Dorothy Parker (née Rothschild; August 22, 1893 – June 7, 1967) was an American poet, writer, critic, and satirist based in New York; she was best known for her wit, wisecracks, and eye for 20th-century urban foibles.
August 22, 1893
Long Branch, New Jersey, U.S.
|Died||June 7, 1967 (aged 73)|
New York City, U.S.
|Resting place||Woodlawn Cemetery|
The Bronx, New York, U.S.
|Genre||Poetry, satire, short stories, criticism, essays|
|Literary movement||American modernism|
|Notable works||Enough Rope, Sunset Gun, A Star Is Born|
|Notable awards||O. Henry Award |
Edwin Pond Parker II
(m. 1917; div. 1928)
(m. 1934; div. 1947)
(m. 1950; died 1963)
From a conflicted and unhappy childhood, Parker rose to acclaim, both for her literary works published in magazines, such as The New Yorker, and as a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table. Following the breakup of the circle, Parker traveled to Hollywood to pursue screenwriting. Her successes there, including two Academy Award nominations, were curtailed when her involvement in left-wing politics resulted in her being placed on the Hollywood blacklist.
Dismissive of her own talents, she deplored her reputation as a "wisecracker." Nevertheless, both her literary output and reputation for sharp wit have endured. Some of her works have been set to music; adaptations notably include the operatic song cycle Hate Songs by composer Marcus Paus.
Early life and educationEdit
Also known as Dot or Dottie, Parker was born Dorothy Rothschild in 1893 to Jacob Henry Rothschild and his wife Eliza Annie (née Marston) (1851–1898) at 732 Ocean Avenue in Long Branch, New Jersey. Her parents had a summer beach cottage there. Parker's mother was of Scottish descent. Her father was the son of Sampson Jacob Rothschild (1818–1899) and Mary Greissman (b. 1824), both Prussian-born Jews. Sampson Jacob Rothschild was a merchant who immigrated to the USA around 1846, settling in Monroe County, Alabama. Jacob Henry Rothschild was one of five known siblings. The others were Simon (1854–1908); Samuel (b. 1857); Hannah (1860–1911), later Mrs. William Henry Theobald; and Martin, born in Manhattan on December 12, 1865, who perished in the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. Parker wrote in her essay, "My Home Town," that her parents returned to their Manhattan apartment shortly after Labor Day so that she could be called a true New Yorker. Her mother died in Manhattan in July 1898, a month before Parker's fifth birthday.
Her father remarried in 1900 to Eleanor Frances Lewis (1851–1903). Parker hated her father, who physically abused her, and her stepmother, whom she refused to call "mother," "stepmother," or "Eleanor," instead referring to her as "the housekeeper." However, her biographer, Marion Meade, refers to this account as "largely false," stating that the atmosphere in which Parker was growing up was indulgent, affectionate, supportive and generous. Parker grew up on the Upper West Side and attended a Roman Catholic elementary school at the Convent of the Blessed Sacrament on West 79th Street with her sister, Helen, although their father was Jewish and her stepmother was Protestant. (Mercedes de Acosta was a classmate.) Parker once joked that she was asked to leave following her characterization of the Immaculate Conception as "spontaneous combustion." Her stepmother died in 1903, when Parker was nine. Parker later attended Miss Dana's School, a finishing school in Morristown, New Jersey. She graduated from Miss Dana's School in 1911, at the age of 18, according to Authur, although Rhonda Pettit and Marion Meade state she never graduated from either school. Following her father's death in 1913, she played piano at a dancing school to earn a living while she worked on her poetry.
She sold her first poem to Vanity Fair magazine in 1914 and some months later was hired as an editorial assistant for Vogue, another Condé Nast magazine. She moved to Vanity Fair as a staff writer after two years at Vogue.
