Dorothy Parker was born on August 22, 1893 in West End, New York while her parents were there on vacation. The prosperous Jewish family lived in Manhattan where her father, Jacob, was a garment manufacturer. Her mother, Annie Eliza Rothschild was from the Rothschild Banking Clan. Dorothy was the youngest of 4 children. Her mother died when she was 4 and Jacob married Eleanor Francis Lewis who died just 3 years later. It was not a loss Dorothy mourned.
Dorothy’s early education was at Blessed Sacrament Convent School which was Roman Catholic. She finished her education at Miss Dana’s School in Morristown, New Jersey. She claimed the only thing she learned was that ‘if you spit on a pencil eraser it will erase in’.
When her father died in 1913 she was twenty and already knew she wanted to be a writer. Earning a living had to come first so she found a job as a dance class pianist at night and honed her writing skills during the day.
In 1914 Dorothy sold “Any Porch”, a poem, to Vanity Fair for $12.00. In 1916 she sold more of her poetry to Vogue and was given an editorial position at the magazine and her career took off from there. In 1917 she married Edwin Pond Parker II, a stockbroker, but the marriage didn’t last long as he was an alcoholic and during WWI became addicted to morphine. After the divorce in 1920 she kept his name. During the time of her marriage she worked at Vanity Fair where her managing editor, Frank Crowinshield, said she had “the quickest tongue imaginable, and I need not to say the keenest sense of mockery.” For a time she filled in for P.G. Wodehouse as a Theater Critic. It was said that she was very entertaining at it, scathing and mocking, while sparing no one. Here is where she met and became close friends with writers Robert Benchley and Robert Sherwood. The 3 formed the famous Algonquin Round Table which consisted of luncheons at the Algonquin Motel in New York. The intellectual set included writers and journalists like Franklin Pierce Adams, James Thurber, Alexander Woollcott, George S. Kaufman, Edna Ferber and other well known personalities. Conversation at these gatherings was always lively but seldom kind. The 1994 movie ‘Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle’ was based on the life and times of this famous group.
Vanity Fair fired Dorothy in 1920 and several of her friends resigned in protest. Dorothy and Robert Benchley formed a free lance writing firm called ‘Park-Bench’. In 1925 the pair joined Harold Ross’s new magazine ‘The New Yorker’ and Dorothy began writing book reviews. Her acid wit was not always popular with the writers. She stayed there until 1933 but would continue writing for the magazine off and on until 1955.
In 1934 she married Alan Campbell who was an actor and script writer. It was a rocky marriage with several separations but it was the beginning of a flourishing career with him writing such successful film scripts as ‘A Star is Born’. She worked on Hitchcock’s film ‘Sagoteur’. With the help of Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, and others Dorothy founded ‘The Screen Writers Guild”. While in Hollywood she dabbled in politics as one of the founders of the Anti-Nazi League and later veered towards Communism. She was actually investigated by the FBI. She was blacklisted and out of work in Hollywood effectively ending her script writing career. She moved back to New York as a Literary Critic for the Esquire until 1962.
In 1963 Alan died suddenly of a heart attack and she was alone and riddled with grief. Already an alcoholic, it got worse. On June 7, 1967, shortly before her 74th birthday, she too died from of a heart attack. According to her will, she left her estate to the civil rights activist, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
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