In the history of American literature, Dorothy Parker had been one of the accomplished female writers in American literature whose literary works and scripts in films were critically acclaimed and loved by public.
Life
Dorothy Parker, born as Dorothy Rothchild had been the fourth child of her parents. Dorothy had an unhappy childhood as her mother died and she stayed with her father and step mother. But by the time she was in her teens, she had lost her father, brother and step mother and started giving classes of piano to earn her living.
After selling her first poem to Vanity Fair in 1914, she joined the editorial department of the the Vogue fashion magazine. In 1917, she moved to Vanity fair and there Dorothy, Robert Benchley and Robert E. Sherwood formed renowned intellectual and literary circle Algonquin Round Table that had members like newspaper columnists Franklin Pierce Adams, James Thurber and many others. When their remarks and verses of the lunchtime were printed in newspaper, Dorothy gained reputation for her dry wit and sarcasm on various subjects. But her caustic remarks offended many powerful producers and she lost her job in Vanity Fair in 1920.
Meanwhile she married Edmund Parker in 1917 but had a troubled married life. She eventually got into a series of affairs and divorced her husband in the 1920's. In 1925, she joined The New Yorker as part of the board of editors and published her first collection of poems Enough Rope in 1926. Enough Rope was a bestseller followed by Sunset Guns and Death and Taxes, which were collected in Collected Poems: Not So Deep As a Well. The next 15 years was the peak period of her creative output and success when she published numerous verses and short stories and made collaboration to make plays.
In 1934, she married Alan Campbell and started working as scriptwriter in Hollywood. She was nominated twice for her screenplays but was blacklisted for her support for Communist parties.They had a divorce in 1947 but later got remarried in 1950. They remained married until his death in 1963. In 1967, Dorothy Parker died of a heart attack.
Alcoholism and the effects
It is not known whether it was grief of a troubled childhood or problems of a failed marriage and affairs that led her to depend on alcohol, but she was known for her alcoholism and suicidal tendencies. Her poems, replete with vicious humor reflects the anguish for the shallowness of modern life, ludicrousness of relationships and make commentaries on suicide. Alcoholism affected her relationship with Campbell and her health too.
However, credit has to be given that despite her alcoholism and attempt to suicide for three times, Dorothy Parker produced works that put her in the forefront of the American literary figures.
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