Chapter I
Dorothy Parker: A Manhattan Confection
Herald Square.
Dorothy circa 1924.
It is the autumn of 1988 and Dorothy Parker is back at the Algonquin Hotel, surrounded by reporters. A small crowd has gathered around the Round Table in the Round Table Room. Some have cocktails in hand; others are telling jokes; a few jot down quips and quotes in narrow reporters’ notebooks. Television news cameras are rolling. Somewhere in the room, Mrs. Parker is waiting. She’s in a can.
All eyes turn to the tall, white-haired Paul O’Dwyer as he moves to the front of the room with Dorothy Parker. The eighty-one-year-old lawyer from County Mayo, Ireland, had, with his late partner, Oscar Bernstien, built a law practice known throughout the city for representing underdogs, defending civil rights, and serving those in need. It was Bernstien who had drawn up Mrs. Parker’s last will and testament. According to that will, after Parker’s death in June 1967, her estate went to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a man she greatly admired but had never met. Ten months later he was assassinated, and Parker’s literary rights were later transferred to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Mrs. Parker’s iconic status was officially recognized in 1992, when the U.S. Postal Service issued this commemorative stamp.
Mrs. Parker had been cremated in Westchester County, but her remains had gone unclaimed by her executrix, the playwright Lillian Hellman, and the ashes had been in O’Dwyer’s filing cabinet for almost twenty years. Now the final chapter of Parker’s life was being written—literally—by biographer Marion Meade, who had discovered while researching her landmark biography Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? that the ashes had never been properly interred. O’Dwyer has called this press conference at the Algonquin to officially hand over Parker’s ashes to Dr. Benjamin Hooks, executive director of the NAACP. After a short speech by O’Dwyer, Dr. Hooks graciously accepts the ashes and promises to create a proper memorial for this inveterate New Yorker. The irony is that Parker’s final resting place will be at the NAACP headquarters in Baltimore, rather than in the city she had done so much to make famous.
Dorothy’s memorial in Baltimore.
On October 20, 1988, the ashes were placed in a garden outside the NAACP offices in Baltimore, with Dr. Hooks officiating over the dedication. The circular brick memorial designed by Harry G. Robinson is meant to recall the Algonquin’s Round Table. The memorial stands in a small grove of pines; pine needles and cones lie scattered on the grass. An urn containing Dorothy Parker’s ashes stands in the center of the memorial, bearing a plaque commemorating her life and accomplishments. Always one to approach serious subjects with irreverence, Parker had tossed off a handful of mock epitaphs over the course of her life, but the real one reads,
After Mrs. Parker was finally laid to rest, a renewed interest in her work arose, as if quite literally from the ashes. Since the late 1980s, new collections of her work have been published; she has been the subject of three biographies, an award-winning Hollywood feature film, and an Oscar-winning documentary. In 1993 the U.S. Postal Service honored Parker with a commemorative postage stamp, and her birthplace in West End, New Jersey, was named a national literary landmark in 2005. The Dorothy Parker Society boasts some three thousand members around the world, offers monthly tours covering sites important to Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table, and hosts an annual “Parkerfest.” Mrs. Parker herself might have commented on this activity with a typical sardonic observation, but no doubt she would also be pleased with the upsurge of enthusiasm for her work, which has introduced many adoring fans to the Manhattan she called home.
Few other writers have portrayed any city with as much keen and insightful detail as Dorothy Parker did when writing of Manhattan. She belongs to an impressive club of New York City writers—Edith Wharton, Eugene Debs, James Baldwin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, J.D. Salinger—native sons and daughters who evoke, through their work, a city that is as alive and vibrant today as when they penned their words. In Dorothy Parker’s New York, the speakeasies are always hopping, the party is just beginning, and all the taxicabs hold couples on their way to an affaire de cœur.
Dorothy Parker herself was a Manhattan confection: equal parts bootleg scotch, Broadway lights, speakeasy smoke, skyscraper steel, streetcar noise, and jazz horns. She was a product of a city struggling economically but on the verge of enormous power and influence. Dorothy, the precocious offspring of a Jewish father and a Protestant mother, would not have been comfortable in turn-of-the-century Los Angeles, with its dirt roads and deplorable culture. Chicago at the time was a cow town, a place of stockyards, not sophistication. And puritanical Boston certainly had no room for the likes of her.
