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Parker Dorothy 1893 - 1967 (74)

Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.


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A Certain Lady



Dorothy Parker (1893 - 1967) was an American poet, short story writer and critic. Born August 22, 1893 in New Jersey, United States, her mother died when she was five years old. She was raised by her father and his brother Martin, who perished in the sinking of the Titanic. After a few years, her father also died, leaving her without a family, as she had no brothers.

She had to give up her studies and do various jobs to make a living, such as playing the piano in a dance school, while at the same time she was writing and trying to publish poems and short stories. After 4 years of efforts, a satirical poem about suffragettes and the women's movement of the time will be published in "Vanity fair" magazine. She would later be hired as a reviewer for the magazine until she was fired as she wrote negative reviews for people who were advertised in the magazine and she had been instructed to write positively.

She will continue to write and collaborate with newspapers and magazines of her time, while becoming a key member in Algonquin Round Table, a legendary club of writers, critics and artists who met almost daily at the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan. Her short stories were published in the "New Yorker" magazine, while from 1927 she undertook the book column of the magazine. Her first collection of poetry was published in 1926 and four years later her first collection of short stories. In the following decades she wrote poems, short stories and plays, and won an Oscar nomination for her partr in writting the screenplay "A Star is Born" (1937).

Parker was an advocate of human rights and in 1939, she co-founded Equality magazine to defend democratic rights. At the same time, she scandalized the society of her time, with her liberal views, her sarcastic humor, her caustic outbursts, her crazy drunks. During her lifetime, she had three marriages, the last two with the same husband and three suicide attempts. She died alone in New York in 1967, after a heart attack.