In 1917, she met a Wall Street stockbroker, Edwin Pond Parker II (1893–1933) and they married before he left to serve in World War I with the U.S. Army 4th Division. Dorothy Parker filed for divorce in 1928. He later remarried, to Anne E. O’Brien, formerly probation officer of the Juvenile Court, and died at 39, from an overdose of a sleeping powder for pain following a dental procedure. Dorothy Parker retained her married name, though she remarried the screenwriter and former actor Alan Campbell, and moved to Hollywood.
Algonquin Round Table yearsEdit
Parker's career took off in 1918 while she was writing theater criticism for Vanity Fair, filling in for the vacationing P. G. Wodehouse. At the magazine, she met Robert Benchley, who became a close friend, and Robert E. Sherwood. The trio began lunching at the Algonquin Hotel on a near-daily basis and became founding members of what became known as the Algonquin Round Table. The Round Table numbered among its members the newspaper columnists Franklin Pierce Adams and Alexander Woollcott. Through their publication of Parker's lunchtime remarks and short verses, particularly in Adams' column "The Conning Tower", Dorothy began developing a national reputation as a wit. When the group was informed that famously taciturn former president Calvin Coolidge had died, Parker remarked, "How could they tell?"
Parker's caustic wit as a critic initially proved popular, but she was eventually dismissed by Vanity Fair in 1920 after her criticisms too often offended powerful producers. In solidarity, Benchley resigned in protest. (Sherwood is sometimes reported to have done so as well, but in actuality he had been fired in December 1919.) She soon started working for Ainslee's Magazine, which had a higher circulation. She also published pieces in Vanity Fair, which was happier to publish her than employ her, The Smart Set, and The American Mercury, but also in the popular Ladies’ Home Journal, Saturday Evening Post, and Life.
When Harold Ross founded The New Yorker in 1925, Parker and Benchley were part of a board of editors established by Ross to allay the concerns of his investors. Parker's first piece for the magazine was published in its second issue. Parker became famous for her short, viciously humorous poems, many highlighting ludicrous aspects of her many (largely unsuccessful) romantic affairs and others wistfully considering the appeal of suicide.
The next 15 years were Parker's greatest period of productivity and success. In the 1920s alone she published some 300 poems and free verses in Vanity Fair, Vogue, "The Conning Tower" and The New Yorker as well as Life, McCall's and The New Republic. Her poem, "Song in a Minor Key" was published during a candid interview with New York N.E.A. writer Josephine Van de Grift.
Parker published her first volume of poetry, Enough Rope, in 1926. The collection sold 47,000 copies and garnered impressive reviews. The Nation described her verse as "caked with a salty humor, rough with splinters of disillusion, and tarred with a bright black authenticity." Although some critics, notably The New York Times reviewer, dismissed her work as "flapper verse," the volume helped affirm Parker's reputation for sparkling wit. Parker released two more volumes of verse, Sunset Gun (1928) and Death and Taxes (1931), along with the short story collections Laments for the Living (1930) and After Such Pleasures (1933). Not So Deep as a Well (1936) collected much of the material previously published in Rope, Gun, and Death and she re-released her fiction with a few new pieces in 1939 under the title Here Lies.
She collaborated with playwright Elmer Rice to create Close Harmony, which ran on Broadway in December 1924. The play was well received in out-of-town previews and was favorably reviewed in New York, but it closed after a run of only 24 performances. It become a successful touring production under the title The Lady Next Door.
Some of Parker's most popular work was published in The New Yorker in the form of acerbic book reviews under the byline "Constant Reader". Her response to the whimsy of A. A. Milne's The House at Pooh Corner was "Tonstant Weader fwowed up." Her reviews appeared semi-regularly from 1927 to 1933, were widely read, and were posthumously published in a collection under the name Constant Reader in 1970.
Her best-known short story, "Big Blonde", published in The Bookman magazine, was awarded the O. Henry Award as the best short story of 1929. Her short stories, though often witty, were also spare and incisive, and more bittersweet than comic; her style is often described as sardonic.