Jennifer Jason Leigh starred as Dorothy Parker in the 1994 film Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle.
A Parker Portrait
In 1940, Pocket Books published After Such Pleasures in paperback. At the end of the collection of short stories, Dottie’s editor added a brief biography and portrait of the author, then in her late forties:
Dorothy Parker is slightly over five feet in height, dark, and attractive, with somewhat weary eyes and a sad mouth. Her favorite possession is Robinson, a dachshund. She is superstitious, pessimistic, hates to be alone, and prefers to be considered a satirist rather than a humorist. She usually writes in longhand, crossing out every other word in order to achieve the utmost simplicity; she tries to avoid feminine style. Being extremely near-sighted, she wears glasses when writing, but she has never been seen on the street with them. Ernest Hemingway is her favorite author—flowers and a good cry are reported to be among her favorite diversions.
Dottie in 1941.
Only New York, with its bustling, crowded streets and undisputed role as the center of American popular culture, could have nurtured Dorothy, providing her access to, and friendships with, some of the most important cultural figures of the time. The life of Dorothy Parker is inescapably intertwined with the New York she inhabited; likewise, popular perception of New York and its history has been shaped by the life she lived and the world she captured in print.
Nineties New York: A City in Upheaval
At the end of the nineteenth century, New York was poised on the edge of tremendous economic, social, and political change. Dorothy was born into that world on August 22, 1893, in West End, New Jersey, at her family’s summer beach cottage. That summer a catastrophic economic collapse launched a five-year depression in the United States. By the fall of 1893, 141 national banks had failed, followed by savings and loan institutions, mortgage companies, and private investment banks. Layoffs happened at an astonishing rate and only worsened during the freezing winter.
West End, New Jersey, where Dorothy was born, was named a national literary landmark in 2005.
The same month that Eliza Rothschild delivered Dottie, Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World announced a “war on hunger” and recounted tales of the indigent to its readers. Intrepid reporters Nellie Bly and Stephen Crane wrote first-person accounts of the city’s downtrodden, including stories about mothers who couldn’t feed their children and turned them out into the streets. While the Rothschilds slept, Pulitzer’s newspaper wagons prowled the streets, handing out free loaves of bread.
The New York police canvassed homes door to door to assess the alarming situation, reporting 70,000 unemployed, of whom 25,000 were women. City officials offered little relief for the poor. City government, controlled by the corrupt Tammany Hall political machine, was starting to be overturned by the forces of good government, but it would take years for real moral and social reform to take effect. Against this backdrop, the population was exploding. In 1900 New York City had just over 3 million residents; in 1910, 4.8 million; by 1920, 5.6 million people; and in 1930, more than 7 million—a 133 percent increase in just thirty years.
Although the Rothschilds, who were second-generation Americans, may not have felt much affinity for the newcomers from Europe overflowing the tenements on the Lower East Side, the newly arrived masses provided a dependable workforce. Some went to work for Henry Rothschild’s garment business; others were employed as the family’s household help. Dorothy never described what it was like inside her father’s factory, but the use of sweatshop labor was so widespread that the working conditions there were quite likely poor and the pay minimal. In response to the harsh conditions, New York City soon became a hotbed for labor reform, with workers striking and thugs (and policemen) beating those in the picket lines. Child labor was an important issue, and women held strikes to protest intolerable working conditions for garment workers.
Women’s rights, especially the right to vote, was another galvanizing issue of the day. When Dorothy was sixteen, more than 20,000 New York women wage earners went on strike for almost two months, and as she entered the writing profession in her early twenties, the suffrage movement was advocating voting rights for women. In October 1917, tens of thousands of women marched in a New York City suffrage parade. In June 1919, Congress proposed the Fifteenth Amendment, giving all citizens the right to vote regardless of sex; ratification was completed on August 18, 1920.
This was the world into which Dorothy Parker was born and from which she drew her inspiration. However, although she occasionally ventured into working-class lives with stories like “Clothe the Naked” and “The Standard of Living,” she was much more at home chronicling the limited options available to middle-class women of the early twentieth century. In her verse, women are more likely to have their hearts broken by men than men are likely to be left heartbroken by women. In her fiction, she used stock characters for her female roles: doltish office girls, blushing new brides, flustered girlfriends, and society matrons who are small-minded or silly (and frequently both). Few of these women gain power or satisfaction from their interactions with the men in their lives.
