Dorothy Parker Biography

Dorothy Parker was an American poet and critic of the mid-20th century, famous for her sardonic wit and quotable one-liners like “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.”

Dorothy Parker wrote light verse and epigrams while working for magazines in New York, starting with Vanity Fair in 1917. Later she wrote for The New Yorker, Life and others, contributing book and play reviews and earning a reputation as a sharp-tongued critic.

Parker was a member of the Algonquin Round Table (an informal literary gathering at New York’s Algonquin Hotel in the 1920s that included her colleague Robert Benchley), and her witty anecdotes and literary insight made her a star of New York’s high society. Time magazine called Parker “the tongue heard ’round the world,” and she is the source of many famous comic lines, including her comment on a Katharine Hepburn performance: “She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.”

Dorothy Parker also hobnobbed with celebrities in California, where she lived while punching up scripts for films including A Star is Born (1937). In the 1940s her left-wing politics got her in trouble with the likes of Senator Joe McCarthy, but she continued to work as a writer, her celebrity status somewhat dimmed.

Her books of poetry include Enough Rope (1920) and Death and Taxes (1931), and her collections of stories include Laments for the Living (1930) and After Such Pleasures (1933). Parker attempted suicide four times in the 1920s and ’30s, but she lived until 1967 and died of heart failure when she was nearly 74.