Parker eventually separated from her husband, divorcing in 1928. She had a number of affairs, her lovers including reporter-turned-playwright Charles MacArthur and the publisher Seward Collins. Her relationship with MacArthur resulted in a pregnancy. Parker is alleged to have said, "how like me, to put all my eggs into one bastard.”  She had an abortion, and fell into a depression that culminated in her first attempt at suicide.
Toward the end of this period, Parker began to become more politically aware and active. What would become a lifelong commitment to activism began in 1927, when she became concerned about the pending executions of Sacco and Vanzetti. Parker traveled to Boston to protest the proceedings. She and fellow Round Tabler Ruth Hale were arrested, and Parker eventually pleaded guilty to a charge of "loitering and sauntering", paying a $5 fine.
In 1932, Parker met Alan Campbell, an actor with aspirations to become a screenwriter. They married two years later in Raton, New Mexico. Campbell's mixed parentage was the reverse of Parker's: he had a German-Jewish mother and a Scottish father. She learned that he was bisexual and later proclaimed in public that he was "queer as a billy goat". The pair moved to Hollywood and signed ten-week contracts with Paramount Pictures, with Campbell (who was also expected to act) earning $250 per week and Parker earning $1,000 per week. They would eventually earn $2,000 and in some instances upwards of $5,000 per week as freelancers for various studios. She and Campbell worked on more than 15 films.
With Campbell and Robert Carson, she wrote the script for the 1937 film A Star Is Born, for which they were nominated for an Academy Award for Best Writing—Screenplay. She wrote additional dialogue for The Little Foxes in 1941. Together with Frank Cavett, she received a nomination for an Oscar for the screenplay of Smash-Up, the Story of a Woman (1947), starring Susan Hayward.
After the United States entered the Second World War, Parker and Alexander Woollcott collaborated to produce an anthology of her work as part of a series published by Viking Press for servicemen stationed overseas. With an introduction by W. Somerset Maugham, the volume compiled over two dozen of Parker's short stories, along with selected poems from Enough Rope, Sunset Gun, and Death and Taxes. It was published in the United States in 1944 under the title The Portable Dorothy Parker. Hers is one of three Portable series, including volumes devoted to William Shakespeare and The Bible, that have remained in continuous print.
During the 1930s and 1940s, Parker became an increasingly vocal advocate of civil liberties and civil rights, and a frequent critic of authority figures. During the Great Depression, she was among numerous American intellectuals and artists who became involved in related social movements. She reported in 1937 on the Loyalist cause in Spain for the Communist magazine, 'The New Masses.' At the behest of Otto Katz, a covert Soviet Comintern agent and operative of German Communist Party agent Willi Münzenberg, Parker helped to found the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League in 1936, which the FBI suspected of being a Communist Party front. The Hollywood Anti-Nazi League's membership eventually grew to some 4,000 strong. According to David Caute, its often wealthy members were "able to contribute as much to [Communist] Party funds as the whole American working class," although they may not have been intending to support the Party cause.
Parker also served as chair of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee's fundraising arm, "Spanish Refugee Appeal". She organized Project Rescue Ship to transport Loyalist veterans to Mexico, headed Spanish Children's Relief, and lent her name to many other left-wing causes and organizations. Her former Round Table friends saw less and less of her, and her relationship with Robert Benchley became particularly strained (although they would reconcile). Parker met S. J. Perelman at a party in 1932 and, despite a rocky start (Perelman called it "a scarifying ordeal"), they remained friends for the next 35 years. They became neighbors when the Perelmans helped Parker and Campbell buy a run-down farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, near New Hope, a popular summer destination among many writers and artists from New York.
Parker was listed as a Communist by the publication Red Channels in 1950. The FBI compiled a 1,000-page dossier on her because of her suspected involvement in Communism during the era when Senator Joseph McCarthy was raising alarms about communists in government and Hollywood. As a result, movie studio bosses placed her on the Hollywood blacklist. Her final screenplay was The Fan, a 1949 adaptation of Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan, directed by Otto Preminger.
