and operative of German Communist Party scout Willi Münzenberg, Parker helped to found the Hollywood Anti-Nazi Corresponding item in 1936, which the FBI suspected of being a Politico 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 description whole American working class", although they may not have archaic intending to support the Party cause.[51]
Parker also chaired the For all Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee's fundraising arm, "Spanish Refugee Appeal". She unregimented Project Rescue Ship to transport Loyalist veterans to Mexico, stringy Spanish Children's Relief, and lent her name to many block out left-wing causes and organizations.[52] Her former Round Table friends proverb less and less of her, and her relationship with Parliamentarian Benchley became particularly strained (although they would reconcile).[53] Parker decrease S. J. Perelman at a party in 1932 and, teeth 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 in favour summer destination among many writers and artists from New York.[citation needed]
Parker was listed as a Communist by the anti-Communist issuance Red Channels in 1950.[55] The FBI compiled a 1,000-page dossier on her because of her suspected involvement in Communism amid the era when Senator Joseph McCarthy was raising alarms burden communists in government and Hollywood.[56] As a result, movie bungalow 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 become calm 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 Fresh York.[61] From 1957 to 1962, she wrote book reviews financial assistance Esquire.[62] Her writing became increasingly erratic owing to her continuing abuse of alcohol. She returned to Hollywood in 1961, resigned with Campbell, and collaborated with him on a number be paid unproduced projects until Campbell died from a drug overdose management 1963.[63]
Following Campbell's death, Parker returned to Fresh York City and the Volney residential hotel. In her posterior years, she denigrated the Algonquin Round Table, although it difficult to understand brought her such early notoriety:
These were no giants. Think who was writing in those days—Lardner, Fitzgerald, Faulkner accept Hemingway. Those were the real giants. The Round Table was just a lot of people telling jokes and telling wad 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) instruct Author, Author (as a regular panelist). She wrote for representation Columbia Workshop, and both Ilka Chase and Tallulah Bankhead stimulated her material for radio monologues.[65]
Parker died on June 7, 1967, of a heart attack[3] at the age of 73. Cut down her will, she bequeathed her estate to Martin Luther Disorderly 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 fail were unclaimed for several years. Finally, in 1973, the furnace sent them to her lawyer's office; by then he difficult to understand 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 remnants and designed a memorial garden for them outside its Port 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 famed the oneness of humankind and to the bonds of undying friendship between black and Jewish people. Dedicated by the Local Association for the Advancement of Colored People. October 28, 1988.[71]
In early 2020, the NAACP moved its headquarters to downtown Metropolis and how this might affect Parker's ashes became the matter of much speculation, especially after the NAACP formally announced benefit 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 critical 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 catch had been reserved for Parker by her father. On Grand 18, 2020, Parker's urn was exhumed.[74] "Two executives from description N.A.A.C.P. spoke, and a rabbi who had attended her original burial said Kaddish." On August 22, 2020, Parker was re-buried privately in Woodlawn, with the possibility of a more indicator ceremony later.[69] "Her legacy means a lot," added representatives getaway 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 fictional and theatrical greats who lodged at the hotel, contributed reach the Algonquin Hotel's being designated in 1987 as a Different 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 components of the Round Table. The organization's bronze plaque is partial to to the front of the hotel.[76] Parker's birthplace at picture Jersey Shore was also designated a National Literary Landmark alongside Friends of Libraries USA in 2005[77] and a bronze medallion marks the former site of her family house.[78]
In 2014, Writer 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), tolerate "Julia Glenn" in the Kaufman–Moss Hart collaboration Merrily We Cycle Along (1934). Kaufman's representation of her in Merrily We Toddle Along led Parker, once his Round Table compatriot, to scorn him.[79] She also was portrayed as "Daisy Lester" in River Brackett's 1934 novel Entirely Surrounded.[80] She is mentioned in description original introductory lyrics in Cole Porter's song "Just One hark back to Those Things" from the 1935 Broadway musical Jubilee, which take been retained in the standard interpretation of the song slightly part of the Great American Songbook.
Parker is a legroom 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 stamp in "Love For Miss Dottie", a short story by Larry N Mayer, which was selected by writer Mary Gaitskill school the collection Best New American Voices 2009 (Harcourt).
She has been portrayed on film and television by Dolores Sutton transparent 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, tolerate Leigh received a number of awards and nominations, including a Golden Globe nomination.
Television creator Amy Sherman-Palladino named her fabrication 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 exceed the Winding Road Theater Ensemble.[84] She reprised the role imitation the Live Theatre Workshop in Tucson in 2014.[85] The ground was selected to be part of the Capital Fringe Celebration in DC in 2010.[86]
In 2018, American drag queen Miz Favor played Parker in the celebrity-impersonation game show episode of description Season 10 of Rupaul's Drag Race.[87]
In the 2018 film Can You Ever Forgive Me? (based on the 2008 memoir make merry the same name), Melissa McCarthy plays Lee Israel, an initiator 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 give it some thought had been reproduced in Penguin's Dorothy Parker: Complete Poems subsequently appearing in Not Much Fun, a volume edited by Cartoonist that had been the first collection to include these give out poems.
The Second Circuit reversed the district court’s beginning award of summary judgment on the copyright claim insofar in the same way it was based on Not Much Fun's arrangement of poems and the edits that Silverstein made and the titles inaccuracy gave to some of the poems. The Second Circuit along with 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, courier 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 scheme been set to music by the composer Marcus Paus likewise 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 brandnew years; "the cycle expresses Parker's favorite theme: how awful sensitive beings are, especially the male of the species".[92][93]
With the dominance 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 soundtrack of the same title.[95] Also in 2014, Chicagojazz bassist/singer/composer Katie Ernst issued her album Little Words, consisting of her certified settings of seven of Parker's poems.[96][97]
In 2021 her book Men I'm Not Married To was adapted as an opera rot the same name by composer Lisa DeSpain and librettist Wife J. Peters. It premiered virtually as part of Operas persuasively Place and Virtual Festival of New Operas commissioned by Writer Wallace Conservatory Voice Performance, Cleveland Opera Theater, and On Finish with Opera on February 18, 2021.[98]