Dorothy Parker Lives On

The witty poetry, prose, and fiction writer Dorothy Parker died 50 years ago this month, the Guardian's John Dugdale explains. In a recent article, Dugdale outlines Parker's importance and sets the record straight on a few oft-cited, inaccurate details. "A bestselling poet who moved on to fiction, Dorothy Parker, who died 50 years ago this month, single-handedly invented 'the New Yorker short story', the kind of debonair but melancholy tale later associated with JD Salinger and John Cheever," he writes. From there:

She was equally innovative as a critic, pioneering a first‑person style and busting the taboo on hatchet jobs by women when reviewing theatre – she was fired under pressure from Broadway managers after three plays that she had slated closed – and books (as “Constant Reader”, best remembered for her one-liner on AA Milne, “Tonstant Weader Fwowed Up”).

And, as the only woman in the core members of the 1920s Algonquin “vicious circle”, she was arguably the first female celebrity wit since the 17th century, outperforming her illustrious male peers as a gag maker (after terminating a pregnancy by the priapic playwright Charles MacArthur: “I put all my eggs in one bastard”; on being told that stolid, taciturn President Coolidge had died: “How could they tell?”). Parker has survived better than the rest of her New Yorker set – her poems and stories are picked for anthologies, her best zingers are frequently invoked, and she’s usually only outscored by Oscar Wilde (and easily the most-quoted woman, in terms of things said rather than written) in dictionaries of quotations.

Next year she’ll get a posthumous screenplay credit for Bradley Cooper’s updated remake of A Star Is Born (Parker co-wrote the 1937 film), starring Cooper and Lady Gaga. But actually finding her work is tricky, partly because (as Natalie Haynes has noted) it’s all “slight in scale” – stories, reviews, verse, witticisms – and lacks the single substantial book that would help to categorise and promote her. In a bookshop today, you’re unlikely to locate her in fiction or poetry, or even in humour. If Parker’s there at all, she’ll be slightly improbably shelved instead with literary giants: Penguin Classics’ The Collected Dorothy Parker is still in print, though – as it’s a 2001 repackaging of the 1944 Portable Dorothy Parker with a bizarrely uncelebratory 1973 introduction by Brendan Gill – a new Best Of selection is surely long overdue.

Read more at the Guardian.