Her marriage to Campbell was tempestuous, with tensions exacerbated by Parker's increasing alcohol consumption and Campbell's long-term affair with a married woman in Europe during World War II. They divorced in 1947, remarried in 1950, then separated in 1952 when Parker moved back to New York. From 1957 to 1962, she lived at the Volney Residential Hotel on Manhattan's Upper East Side and wrote book reviews for Esquire magazine. Her writing became increasingly erratic due to her continued abuse of alcohol. She returned to Hollywood in 1961, reconciled with Campbell, and collaborated with him on a number of unproduced projects until Campbell died from a drug overdose in 1963.
Later life and deathEdit
Following Campbell's death, Parker returned to New York City and the Volney Residential hotel. In her later years, she denigrated the Algonquin Round Table, although it had brought her such early notoriety:
These were no giants. Think who was writing in those days—Lardner, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Hemingway. Those were the real giants. The Round Table was just a lot of people telling jokes and telling each other how good they were. Just a bunch of loudmouths showing off, saving their gags for days, waiting for a chance to spring them ... There was no truth in anything they said. It was the terrible day of the wisecrack, so there didn't have to be any truth ...
Parker occasionally participated in radio programs, including Information Please (as a guest) and Author, Author (as a regular panelist). She wrote for the Columbia Workshop, and both Ilka Chase and Tallulah Bankhead used her material for radio monologues.
Following her cremation, Parker's ashes were unclaimed for several years. Finally, in 1973, the crematorium sent them to her lawyer's office; by then he had retired, and the ashes remained in the custody of his colleague Paul O'Dwyer's filing cabinet, for approximately 17 years. In 1988, O'Dwyer brought this situation to public attention, with the aid of celebrity columnist Liz Smith; after some discussion, the NAACP claimed Parker's remains and designed a memorial garden for them outside its Baltimore headquarters. The plaque read,
Here lie the ashes of Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) humorist, writer, critic. Defender of human and civil rights. For her epitaph she suggested, 'Excuse my dust'. This memorial garden is dedicated to her noble spirit which celebrated the oneness of humankind and to the bonds of everlasting friendship between black and Jewish people. Dedicated by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. October 28, 1988.
In early 2020, the NAACP moved its headquarters to downtown Baltimore and the question about what would happen to Parker's ashes became the topic of much speculation, especially after the NAACP formally announced it would later move to Washington, DC.
Relatives called for the ashes to be moved back to the family's plot in Woodlawn Cemetery, in the Bronx, where a place had been reserved for Parker by her father. On August 18, 2020, Parker's urn was exhumed. "Two executives from the N.A.A.C.P. spoke, and a rabbi who had attended her initial burial said Kaddish." On August 22, 2020, Parker was re-buried privately in Woodlawn, with the possibility of a more public ceremony later. "Her legacy means a lot," added representatives from the NAACP.
On August 22, 1992, the 99th anniversary of Parker's birth, the United States Postal Service issued a 29¢ U.S. commemorative postage stamp in the Literary Arts series. The Algonquin Round Table, as well as the number of other literary and theatrical greats who lodged at the hotel, contributed to the Algonquin Hotel's being designated in 1987 as a New York City Historic Landmark. In 1996, the hotel was designated as a National Literary Landmark by the Friends of Libraries USA, based on the contributions of Parker and other members of the Round Table. The organization's bronze plaque is attached to the front of the hotel. Parker's birthplace at the Jersey Shore was also designated a National Literary Landmark by Friends of Libraries USA in 2005 and a bronze plaque marks the former site of her family house.
In 2014, Parker was elected to the New Jersey Hall of Fame.
