The Portable Dorothy Parker

"Lack of knowledge about Dorothy Parker is not confined to the international audience. She is no longer well known here either. Dorothy Parker wrote many kinds of things – short stories, book reviews and poetry. Not the kind of poetry people think of, not John Donne – she wrote light-hearted poems, she wrote theatre reviews, she wrote for The New Yorker . She was most known for being part of a group that was called the Algonquin Round Table – a group of writers that hung around the Algonquin Hotel who were known for being very witty. The reason they were known was that there was a newspaper columnist among them, FPA [Franklin P Adams], who chronicled their witticisms, almost daily. “New York has always, always, always – from the Dutch until this day – been about real estate” People should still read Parker because she is really funny. When you read the book reviews she wrote 60 years ago, you still laugh out loud, even if you don’t know the book. Of course in that era, in every era really, people who were funny were taken less seriously. This was the era of Hemingway – she was not Hemingway. I prefer her, but that is a minority opinion. It depends what you mean by getting ahead. When people talk about getting ahead, they tend to mean getting rich. You don’t have to be witty to get rich – wit is something that would probably only hamper you. Being witty doesn’t get you far anywhere any more. It’s not very valued."