In the roaring ’20s, a decade full of clever chaps like Robert Benchley, Groucho Marx, and Noel Coward, no writer had a sharper and more acid wit than Dorthy Parker.

Parker made her living as an all-r0und professional writer, but she’s largely remembered today for her acerbic wit and for her role as a charter member of New York’s famous Algonquin Round Table, a group of writers and actors that met daily for lunch at the Algonquin Hotel from 1919 until about 1929.

Ah, to have been a fly on the wall of the Rose Room of the Algonquin Hotel when the “Vicious Circle” met for lunch. Among those eating their soup and salad (perhaps accompanied by a cocktail or two) were Tallulah Bankhead, Robert Benchley, Irving Berlin, Noel Coward, Edna Ferber, Harpo Marx, Ring Lardner, and of course Dorothy Parker. How’s that for a luncheon group?

Among these brilliant lunch-goers, Dorothy Parker was the queen of the quip (she once called herself a wiseacre), the darling of New York literary society.

She was aware of her reputation. On the subject of her morning rituals, she wrote, “The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue.”

On hearing of Calvin Coolidge’s death: “How could they tell?”

On a stage performance by Katherine Hepburn: “She ran the gamut of emotions from A to B.”

On Yale prom night: “If all the girls were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.”

On female independence from men: “Where’s the man that could ease a heart like a satin gown?”

Said after she had been seriously ill: “The doctors were very brave about it.”

She could be a bit racy with her puns: ‘You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.“

She could also laugh at herself.

I like to have a martini.
Two at the very most.
After three I’m under the table,
After four I’m under my host.

I’m pretty sure Parker would have appreciated the curious disposition of her ashes, which rested for 15 years in her lawyer’s filing cabinet. But they finally escaped and are now resting under a tombstone in Baltimore, provided by that city’s NAACP, with an epitaph, written by Parker herself, that reads,

Excuse my dust

Postscript: For this post, I went back and read a number of Parker’s 300-some published poems. Many of them are slight things (often published in Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, where slight things go to die), though always written with precise diction and imagery. Some deal with the dark side of life, including suicide and alcoholism. In a review of a collected volume of her poems, the critic for the NY Times called them “flapper verse.” That’s too harsh. She was a talented poet, though perhaps too much of her time.

Her stories have more heft to them, though one I read for this post, Arrangement in Black and White, is so dated that it is almost embarrassing to read today. Parker was a civil rights enthusiast (she bequeathed her estate to Martin Luther King, Jr.), and Black and White is her attempt to satirize an armchair liberal who gushes over a famous black singer at a party. The story is absolutely cringe-inducing in its dated diction and badly managed satire. Many of her stories, however, do transcend their time. Her story Big Blonde (O. Henry Award in 1929), for instance, is an evocative portrait of a working-class woman’s descent into alcoholism. I read it about 40 years ago, and it has stayed with me all these years.

Parker led a charmed life early on, but she didn’t end well. She was married three times, twice with her second husband (she later said he was “queer as a billy goat”). Both husbands died of drug overdoses. Prone to bouts of depression, Parker attempted suicide twice, once by slitting her wrists. Her poem Resume now serves as a kind of ironic comment on those attempts:

Razors pain you,
Rivers are damp,
Acids stain you,
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful,
Nooses give,
Gas smells awful.
You might as well live.

Parker did continue to live, but not well. She ended up an alcoholic, living with her dog in a hotel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. She died of a heart attack at the age of 73.