In popular cultureEdit
Parker inspired a number of fictional characters in several plays of her day. These included "Lily Malone" in Philip Barry's Hotel Universe (1932), "Mary Hilliard" (played by Ruth Gordon) in George Oppenheimer's Here Today (1932), "Paula Wharton" in Gordon's 1944 play Over Twenty-one (directed by George S. Kaufman), and "Julia Glenn" in the Kaufman–Moss Hart collaboration Merrily We Roll Along (1934). Kaufman's representation of her in Merrily We Roll Along led Parker, once his Round Table compatriot, to despise him. She also was portrayed as "Daisy Lester" in Charles Brackett's 1934 novel Entirely Surrounded. She is mentioned in the original introductory lyrics in Cole Porter's song "Just One of Those Things" from the 1935 Broadway musical Jubilee, which have been retained in the standard interpretation of the song as part of the Great American Songbook.
Prince released "The Ballad of Dorothy Parker" in 1987; it was the first song recorded in his Chanhassen, Minnesota studio home. Those closest to him at the time suggest the association between the poet and the waitress by the same name in the song is a coincidence, but Dorothy Parker died on Prince's birthday and chances are this brought her to his attention prior to writing the song.
Parker is featured as a character in the novel The Dorothy Parker Murder Case by George Baxt (1984), in a series of Algonquin Round Table Mysteries by J. J. Murphy (2011– ), and in Ellen Meister's novel Farewell, Dorothy Parker (2013). She is the main character in "Love For Miss Dottie", a short story by Larry N Mayer, which was selected by writer Mary Gaitskill for the collection Best New American Voices 2009 (Harcourt).
She has been portrayed on film and television by Dolores Sutton in F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood (1976), Rosemary Murphy in Julia (1977), Bebe Neuwirth in Dash and Lilly (1999), and Jennifer Jason Leigh in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994). Neuwirth was nominated for an Emmy Award for her performance, and Leigh received a number of awards and nominations, including a Golden Globe nomination.
Tucson actress Lesley Abrams wrote and performed the one-woman show Dorothy Parker's Last Call in 2009 in Tucson, Arizona at the Winding Road Theater Ensemble. She reprised the role at the Live Theatre Workshop in Tucson in 2014. The play was selected to be part of the Capital Fringe Festival in DC in 2010.
In the 2010s some of her poems from the early 20th century have been set to music by the composer Marcus Paus as the operatic song cycle Hate Songs for Mezzo-Soprano and Orchestra (2014); Paus's Hate Songs was included on Tora Augestad's and the Oslo Philharmonic's album Portraying Passion: Works by Weill/Paus/Ives (2018) with works by Paus, Kurt Weill and Charles Ives. It was described by musicologist Ralph P. Locke as "one of the most engaging works" in recent years; "the cycle expresses Parker's favorite theme: how awful human beings are, especially the male of the species."
In 2014, lyrics taken from her book of poetry Not So Deep as a Well were, with the authorization of the NAACP, used by Canadian singer Myriam Gendron to create a folk album of the same name. Also in 2014, Chicago jazz bassist/singer/composer Katie Ernst issued her album Little Words, consisting of her authorized settings of seven of Parker's poems.
Essays and reportingEdit
- Parker, Dorothy (February 28, 1925). "A certain lady". The New Yorker. Vol. 1 no. 2. pp. 15–16.
