Dorothy Parker (1) [1893–1967]

Dorothy Parker, née Rothschild, was born in the West End section of Long Branch, New Jersey, to J. Henry and Elizabeth Rothschild. Her mother died when she was four years old and she had an unhappy childhood. She attended a Catholic grammar school and a finishing school in Morristown, NJ, and her formal education ended when she was 14.

In 1914, she sold her first poem to Vanity Fair. At age 22, she took an editorial job at Vogue, and continued to write poems for newspapers and magazines. In 1917, she joined Vanity Fair, taking over from P.G. Wodehouse as drama critic. At the time, she was the first female critic on Broadway. That same year, she married Edwin P. Parker, a stockbroker, but the marriage was tempestuous, and the couple divorced in 1928.

She became known for her witty writing and conversational repartee, and her wisecrack remarks are still widely repeated. In 1919, she became a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table, the informal gathering of writers who lunched at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City. The group included Alexander Woollcott, Robert Benchley, Harpo Marx, George S. Kaufman, Harold Ross, and Edna Ferber. In 1922, Parker published her first short story, "Such a Pretty Little Picture," for Smart Set.

Over the years, she contributed poetry, fiction and book reviews as the "Constant Reader" columnist. Her first collection of poems, Enough Rope, was published in 1926, and was a bestseller. Her two subsequent collections were Sunset Gun (1928) and Death and Taxes (1931). Her collected fiction was issued in 1930 as Laments for the Living.

During the 1920s, she traveled to Europe several times and befriended Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gerald and Sara Murphy. She contributed articles and short fiction to The New Yorker and Life. While her work was successful, she suffered from depression and alcoholism, and attempted suicide.

In 1929, she won the O. Henry Award for her short story "Big Blonde." In 1934, Parker married actor-writer Alan Campbell and the couple relocated to Los Angeles, where they became a highly-paid script writing team. They worked for MGM and Paramount and received an Academy Award nomination for A Star Is Born in 1937. They divorced in 1947, and remarried in 1950, but their relationship deteriorated.
She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1959 and was a visiting professor at California State College in Los Angeles in 1963. That year, she found Alan Parker dead of an apparent suicide. She returned to Manhattan and lived in the Volney Hotel on the Upper East Side for the last 15 years of her life. An ardent supporter of civil rights, she bequeathed her literary estate to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.