NOTES
1. Dorothy Parker to Helen Droste, September 1929.
2. Guinzburg and Oppenheimer originally called their company the Half-Moon Press, in honor of explorer Henry Hudson’s Dutch sailing ship (Halve Maen). Learning that another business had prior rights to the name, they substituted the Viking Press.
3. Alpine Giggle Week.
4. Various George Oppenheimer correspondence to Dorothy Parker.
5. George Oppenheimer, The View from the Sixties: Memories of a Spent Life (New York: David McKay, 1966), 3.
6. Dorothy Parker, “A Book of Great Short Stories,” New Yorker, October 29, 1927.
7. Ibid.
8. F. Scott Fitzgerald to Maxwell Perkins, June 1929, in Dear Scott/Dear Max: The Fitzgerald-Perkins Correspondence (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971), 156.
9. The amount of Parker’s advance against royalties is unknown. As a comparison, Scribner’s in 1923 paid F. Scott Fitzgerald $3,939 (equal to around $53,000 today) for his third novel, The Great Gatsby. Viking’s payment would have been very different for a first-time novelist.
10. Dorothy Parker to Helen Droste, September 1929.
11. Dorothy Parker to Helen Droste, November 28, 1929.
12. Ibid., September 1929.
13. Dorothy Parker, “The Artist’s Reward,” New Yorker, September 30, 1929.
14. Dorothy Parker to Helen Droste, November 28, 1929.
15. Dorothy Parker to Robert Benchley, November 7, 1929.
16. Ibid.
17. Dorothy Parker to Helen Droste, November 28, 1929.
18. New York Telegram, February 1, 1930.
19. Asked by the Paris Review, in a 1956 interview, if she’d ever tried a novel, she apparently decided to forget the painful episode with the shoe polish. “I wish to God I could do one, but I haven’t got the nerve.”
20. New York Times, June 15, 1930.
21. Dorothy Parker to George Oppenheimer, July 2, 1930.
22. Alpine Giggle Week.
23. George Oppenheimer to Dorothy Parker, July 3, 1930.
24. Alpine Giggle Week.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. Dorothy Parker to Robert Benchley, November 8, 1930.
29. Dorothy Parker, “Home Is the Sailor,” New Yorker, January 24, 1931.
30. Ernest Hemingway, Sean Hemingway, and Patrick Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (restored edition) (New York: Scribner, 2010), 239.