- Constant Reader (1970)
- Fitzpatrick, Kevin (2014). Complete Broadway, 1918–1923. iUniverse. ISBN 978-1-4917-2267-1. (compilation of reviews, edited by Fitzpatrick; most of these reviews have never been reprinted)
- Short story: A Telephone Call
- 1930: Laments for the Living (includes 13 short stories)
- 1933: After Such Pleasures (includes 11 short stories)
- 1939: Here Lies: The Collected Stories of Dorothy Parker (reprints of the stories from both previous collections, plus 3 new stories)
- 1942: Collected Stories
- 1944: The Portable Dorothy Parker (reprints of the stories from the previous collections, plus 5 new stories and verse from 3 poetry books)
- 1926: Enough Rope
- 1928: Sunset Gun
- 1931: Death and Taxes
- 1936: Collected Poems: Not So Deep as a Well
- 1944: Collected Poetry
- 1996: Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker (UK title: The Uncollected Dorothy Parker)
- 2009: Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker (2nd ed., with additional poems)
- List of poems
|Cassandra drops into verse||1925||Parker, Dorothy (February 28, 1925). "Cassandra drops into verse". The New Yorker. Vol. 1 no. 2. p. 5.|
|Thought for a sunshiny morning||1927||Parker, Dorothy (December 30, 2019). "Thought for a sunshiny morning". The New Yorker. Vol. 95 no. 42. p. 65. Retrieved May 1, 2020.|
- 1929: Close Harmony (with Elmer Rice)
- 1953: Ladies of the Corridor (with Arnaud D'Usseau)
- 1936: Suzy (with Alan Campbell, Horace Jackson and Lenore J. Coffee; based on a novel by Herman Gorman)
- 1937: A Star is Born (with William A. Wellman, Robert Carson and Alan Campbell)
- 1938: Sweethearts (with Alan Campbell, Laura Perelman and S.J. Perelman)
- 1938: Trade Winds (with Alan Campbell and Frank R. Adams; story by Tay Garnett)
- 1941: Week-End for Three (with Alan Campbell; story by Budd Schulberg)
- 1942: Saboteur (with Peter Viertel and Joan Harrison)
- 1947: Smash-Up, the Story of a Woman (with Frank Cavett, John Howard Lawson and Lionel Wiggam)
- 1949: The Fan (with Walter Reisch and Ross Evans; based on Lady Windermere's Fan by Oscar Wilde)
- "Fanger teatrets toner på hvert sitt drømmende album". www.dagsavisen.no.
- "Urfremfører Paus-opera i Kilden". www.fvn.no. January 28, 2014.
- Meade 6.
- Meade, Marion (1987). Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?. New York: Penguin Books. p. 5. ISBN 0-14-011616-8.
- Whitman, Alden (June 8, 1967). "Dorothy Parker, 73, Literary Wit, Dies". The New York Times.
- "Martin Rothschild : Titanic Victim". Encyclopedia Titanica.
- Meade 12.
- Meade 13.
- Herrmann, Dorothy (1982). With Malice Toward All: The Quips, Lives and Loves of Some Celebrated 20th-Century American Wits. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. p. 78. ISBN 0-399-12710-0.
- Meade, M. (1987). Dorothy Parker: what fresh hell is this? New York: Villard Books.
- Meade 14.
- Chambers, Dianne (1995). "Parker, Dorothy". In Wagner-Martin, Linda (ed.). The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States. Oxford University Press.
- Meade 16.
- Meade 27.
- Kinney, Authur F. (1978). Dorothy Parker. Boston: Twayne Publishers. pp. 26–27. ISBN 9780805772418.
- "Modern American Poetry".
- Silverstein, Stuart Y. (1996). Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker. New York: Scribner. p. 13. ISBN 0-7432-1148-0.
- Silverstein 13.
- Herrmann 78.
- "Edwin P. Parker 2d". The New York Times. Associated Press. January 8, 1933. Retrieved February 28, 2013.
- Hartford Courant, Hartford, Connecticut, January 8, 1933, Sun. Page 6.
- Silverstein 18.
- Altman, Billy (1997). Laughter's Gentle Soul: The Life of Robert Benchley. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. p. 146. ISBN 0-393-03833-5.
- Greenberg, David (2006). Calvin Coolidge. The American Presidents Series. Times Books. p. 9. ISBN 978-0-8050-6957-0. Retrieved March 19, 2015.
- Goldman, When Dorothy Parker Got Fired from Vanity Fair" Public Domain Review. February 6, 2020. Accessed March 9, 2020.
- Gottlieb, Robert (April 7, 2016). "Brilliant, Troubled Dorothy Parker". New York Review of Books. Retrieved August 23, 2018.
- Silverstein 32.
- Silverstein 62–3.
- Van de Grift, Josephine. (November 5, 1922). Dorothy Parker says it's not all fun to be funny. The Salina Daily Union. p. 18.
