Dorothy Parker
Dorothy Parker was an American poet, and a short story writer. Dorothy Parker was born August 22, 1893, and came to fame writing book reviews, poetry, and short fiction for fledgling magazine The New Yorker. Parker was born in West End, New Jersey, as the last child of Jacob Rothschild, a garment manufacturer, and Annie Eliza Rothschild, the daughter of a machinist at Phoenix Armour. She has three siblings. Parker's mother died in 1898. Jacob married in 1900 Eleanor Frances Lewis, a Roman Catholic, but Parker never liked her stepmother. Eleanor Frances died three years after the wedding. Parker's father died when she was twenty.
As a young girl, she attended, and despised, a Catholic school in Manhattan, later transferring to Miss Dana's, a boarding school. Miss Dana's School in Morristown, New Jersey, there was only fifteen girls to a class and each received considerable personal attention. Moreover, the classes were in the form of a seminar, with students and teachers sitting together at tables, the school made serious efforts to turn out well-read, well-informed, and well-spoken young women who would be effective in the world. She left school abruptly at age fourteen, never to return, to take care of her ill father, who was once again a widower. When he died in 1913, the twenty-year-old Dorothy made a living by playing piano at a Manhattan dance school. She moved to New York City, when she wrote during the day and earned money at night playing the piano in a dancing school. In 1914, Dorothy sold her first poem to Vanity Fair. At age 22, she took an editorial job at Vogue. She continued to write poems for newspapers and magazines, and in 1917 she joined Vanity Fair, taking over for P.G. Wodehouse as drama critic. That same year she married a stockbroker, Edwin P. Parker. But the marriage was tempestuous, and the couple divorced in 1928. In 1919, Parker became a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table, an informal gathering of writers who lunched at the Algonquin Hotel. In 1922, Parker published her first short story, Such a Pretty Little Picture, for Smart Set. When the New Yorker debuted in 1925, Parker was listed on the editorial board. Over the years, she contributed poetry, fiction and book reviews as the Constant Reader. Parker’s first collection of poetry, Enough Rope, was published in 1926, and was a bestseller. Her two subsequent collections were Sunset Gun in 1928 and Death and Taxes in 1931. Her collected fiction came out in 1930 as Laments for the Living
In 1929, she won the O. Henry Award for her autobiographical short story Big Blonde. She produced short fiction in the early 1930s, and also began writing drama reviews for the New Yorker. In 1934, Parker married actor-writer Alan Campbell in New Mexico. The couple relocated to Los Angeles and became a highly paid screenwriting team. They labored for MGM and Paramount on mostly forgettable features, the highlight being an Academy Award nomination for A Star Is Born in 1937. They divorced in 1947, and remarried in 1950, staying together until Campbell's death in 1963.
Dorothy Parker died of a heart-attack, in New Jersey on 22nd August, 1967. Before her lonely death in New York on June 7, 1967, Parker disparaged the life that she and other Round Tablers had lived. She also judged her own writing harshly as derivative and not living up to her promise. However, her work uniquely catalogued society's random pretensions and her own tough, intimate longings. She remains one of the most shrewdly sensitive and elegant satirists of the twentieth century.

Works Cited:
"Biography" Dictionary of World Biography: Twentieth Century Ed. Christina J. Moose. Salem Press, Inc. 1999 eNotes.com 27 Feb, 2014 http://www.enotes.com/topics/dorothy-parker#biography-dorothy-parker
"Dorothy Parker." 2014. The Biography Channel website. Feb 27 2014, 05:04 http://www.biography.com/people/dorothy-parker-9433450.