Girls march in New York City in 1909 to protest child labor.
A poignant and powerful example is “Mr. Durant,” written for American Mercury magazine in 1924. It’s the tale of a loathsome middle-aged businessman who impregnates his twenty-year-old secretary. Dorothy’s descriptions of the dress and mannerisms of the young female office worker are masterly for their portrayal from Mr. Durant’s perspective: “When she bent over her work, her back showing white through her sleazy blouse, her clean hair coiled smoothly on her thin neck, her straight, childish legs crossed at the knee to support her pad, she had an undeniable appeal.” As a Center Street trolley takes Mr. Durant uptown to his wife and children, he considers the dilemma with a cold, detached practicality:
The New York City of Dorothy Parker’s imagination was one where women needed to be “fixed up” or simply removed from sight. Her fiction and poetry don’t feature women transcending the roles that society had prescribed for them—none of her characters become powerful theater critics or social gadflies or Oscar-nominated Hollywood screenwriters.
Gin and Sin: Dottie Records the Jazz Age
Dorothy Parker was at her tantalizing best when she wrote about the apartment houses, afternoon teas, bridge games, train stations, and saloons that made up her New York life. She populated these settings with the unfaithful husbands, drunken social climbers, dissipated lovers, and cowardly gentlemen she saw around her. Yet the themes she worked and reworked continue to resonate today. Spouses are still unfaithful to each other; heartbreak and loss are forever part of the human condition; boneheaded bosses, insecure lovers, haughty neighbors, dull-witted children—no matter what decade these characters appear in, they will be understood. William Shakespeare had his conflicted princes, Parker her alcoholic debutantes, and both remain fresh and recognizable.
For a writer with Parker’s remarkable talents, New York provided plenty of characters for fiction and poetry: bootleggers and stock traders, chorus girls and grandes dames, Fifth Avenue swells and the Bowery’s down-and-outers. The years of relative peace between the First and Second World Wars gave Parker the freedom to write about affairs of the heart, the trials of suburbia, the inanities of social convention, and even the merits of gin versus scotch—topics that in the hands of a trenchant observer such as Parker not only made for timeless stories but, most important for her editors, sold magazines.
The printed word was enjoying heady days when Parker’s career took off. The city had at least fifteen daily newspapers, with editions rolling off the presses in the morning and afternoon. With the addition of scores of magazines and cheap pulps and hundreds of dime novels, sidewalk newsstands were bursting with titles. Movies were still silent, radio was in its infancy, and live shows were the thing at the city’s nearly eighty Broadway theaters (today there are about thirty-five). Parker began her career at Vogue, which had transformed itself from printing dressmaking patterns to dictating style. When she joined Vanity Fair—the magazine was just four years old and already the most sophisticated publication in the country—she was minted as the reigning arbiter of sass and class. Her snappy wisecracks (dutifully retold by her ink-stained chums) and mordant verse (sent in to the most popular daily newspaper columnists) made her a symbol of the Roaring Twenties and an expert on Broadway, banter, and bacchanalia.
Although she did not draw the intense media scrutiny attracted by a couple like Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, she was one of the best-known women of the time. Her reputation came primarily from her wisecracks and prose “squibs,” as she called them, but also from her short fiction. Her first book, Enough Rope, was a best seller, going through eleven printings in fifteen months. At one point she was so famous that people followed her around waiting for her to say something funny; even worse, complete strangers accosted her, begging for a joke. Luckily, she was often up to the task. A woman at a party asked if she was Dorothy Parker. “Yes, do you mind?” was her quick reply. In a 1956 interview with the Paris Review—the only serious literary question-and-answer session she ever sat for—Parker recalled, “Why, it got so bad that they began to laugh before I opened my mouth.”
Much of Dorothy’s humor relied on satire. Her keen eye for socially damning detail was evident in the very first poem she sold, a thirty-six-line piece she submitted to Vanity Fair in 1915, called “Any Porch.” She was paid the sum of twelve dollars, more than a week’s salary at the time. The poem, with its rhyming iambic couplets of droll dialogue, provided New York with its first taste of Dorothy’s ability to carefully observe and devastatingly mock the vapid inanities of the socialites who brushed up against her world. Here is an excerpt:
Dorothy drew inspiration from what she witnessed in her social and professional life. She mimicked the language she heard and lampooned her hosts and companions in brilliant stories and clever verse. She was one of the earliest contributors to The New Yorker and had much to do with its rise in prestige. Yet stories such as “Dialogue at Three in the Morning” and “Arrangement in Black and White” satirized the very readers the new magazine was cultivating.