- Silverstein 35.
- Meade 177.
- Meade 178.
- Meade 138.
- Parker, Dorothy (1976). Far From Well, collected in The Portable Dorothy Parker Revised and Enlarged Edition. New York: Penguin Books. p. 518. ISBN 0-14-015074-9.
- Silverstein 38.
- Herrmann 74.
- The Columbia companion to the twentieth-century American short story. Gelfant, Blanche H., 1922–. New York: Columbia University Press. 2000. ISBN 978-0-231-11098-3. OCLC 51443994.CS1 maint: others (link)
- Meade 105.
- Silverstein 29.
- Silverstein 44.
- Meade 238.
- Wallace, David (September 4, 2012). Capital of the World: A Portrait of New York City in the Roaring Twenties. Lyons Press. pp. 184–. ISBN 978-0-7627-6819-6.
- Silverstein 40.
- Dorothy Parker at IMDb[unreliable source?]
- Parish, J.R.; Pitts, M.R. (1992). The great Hollywood musical pictures. Scarecrow Press. ISBN 978-0-8108-2529-1.
- Meade 318.
- Publisher's Note (1976). The Portable Dorothy Parker Revised and Enlarged Edition. New York: Penguin. ISBN 0-14-015074-9.
- Meade 285.
- Koch, Stephen, Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Munzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals, New York: Enigma Books (2004), Revised Edition, ISBN 1-929631-20-0
- Caute, David, The Fellow Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism, New Haven: Yale University Press (1988), ISBN 0-300-04195-0
- Buhle, Paul; Dave Wagner (2002). Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story Behind America's Favorite Movies. New York: The New Press. p. 89. ISBN 1-56584-718-0.
- Altman 314.
- Perelman 171.
- "Dorothy ParkerR Writer, Versifier". Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television. Counterattack. Archived from the original on August 7, 2007. Retrieved September 24, 2007.
- Kunkel, Thomas (1996). Genius in Disguise: Harold Ross of The New Yorker. Carrol & Graf. p. 405. ISBN 0-7867-0323-7.
- Meade 327.
- Meade 329.
- Meade 339.
- James Malanowski (July 17, 1959). "Dead & Famous; Where the Grim Reaper has Walked in New York". Spy. Retrieved April 10, 2013. Cite journal requires
- Itzkovitz, Daniel (May 28, 1998). "Dorothy Rothschild Parker (1893–1967)". Jewish Virtual Library. Retrieved September 25, 2005.
- Meade 392–3.
- Herrmann p. 85.
- Dunning, John (1998). On The Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-507678-8.
- Kaplan, Morris (June 27, 1967). "Dorothy Parker's Will Leaves Estate of $10,000 to Dr. King". The New York Times. p. 22.
- Shapiro, Laurie Gwen (September 4, 2020). "The Improbable Journey of Dorothy Parker's Ashes". The New Yorker. Retrieved September 6, 2020.
- Meade 412.
- Wilson, Scott. Resting Places: The Burial Sites of More Than 14,000 Famous Persons, 3d ed.: 2 (Kindle Location 36205). McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers. Kindle Edition.
- Hitchens, Christopher (2000). Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere. New York: Verso. p. 293. ISBN 1-85984-786-2.
- Prudente, Tim (July 12, 2020). "Talks under way to move the ashes of famed New Yorker writer Dorothy Parker from her Baltimore resting place". Baltimore Sun. Retrieved September 6, 2020.
- Gross, Jenny (July 19, 2020). "Dorothy Parker's Ashes Could Be Moved. Again". The New York Times. Retrieved September 10, 2020.
- "Talks under way to move the ashes of famed New Yorker writer Dorothy Parker from her Baltimore resting place". The Baltimore Sun. Retrieved September 10, 2020.
- Fitzpatrick, Kevin (September 7, 2020). "Homecoming: Dorothy Parker's ashes buried in New York City". Dorothy Parker Society. Retrieved September 7, 2020.
