(1893-1967) poet, critic and short-story writer. Born (prematurely -- 'the only time I was ever early') Dorothy Rothschild in New Jersey of mixed Scottish Jewish parentage, her mother's death and father's remarriage to a Roman Catholic resulted in her receiving her early education at a convent school. After her stepmother's death in 1903, she was transferred to Miss Dana's -- an exclusive finishing school in New Jersey, although in later life she claimed to have been expelled from the convent after confusing the immaculate conception with spontaneous combustion. Dorothy's father died in 1912 and, despite his being a wealthy garment manufacturer, left her without financial support. For a while she worked as a dance class pianist; however, a chance to fulfil her literary ambitions came when she sold some poems to Vogue, and on their strength was employed as the magazine's caption writer.

In 1917 she married Edwin Parker, a Wall Street broker, who shortly after left to serve in the First World War. Following the appearance of a series of articles mocking the pretensions of the fashionable, Parker was transferred to Vogue's sister title, Vanity Fair. She became its drama critic in 1918 -- the only woman holding such a position in New York at that time -- and was joined on its staff by Robert Sherwood and Robert Benchley. They became firm friends, and regularly dined at New York's Algonquin Hotel with, amongst others, Alexander Woolcott, Franklin P. Adams, George S. Kaufmann, Harold Ross and Mark Connolly. Collectively they represented the nucleus (or 'Board') of what become known as the 'Algonquin Round Table' -- later members of this set included James Thurber, Harpo Marx and Tallulah Bankhead. Adams documented the repartee of this group of journalists, playwrights and cultural trendsetters in a New York Tribune column, 'The Conning Tower'. Parker, whom Woolcott later described as 'so odd a blend of Little Nell and Lady Macbeth', was the clique's undisputed queen, and while in later life dismissive of the legendary status their gatherings acquired -- 'It was no Mermaid Tavern [. . .] Just a bunch of loudmouths showing off, saving their gags for days' -- it was at the Algonquin that the myth of 'Mrs. Parker' was born.

In 1920 the increasingly sardonic tone of Parker's theatre reviews, which lambasted productions on whose patronage Vanity Fair depended, resulted in her dismissal. Joining forces with (who resigned in protest) as 'Park-Bench', she began to work freelance. In 1922 Parker published her first short story, 'Such a Pretty Little Picture', in Smart Set, and the following years saw her fiction grace the pages of Cosmopolitan, Harpers and other leading magazines of day. But it was with the establishment of the New Yorker by Harold Ross that her stories found their natural home, their tone of jaded sophistication defining the journal's spirit. By 1924 her marriage was effectively over, her husband's alcoholism and unease amongst the Algonquin wits having strained the relationship beyond endurance. They were divorced in 1928. In spite of this, and her remarriage, Dorothy would remain 'Mrs. Parker'.

Parker, in whose life the speakeasy already featured highly, now began to drink heavily. Following an intense but short-lived affair with the playwright Charles McArthur and a subsequent abortion, she attempted to take her own life. She made a second attempt in 1926, and these experiences led to one of her best known poems, 'Resume':

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.

In spite of this turmoil, the late 1920s proved the most productive years of Parker's life: in 1926 her first volume of verse, Enough Rope, appeared; two more followed, Sunset Gun (1928) and Death and Taxes (1931). Her poetry's unique combination of formal simplicity and dark sentiment proved exceptionally popular, and in 1936 her published verse was issued in a single volume, Not so Deep as a Well. Often dismissed as inconsequential, Parker's verse can be seen as careful pastiche of romantic poetry, which observes its conventions the better to undermine them with the sardonic sentiment of their concluding lines.

In 1929 Parker won the O.E. Henry prize for short fiction for her story 'Big Blonde'. Still frequently anthologised, its account of a successful model's decline, via a failed marriage and a succession of relationships with various men, into middle aged desperation and alcoholism (her days 'a blurred and flickering sequence, an imperfect film, dealing with the actions of strangers'), captures both Parker's own fears about the direction of her life, and the fate of her 'lost' generation.

