Description
Book SynopsisDespite her prolific output, ageless writer and wit Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) never penned an autobiography (although if she had, she said that it would have been titled Mongrel). Combing through her stories, poems, articles, reviews, correspondence, and even her rare journalism and song lyrics, editor Barry Day has selected and arranged passages that describe her life and its preoccupations-urban living, the theater and cinema, the battle of the sexes, and death by dissipation. Best known for her scathing pieces for the New Yorker and her membership in the Algonquin Round Table ("The greatest collection of unsaleable wit in America."), Parker filled her work with a unique mix of fearlessness, melancholy, savvy, and hope. In Dorothy Parker, the irrepressible writer addresses: her early career writing for magazines; her championing of social causes such as integration; and the obsession with suicide that became another drama ("Scratch an actor...and you'll find an actress."), literature ("This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.") and much more.
Trade Review.....informative and entertaining.... * Library Journal *
Barry Day finds his perfect subject in Dorothy Parker, the pessimistic muse of the wits of the Algonquin Round Table who epitomized the spirit of New York and the 1920s and 1930s. * Post and Courier *
Day organizes her famous witticisms into a kind of autobiography, walking us through her preoccupations—women and men, love, death, art—in a way that shows us she did indeed bequeath us reminiscence in the form of her own verse, short stories and those marvelous stinging reviews.
One writer described her as a mixture between Little Nell and Lady Macbeth. Yet the witty Dorothy Parker mostly seemed sad. Her short stories and verse highlight the plight of women who can't fit in, who can't find a mate. * Press Enterprise *
