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Dorothy Parker née Rothschild (1898–1967), grew up on New York’s Upper West Side. She became famous for her comic poems, her short stories, her reviews, and her repartée, as recorded by the columnist Wolcott Gibbs over lunches at the Algonquin hotel. A prolific magazine contributor in her youth and a successful screenwriter (she co-wrote the original A Star is Born), she struggled all her life with alcoholism and wrote very little in her later decades, though continued to be a vocal champion of progressive causes, especially civil rights. Sloane Crosley is the author of the essay collections I Was Told There’d Be Cake (a 2009 finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor), How Did You Get This Number, and Look Alive Out There (a 2019 Thurber Prize finalist); the novels The Clasp and Cult Classic; and, most recently, her memoir, Grief Is for People. A contributing editor at Vanity Fair, she lives in New York City.
""Does anyone know how hard it is to be that funny? . . . Read her book reviews. Read them now and see how good they are.""--Fran Lebowitz ""A bestselling poet who moved on to fiction, Dorothy Parker . . . was equally innovative as a critic, pioneering a first-person style and busting the taboo on hatchet jobs by women . . . She was arguably the first female celebrity wit since the 17th century, outperforming her illustrious male peers.""--John Dugdale ""The Guardian"" ""In Parker's hands, the humble book review becomes an instrument as expressive as a lyric poem.""--Nicholas Frankel ""Wall Street Journal, Five Best Books by Great Wits"" ""The Constant Reader columns are not really book reviews; they are standup-comedy routines. You don't have to listen to her opinion, she says. If she didn't like the book, maybe that's just her hangover speaking.""--Joan Acocella ""New Yorker"" ""All I wanted in this world was to come to New York and be Dorothy Parker. The funny lady. The only lady at the table. The woman who made her living by her wit . . . Who always got off the perfect line at the perfect moment, who never went home and lay awake wondering what she ought to have said because she had said exactly what she ought to have.""--Nora Ephron ""Esquire"" ""It is through Parker's refusal to claim authority, then, that her book reviews achieve it. She presents readers with an unpretentious, sometimes self-mocking voice that, while it expresses strong opinions, pretends no Olympian knowledge or status. Her use of humor is even-handed: she uses it to make fun of shallow, silly, or just plain bad published work, but she also turns it on herself . . . And, as a bonus, the reviews contain some of her own best, most spirited writing, which is the reason, finally, that we continue to read them with such pleasure.""--Nancy A. Walker ""Studies in American Humor"" ""Length doesn't increase depth, necessarily, and just because her little characterizations of a book were short doesn't mean they weren't true."" --Gloria Steinem
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