- Heller Anderson, Susan (September 20, 1987). "City Makes It Official: Algonquin is Landmark". The New York Times. Retrieved October 21, 2007.
- Friends of Libraries USA. "1996 dedications". Archived from the original on May 6, 2008. Retrieved September 13, 2007.
- Hann, Christopher (February 7, 2008). "The Write Stuff". New Jersey Monthly.
- "Plaque Unveiled at Parker Teenage Home". Dorothyparker.com. August 24, 2009.
- Meade 241.
- Silverstein 10–11.
- "Prince: The Story of Sign O' the Times, Episode 2: The Dream Factory".
- Meister, Ellen (2013) Farewell, Dorothy Parker. Putnam Adult. ISBN 039915907X
- Simonson, Robert (July 9, 2014). "Tony Nominee and Emmy Winner Rosemary Murphy Dies at 89". Playbill.
- Crusie, Jennifer, ed. (2007). "Palladino on naming her company". Coffee at Luke's: An Unauthorized Gilmore Girls Gabfest. Dallas: BenBella Books. p. 185. ISBN 978-1-933771-17-5. Retrieved August 24, 2012.
- "Shaken Not Stirred" Retrieved July 12, 2014.
- "'Last Call' an energetic reflection of Dorothy Parker's life Retrieved July 12, 2014.
- "Dorothy Parker's Last Call" Retrieved July 12, 2014.
- Duarte, Amanda (May 4, 2018). "'RuPaul's Drag Race' Season 10, Episode 7: Citizens Divided". The New York Times. Retrieved May 5, 2018.
- "Mange ansikter". Klassekampen.
- Locke, Ralph P. "Die sieben Todsünden and other works" (PDF). Kurt Weill Newsletter. 37 (1): 18.
- Locke, Ralph P. (December 13, 2019). "Locke's List: Best Opera and Vocal Music of 2019". The Boston Musical Intelligencer.
- "The composer wishes to thank the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for authorizing the use of Dorothy Parker's works". Retrieved May 21, 2015.
- "Myriam Gendron inspired by Dorothy Parker poems" Retrieved May 21, 2015.
- Margasak, Peter (April 26, 2016). "Jazz bassist and vocalist Katie Ernst rises like the tide". Chicago Reader. Retrieved September 4, 2017.
- Ernst, Katie (2014), Little Words, Ernst, Katie, retrieved September 4, 2017
- Randall Calhoun, Dorothy Parker: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1993. ISBN 0-313-26507-0
- Kevin C. Fitzpatrick, A Journey into Dorothy Parker's New York. Berkeley, CA: Roaring Forties Press, 2005. ISBN 0-9766706-0-7
- John Keats, You Might As Well Live: The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970.
- Marion Meade, Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell is This?. New York: Villard, 1988.
- S. J. Perelman, "Dorothy Parker". In The Last Laugh. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981.
- Dorothy Parker Society
- Dorothy Parker at IMDb
- Dorothy Parker at the Internet Broadway Database
- Dorothy Parker at the Internet Off-Broadway Database
- Algonquin Round Table
- Dorothy Parker on Poeticous
- Selected Poems by Dorothy Parker
- Parker's resting place
- Emdashes coverage of Dorothy Parker
- Dorothy Parker photo gallery; GettyImages
- Jonathan Goldman (February 6, 2020). "When Dorothy Parker Got Fired from Vanity Fair". The Public Domain Review.
|Wikiquote has quotations related to: Dorothy Parker|
|Wikimedia Commons has media related to Dorothy Parker.|
- Marion Capron (Summer 1956). "Dorothy Parker, The Art of Fiction No. 13". The Paris Review. Summer 1956 (13).
- Works by Dorothy Parker at Project Gutenberg
- Works by Dorothy Parker at Faded Page (Canada)
- Works by or about Dorothy Parker at Internet Archive
- Works by Dorothy Parker at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
- Minstrels Archive section on Parker's works