The following year saw 'Big Blonde' republished in her first volume of short stories, Laments for the Living; a second, After Such Pleasures, appeared in 1933. Parker's fiction developed the themes of ennui and disillusionment found in her poetry, but gave them a social context and thus a social significance, implying that they were the product of the emptiness at the heart of a privileged, metropolitan lifestyle. Despite the continued circulation of certain lines of her verse, it is on the strength of her fiction that Parker's reputation as writer rests. As Brendan Gil put it, 'If it is easier to visit the world of the twenties and thirties through Mrs. Parker's short stories and soliloquies than through her verse, it is also more rewarding; to a startling degree, they have a substance, a solidity, that the poems do not prepare us for.' In addition to her fiction during this period, Parker, under the guise of 'Constant Reader', reviewed books for the New Yorker (collected as Constant Reader, 1970), which are celebrated not for their critical insight but for their cultivation of the 'Mrs. Parker' persona -- memorably she wrote of one book, 'not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force', and of A.A. Milne's The House on Pooh Corner, 'Tonstant Weader fwowed up'.

By the early 1930s the Algonquin circle had dispersed, and following Behchley's and Sherwood's lead Parker turned her attention to the 'Goldwyn' paved streets of Hollywood. In 1934 she married a young actor, Alan Campbell, and relocated to California. This move proved highly lucrative: working as a husband and wife script development team, Parker's regal bearing and penchant for memorable quotes ensured a steady stream of work on numerous scripts, the most enduring of which are probably A Star is Born (1937) and Alfred Hitchcock's Saboteur (1941). Like many American writers in the 1930s, Parker became increasingly politicised, collaborating with and her partner to form the Screen Writers Guild and campaigning for civil rights (an issue she had already raised in her theatre reviews and in her fiction -- for example, 'A Matter of Black and White'). In 1937 Parker travelled to Spain to report on the Civil War. Deeply affected by this experience (a Newsweek article describing her journey noted that Spain had 'unhinged her renowned flippancy'), on returning she devoted herself to raising awareness of the threat of European fascism and became a founder member of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League.

Following America's entry into the war, Campbell volunteered and was sent to Europe, returning in 1947. In 1948 he and Parker divorced, only to remarry two years later. By this time her creative output had radically diminished, to the extent that The Portable Mrs Parker, published in 1944 (revised editions 1973, 2006), effectively constituted her collected poetry and fiction. The anti-communist pogram that swept through Hollywood in the early 1950s brought her career in film to an end; denounced as the 'queen of the communists', she was blacklisted by the California State Senate Committee on Un-American Activities. When interviewed by the FBI about her political activity she famously remarked, 'Listen, I can't even get my dog to stay down, do I look like someone who could overthrow the government?'

In 1952 she and Campbell separated again, and Parker returned to New York, here collaborating with Arnaud D'Usseau on a play, The Ladies of the Corridor (1954). Despite its cool critical reception, Parker declared it 'the only thing I was ever proud of', possibly because of the extended period of sobriety involved in its composition. She and Campbell reunited and returned to California in 1961, but were unable to find work and haunted the peripheries of the film industry. Her literary activity by this time was confined to occasional but influential book reviews for Esquire, but failing sight and her fondness for alcohol made these increasingly a 'forceps delivery'. As a young woman Parker had declared that she chose to live in hotels because all she required was 'a place to lay my hat and a few friends': in 1964, following Campbell's death, she returned to New York to live out her last days in a hotel. Parker died in 1967 and, in a gesture of continuing commitment to civil rights, left her estate to Martin Luther King.

The appeal of Parker's life and work has proved perennial: numerous editions of her work are in print; she is the subject of several biographies, a feature film (Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, 1994) and various critical monographs. In her old age Parker stated, 'my verse is terribly dated -- as anything once fashionable is dreadful now'; paradoxically, the longevity of Parker's work results in part from this proximity to its period, since through its depiction of the painful contradictions of a privileged and relatively independent lifestyle it anticipated many of the dilemmas that women would face in an era of mass consumption.

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