A Place at the Table: Dorothy Parker and the Vicious Circle
Though she skewered her friends and enemies, there were a few other New Yorkers with a sensibility akin to Dorothy’s, and they soon found a common meeting ground. Just as one cannot think of mixing a proper martini without dry vermouth, Dorothy Parker’s story cannot be served without acknowledging her membership in the Algonquin Round Table. This gathering of misfits and cutups—writers, press agents, actors, and hangers-on—wrote itself into American popular culture in the twenties by living the Jazz Age lifestyle and reporting that life to their audiences. They typified, for many, a Manhattan of late nights in theaters, early mornings at house parties and speakeasies, long lunches, and a small bit of work squeezed in somewhere.
“What the Hell?” Words and Phrases Attributed to Parker
“What the hell?” is just one of many phrases that Dorothy Parker is credited with popularizing, according to editor Stuart Y. Silverstein, who put together Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker (Scribner) in 1996. Spending hundreds of hours poring over old copies of magazines and newspapers, he managed to dig up 122 pieces that Dottie had written and, for whatever reason, neglected to publish in her three books of collected verse. (One wag said that Dottie is sure to punch Silverstein in the nose when she meets him in heaven.)
Silverstein says that Parker made numerous contributions to everyday speech, although he also noted in an interview that “in virtually all instances the person credited with the first known use of a word or phrase almost certainly did not create it.... Most words emerge from a hazy mist—suddenly, there they are, out of nowhere.”
According to Silverstein, the first documented use of the following words, terms, and phrases can be attributed to Dorothy Parker: art moderne, ball of fire (said of a person), with bells on, bellyacher, birdbrain, boy-meets-girl, chocolate bar, daisy chain (in the sexual sense), face-lift, high society, mess around (to potter), nostalgic, one-night stand (in the sexual sense), pain in the neck (said of a person), pass (sexual overture), doesn’t have a prayer, queer (gay), scaredy-cat, shoot (expletive), the sky’s the limit, to twist someone’s arm, what the hell, and wisecrack.
The group started meeting in June 1919, when the Algonquin Hotel hosted a welcome-home luncheon roast in honor of Alexander Woollcott, the New York Times drama critic, recently returned from two years in France as an enlisted man in the Great War. Although Dorothy produced much of her finest and most enduring work during this manic decade, it was her connection to the Round Table that made her a popular cultural icon of the Jazz Age. The group was practically inseparable, and with so many newspaper writers among them, their comings and goings were reported in the daily columns. On many afternoons, Dottie might be the only female present, and her circle of friends could always count on her to say something wryly amusing.
You Might as Well Live
Beyond her daily lunches at the Algonquin Round Table, Dorothy Parker’s private life was rocky and provided a seemingly endless source of material for her fiction, poems, screenplays, and plays. During the Round Table years, she had several breakups and reconciliations with her first husband, Eddie Parker. The estrangement caused by the recurring absence of Eddie (and, some twenty-five years later, her second husband, Alan Campbell) due to wartime service shows up in her 1943 short story “The Lovely Leave.” The growing distance between Eddie and Dorothy, psychologically and physically, contributed to their divorce in 1928. Dorothy also had a string of love affairs, often ending in disaster. By the time she was forty, she had tried to take her own life at least three times, often as a result of her loneliness. As Dorothy’s many relationships foundered, she solidified a lifelong preoccupation with death. This fascination is perhaps understandable, since she had lost her mother, stepmother, father, and a favorite uncle all before she turned twenty-one. Throughout her adult life, death was never far from her thoughts. The very titles of her books hint at death (Enough Rope, Sunset Gun, Death and Taxes, Laments for the Living), and images of death and burial appear repeatedly in her work. She even subscribed to undertakers’ trade journals while working at Vanity Fair and wore tuberose, a perfume favored for dressing corpses.
