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Dorothy Parker

Dorothy Parker
Young Dorothy Parker.jpg
Dorothy Parker
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 York City, New York, U.S.
Occupation Author, poet, critic, screenwriter
Nationality American
Genre Poetry, satire, short stories
Literary movement American modernism
Notable works Enough Rope, Sunset Gun, Star Light, Star Bright--, A Star Is Born
Notable awards O. Henry Award
1929
Spouse Edwin Pond Parker II (1917–1928)
Alan Campbell (1934–1947, 1950-1963)
Website
www.dorothyparker.com

Dorothy Parker (August 22, 1893 – June 7, 1967) was an American poet, short story writer, critic, and satirist, best known for her wit, wisecracks and eye for 20th-century urban foibles.

From a conflicted and unhappy childhood, Parker rose to acclaim, both for her literary output in publications such as The New Yorker and as a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table. Following the breakup of the circle, Parker traveled to Hollywood to pursue screenwriting. Her successes there, including two Academy Award nominations, were curtailed when her involvement in left-wing politics led to a place on the Hollywood blacklist.

Dismissive of her own talents, she deplored her reputation as a "wisecracker." Nevertheless, her literary output and reputation for sharp wit have endured.

Also known as Dot or Dottie, Parker was born Dorothy Rothschild to Jacob Henry and Eliza Annie Rothschild (née Marston) at 732 Ocean Avenue in Long Branch, New Jersey, where her parents had a summer beach cottage. Dorothy's mother was of Scottish descent, and her father was of German Jewish descent. Parker wrote in her essay "My Hometown" that her parents got her back to their Manhattan apartment shortly after Labor Day so she could be called a true New Yorker. Her mother died in West End in July 1898, when Parker was a month shy of turning five. Her father remarried in 1900 to a woman named Eleanor Francis Lewis. Parker hated her father, whom she accused of physical abuse; and likewise despised her stepmother, whom she refused to call "mother", "stepmother", or even "Eleanor", instead referring to her as "the housekeeper". She grew up on the Upper West Side and attended a Roman Catholic elementary school at the Convent of the Blessed Sacrament on West 79th Street with sister Helen, despite having a Jewish father and Protestant stepmother. (Mercedes de Acosta was a classmate.) Parker once joked that she was asked to leave following her characterization of the Immaculate Conception as "spontaneous combustion". Her stepmother died in 1903, when Parker was nine. Parker later went to Miss Dana's School, a finishing school in Morristown, New Jersey. She graduated from Miss Dana's School in 1911, at the age of 18. Following her father's death in 1913, she played piano at a dancing school to earn a living while she worked on her verse.


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