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The chief characters of her short stories were usually women, beset by the discontents of emancipation. If they had lovers, they were bored with them; if they had no lovers, they were frustrated without them; and it was always the dream, not the reality, that mattered most. Her best story is Big Blonde, about a woman who falls apart because she has no dream of her own at all.
"Perhaps what gives her writing its peculiar tang," wrote Somerset Maugham, "is her gift for seeing something to laugh at in the bitterest tragedies of the human animal." Her own life started in bitter circumstances. She was born Dorothy Rothschild in 1893 in West End, N.J., of a Scotch mother who died during her infancy and a Jewish father who died, leaving her penniless, when she was in her teens.
A couple of years later, she got her first job, writing captions for Vogue. At 24, she married Edwin Parker II, a businessman from whom she was later divorced but whose name she kept. In 1917 she moved up in the magazine world, joining the staff of Vanity Fair, where she shared an office with Humorist Robert Benchley and the incipient Playwright Robert Sherwood.
She would also join them for lunch down the block at the Hotel Algonquin's fabled conversational Klatsch, the Round Table; among its other members were such quotables as Alexander Woollcott, Franklin Pierce Adams, Heywood Broun, Harold Ross, Marc Connelly and George S. Kaufman. She was pert, provocative, blinking her hazelgreen eyes or raising her pencil-arched eyebrows until they touched the line of her dark bangs as she delivered her acerbic ripostes.
Snows of Yesteryear. Dorothy Parker spent the next few decades mostly living up to, down, or off her legend. In 1933, when she was 40, she married her second husband, Actor-Scenarist Alan Campbell, 28, and toiled with him writing movies. But Hollywood money, she discovered, wasn't real: "It's congealed snow; it melts in your hand." In the '40s, the snow melted even faster as she constantly supported left-wing causes. In 1953, she collaborated on an unsuccessful play, The Ladies of the Corridor, about lonely women living in a hotel. Campbell died in 1963 (they had divorced in 1947 but remarried in 1950), and Dorothy Parker, her health failing, returned to Manhattan. She took up residence in a hotel, spending her final years in solitary.
For her epitaph, she once wryly suggested "Excuse my dust." But she also wrote, in her "Epitaph for a Darling Lady," the sentimental last stanza:
Leave for her a red young rose, go your way, and save your pity; She is happy, for she knows That her dust is very pretty.
Both tributes seem mannered, calculated, polished for technical effect. But then, Dorothy Parker accepted whole the two-faced myth of her time: at her most maudlin, she always tried to speak through her head rather than directly from her heart. That accounts for both her limitation and her fascination.