Dorothy and Alan in 1937 at the Newark airport, boarding a transcontinental flight back to Hollywood. The pair were making a fortune writing for the movies at the time and had just bought a home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
Romantic misadventures and the ongoing flirtation with suicide that they inspired accentuated her sense of death’s omnipresence. When she wrote her O. Henry Award–winning short story “Big Blonde” in 1928, she had already attempted suicide twice. This may explain why Hazel Morse, the tragic protagonist of the story, reflects, “The thought of death came and stayed with her and lent her a sort of drowsy cheer. It would be nice, nice and restful, to be dead.” For Parker, life was not sacred and untouchable, as she commented in 1928’s “Coda”:
Dorothy’s best defense against the darkness and sadness pervading her life was to attack; she built her reputation by using humor to defuse heartache and loneliness as much as to skewer social pretensions and emotional shallowness. For example, in “Autumn Valentine” (1935), Parker twists the standard trope of a broken heart to illustrate how ephemeral even “true love” can actually be:
She could not afford to be all doom and gloom, however; Dorothy was a freelance writer dependent on publishing in general-interest magazines, and her editors paid her to amuse and entertain. Even though she completed less than eight years of formal education, quitting school at fourteen, she got by well enough to write for a pantheon of the best American magazines, including Vogue, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker, because she could amuse and entertain with the best of them. Her first job, working at Vogue for Condé Nast, paid her ten dollars a week. In her spare time she wrote and sold light verse. Her big break came when she joined Vanity Fair and started writing drama reviews. With her byline becoming more common, she branched out into short fiction, selling pieces to The New Yorker. Eventually she compiled her favorite pieces in single volumes, and those books quickly became best sellers. And when Hollywood came calling, she went west and started pulling in big checks to put words in the mouths of actors for the early talkies.
Her main audience throughout her career was women, and she got a lot of mileage—literally and figuratively—out of whom she called “the men I’m not married to.” No one, though, was safe; she could turn just as easily against her readers themselves. Her subject might be the bore at the dinner party or the silly flapper on the street; she treated them all with a lacerating insight born of practiced cynicism. She particularly liked to adopt the air of the put-upon observer, such as in her “hate verse” about women:
Parker wrote a series of these hate verses on such subjects as actors, men, her office, and wives, in which her powers of insight and observation sharpen her social commentary to a wicked-fine edge.
Halfway to the Door: Dorothy and Religion
In the early 1900s, with the wave of immigrants hitting American shores—and particularly the streets of New York—came a growing awareness of the role of Jewish life in a modern America. And yet, although Dorothy Parker’s memorial plaque in Baltimore mentions her Jewish past, her identification with that heritage was uncommon. She was raised as a WASP. Her mother was Scottish; her father was Jewish but not observant, despite buying real estate among Jewish neighbors in West End and working in an industry—the garment trade—that had a long tradition with the religion. Dottie’s father enrolled her in a West 79th Street Roman Catholic elementary school, concealing her Jewish roots from the nuns. Perhaps Henry was merely following the traditional understanding of Jewish identity: A Jew is someone who was born to a Jewish mother or who converts to Judaism in accordance with Jewish law and tradition. Yet when Dottie reminisced about her time at the convent school, she referred to herself as a “little Jewish girl trying to be cute”; thus, at some level, she could not conceal her heritage from herself.
From an early age Dorothy saw religion, something others took so seriously, as both a burden and a farce. Where others turned to religion for comfort, she thought of God as the one who took away her mother and replaced her with an evil stepmother. Dottie did not practice Judaism—or any religion, for that matter—at any time in her life. Her mother, stepmother, and both husbands were Christians, but her marriages were all civil ceremonies, and she claimed that one of the reasons she married Eddie Parker was for his “clean” surname, which she kept for the remainder of her life. While her stepmother, Eleanor, was fervently religious and demanded that young Dottie say prayers at bedtime, a belief in God could not have been easy for this girl who had experienced so much loss at such a young age. One wonders what the prayers of little Dorothy Rothschild were like.
We can see Dorothy’s unusual take on religion in “Prayer for a New Mother” (1928). The surprisingly tender ballad imagines the loss Mary must have felt after the Crucifixion:
Although Parker certainly wasn’t a regular at church or temple, her friends were aware of the mixed-religion no-man’s-land of her childhood and teased her about it. When Aleck Woollcott taunted George S. Kaufman at the Round Table, bellowing, “You goddamn Christ killer,” Kaufman defused the tension that his anti-Semitic friend had wrought by declaring with mock exaggeration, “For my part, I’ve had enough slurs on my race. I am now leaving this table, this dining room, this hotel, never to return.” He paused to glance across the table at Mrs. Parker looking at him. He smiled back and said: “And I trust Mrs. Parker will walk out with me—halfway.”
