"Once upon a time --just after World War I to be precise-- the world was bright and new, and Dorothy Parker was one of the brightest and newest people in it." So begins this biography of one of the wittiest American writers of her era by John Keats. It is an intriguing story, sad in many ways, but never less than interesting. Parker is still read widely all these years after her heyday, and she is remembered as a leading figure at the famous Round Table lunches at the Algonquin Hotel in New York. Because she said and wrote so many funny lines, it was widely presumed that Dorothy Parker's Life was a ceaselessly merry one. She did have a great deal of fun but Parker was also an artist tormented by her own merciless sensibilities, viewing mankind with a wry, hard suspicion. You might as well live (whose title comes from a poem she wrote about the methods of suicide) is a wonderfully readable biography, as much about a style of life and art as about the kind of person who did so much to express it. John Keats manages to depict his remarkable subject- the most talked about woman of her time with warmth, sympathy, and an understanding of the cruel price she paid for her complex creative gifts. Biography of poet Dorothy Parker.