Dorothy Parker

Dorothy Parker (1893-1967), American writer, born in West End, New Jersey, and educated at the Blessed Sacrament Convent, in New York. Between 1916 and 1920 she was a drama and literary critic for the magazines Vogue and Vanity Fair, in New York, after which she became a freelance writer. Among her works are books of verse, short stories, and sketches; her poems and short stories alike are characterized by a style that is often bitingly humorous and sardonic. Her writings are concerned mainly with love and with the frustrations and contradictions of modern life. Her books of verse include Enough Rope (1926), Death and Taxes (1931) and Not So Deep as a Well (1936); among her collections of short stories are Laments for the Living (1930) and After Such Pleasures (1933). Constant Reader (posthumously pub. 1970) comprises book reviews she wrote for the New Yorker magazine from 1927 to 1933 under the pseudonym Constant Reader.