No One-Night Stand: Dorothy Parker’s Legacy
On June 7, 1967, Dorothy Parker could finally put to rest her questions about the afterlife. She suffered a fatal heart attack in her apartment, with only her poodle for company. Her obituary was splashed on the front page of the New York Times the next day. Summing up her impact was New Yorker editor William Shawn’s assessment that Parker’s personal and literary style “were not only highly characteristic of the twenties, but also had an influence on the character of the twenties—at least that particular nonserious, insolemn sophisticated literary circle—she was an important part of New York City.” And indeed, that assessment still stands today, with only one revision: She is an important part of New York City.
Books Published during Parker’s Lifetime
Dorothy Parker never wrote a novel or an autobiography. All of her books that came out during her lifetime were collections of pieces she wrote for periodicals, sometimes with unpublished poems included as well. The first books she published were collections of poetry; when she had written enough short stories, these, too, were collected. After her death, other editions appeared. The Portable Dorothy Parker has stayed continuously in print since 1944; in 2006 it was expanded and revised.
Collected Poetry
Enough Rope (1926)
Sunset Gun (1928)
Death and Taxes (1931)
Collected Poems: Not So Deep as a Well (1936)
Collected Fiction
Laments for the Living (1930)
After Such Pleasures (1933)
Here Lies: The Collected Stories of Dorothy Parker (1939)
Collected Prose and Poetry
The Portable Dorothy Parker (1944)
Dorothy in April 1953. This photo was taken by Roy Schatt in the garden of his studio on East 33rd Street.
A few years after Dorothy’s death, Viking Press issued an expanded edition of The Portable Dorothy Parker. The editors added play and book reviews, more short fiction, and a new introduction by longtime New Yorker staff writer Brendan Gill. Over the next twenty years, three full-length biographies covered her life in detail. In the 1990s Penguin Putnam published two new books: Dorothy Parker: Complete Poems and Dorothy Parker: Complete Stories. In 1996 Scribner published Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker, a collection of 122 pieces mined by Stuart Y. Silverstein from various periodicals.
Of all the Round Table members, Parker is the only one who has remained in print continuously since her lifetime— The Portable Dorothy Parker has been in bookshops since 1944, when she first compiled and arranged it. Part of the Portable’s attraction lies in the relevance of the observations as well as in the immediacy of the physical settings. Parker wrote about 63rd Street; the brownstones on that block are still standing eighty years later. Parker frequented the Plymouth, the New Amsterdam, the Cort—all theaters that have shows running this weekend. Her subject matter—honeymooners, telephone conversations, cousins, parties—is just as relevant today as when Herbert Hoover was in the White House. “A Telephone Call” (1927), one of her most popular short stories, is included in countless modern anthologies. Eight decades after she wrote the story, it was successfully presented in an off-off-Broadway performance, using a cell phone as the prop—without changing a word of dialogue.
Present-day visitors to the Algonquin Hotel ask the staff if they can check into Parker’s old room and order her favorite cocktails, to try to relive her life among her coterie of friends. Everywhere one looks today, from the dim lights in the Algonquin’s lounge to the blinking marquees of the theater district, Dorothy Parker’s humor and insight still ring true.
She was a woman of paradoxes: the self-described “little Jewish girl” who was educated by Catholic nuns, a caustic and often relentless social critic who was touchingly fond of animals and rarely without a pet dog, the dinner guest whom everyone wanted to be seated next to yet who was often lonely. Her exciting and sometimes tragic life bounced her all around Manhattan, so that few places there escaped her keen eye and often brutally insightful pen.
Dorothy Parker has become inseparable from Gotham. Any Broadway theater open since 1930 probably had her in an aisle seat at some time. From apartments and hotels to bars and theaters, from dog-walking parks to the offices of friends and colleagues, each place she wrote about helps complete the picture.
The following pages explore Dorothy Parker through the New York that she inhabited. A Journey into Dorothy Parker’s New York examines where this native New Yorker lived and worked in an effort not just to understand Dorothy better but also to get a better sense of New York City. Each location described here affected her in some fundamental way. In some locations, the connection is direct and obvious; in others, the effect on our understanding of Dorothy is cumulative and subtle. But each place guided her career and her legacy and is thus certainly worth including on the journey.
