The Spectator

From the archives: The Late Dorothy Parker

In celebration of the birthday of Dorothy Parker (1893 – 1967) today, here’s a review from the archives of her biography The Late Dorothy Parker by Leslie Frewin.

Where be your gibes now?, Victoria Glendinning, 12 Sep 1987

Dorothy Parker was ‘America’s wittiest woman’. Here is an example of her wit. Rising from her chair at the Algonquin, she said: ‘Excuse me, I have to go to the bathroom . . . I really have to telephone but I’m too embarrassed to say so.’ I think that’s funny. Do you think it’s funny? Generally, she was funny at other people’s expense, and it hurt.

Born in 1893, she was a Rothschild not the banking family, but clothiers in New York’s garment district. She loathed both her father (for his Jewishness) and her stepmother (for her punitive Protestantism) and left home as soon as she could to live alone in a boarding-house, have the odd lover, and write poems in the style of Edna St Vincent Millay.

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