Dorothy Parker

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Dorothy Parker around 1920

Dorothy Parker (birth name Dorothy Rothschild ; born August 22, 1893 in Long Branch , New Jersey , USA , † June 7, 1967 in New York ) was an American writer , theater and literary critic . She was counted among the most important authors of her time. She wrote numerous poems, short stories and several plays. In her texts, she addresses the gender struggle using scenes from the lives of different women of all levels of education and the social position of minorities.

Life

Childhood and youth

Dorothy Parker was born in New Jersey to a Scottish mother and a German-Jewish father. She lost her family very early. When she was four years old, her mother, Eliza Annie Marston (1854–1898), died; her father, Jacob Henry Rothschild (1851-1913), who had remarried, died in 1913 after his second wife, Eleanor Lewis Rothschild, died in 1903. In 1912 her uncle, Martin Rothschild, was killed on board the Titanic . Her aunt, Elizabeth Barrett Rothschild, survived. She escaped in lifeboat No. 6, in which Alice Cleaver , Margaret Brown , Helen Candee , Frederick Fleet , Major Arthur Peuchen , the daughter of US politician James A. Hughes , Eloise Hughes Smith, and Sigrid Lindström, niece of the former Swedish man, were next to her Prime Minister Arvid Posse , sat.

Dorothy's upbringing took place in private schools in New Jersey and New York, where she moved in 1911. At first she earned her living as a piano player in a dance school. She started writing early, and at 21 she began submitting her manuscripts to various newspapers and magazines. The poem Any Porch was finally published in 1916 by Vanity Fair , a magazine she was hired as a critic two years later. In the meantime, she also worked for Vogue .

Mrs. Parker and her devilish circle

In 1917 she married Edwin Pond Parker, a Wall Street stockbroker, but they were instantly separated by World War I. She made a name for herself as the only female theater critic in New York and, in the spring of 1919, was among the founding members of what would later become the famous literary circle at the Algonquin Hotel, along with friends Robert Benchley and Robert Sherwood . Other participants were Franklin Pierce Adams , Alexander Woollcott , Harold Ross , James Thurber , George Kaufman and many others. Dorothy Parker's sarcasm, irony and sharp-tongued repartee made her a legend there.

In 1920 she was fired from Vanity Fair after the acrid sarcasm of her reviews seemed unsustainable. After an interlude in film, where she wrote subtitles to make money, she found a job with Ainslee’s magazine , which gave her complete freedom with her writing. In 1922 she published her first short story, Such a Pretty Little Picture , which marked the beginning of her career as a writer.

A career as a writer

In 1924 she separated from Edwin Parker and from then on lived in the Algonquin Hotel. In addition to short stories, she also began writing plays and was among the earliest writers of the New Yorker , which first appeared in early 1925. On a trip to Paris in 1926, she met Ernest Hemingway , with whom she befriended, although her views on the position of women in society were very different.

She continued to write theater reviews and poetry for The New Yorker and Life . Her first volume of poetry was published in 1926 under the title Enough Rope . It got very good reviews and became a commercial success. In 1927 she began to get involved politically. She got enthusiastic about socialism and began campaigning for the rights of the underprivileged. In October 1927 she became the literary critic of the New Yorker and got her own column called The Constant Reader , which she kept until 1933. In 1928 she was divorced from Edwin Parker. In 1929 the short story Big Blonde was published , which was awarded the O. Henry Prize for “Best Short Story of the Year”.

Second marriage and Hollywood

In late 1929, Dorothy Parker moved to Hollywood and signed a contract with MGM as a screenwriter. During the next ten years she wrote several scripts, many together with her second husband, Alan Campbell , whom she met on a trip to Europe in 1933. In 1936 she was one of the five founding members of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League . Together with Robert Carson, they received an Oscar nomination in 1937 for the screenplay for the film A Star Rises . While she was working on the script for the Jeanette MacDonald - Nelson Eddy operetta Sweethearts , she is said to have shouted from a window in the Writer's Building : “Let me out. I am as sane as you are. "

In 1937 Dorothy Parker became a political correspondent in the Spanish Civil War . She continued to write short stories throughout the 1940s, which were published in various magazines and as an anthology by Viking Press .

Her marriage to Alan Campbell was divorced in 1947, but they remarried in 1950 and lived more or less closely together until Campbell's death in June 1963.

In the 1950s, during the McCarthy era , she was suspected of being a communist and repeatedly interrogated by the FBI . As a result, she was blacklisted by the Hollywood studios and could no longer write scripts.

Back to New York

From September 1952 Dorothy Parker lived again in New York, where she worked with Arnaud d'Usseau on the play Ladies in the Hotel , which premiered in October 1953 but was not a great success. In April 1958 she was honored with the Marjorie Peabody Waite Award, bestowed by the National Institute of Arts and Letters , a member of which she was appointed a little later, on May 21, 1959. In the spring of 1961 she moved again to Los Angeles, where she worked with Alan Campbell on the script for the film The Good Soup and also received a teaching position at California State University . At the beginning of 1964, she finally returned to New York. Her last short story was published in the November 1964 issue of Esquire magazine. On June 7, 1967, she died lonely of a heart attack in her New York hotel room. On the occasion of her death, Time Magazine devoted an entire page to her. She bequeathed her estate to Martin Luther King and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Works

Parker tried several times on a novel, but she only published poetry, short stories and - posthumously - some journalistic articles. Occasionally poems were published in German, but also two plays: Close Harmony or Die liebe Familie (Haffmans Verlag, Zurich 1989. German by Friederike Roth) and Ladies in the Hotel (Haffmans-Heyne, Munich 1993).

Poetry

  • Enough Rope (1926)
  • Sunset Gun (1928)
  • Death and Taxes (1931)
  • Collected Poems: Not So Deep as a Well (1936)
  • Stuart Y. Silverstein (Ed.): Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker . New York: Scribner, 1996. ISBN 0-684-81855-8

Short prose

  • Laments for the Living (1930)
  • After Such Pleasures (1933)
  • Here Lies: The Collected Stories of Dorothy Parker (1939), German New Yorker stories (Haffmans Taschenbuch 1988 and 1992, Rowohlt 1995 and 1997, Diana 2002, Kein & Aber 2003, Brigitte Edition 2005) translated by Pieke Biermann and Ursula-Maria Mössner

Selected prose and poetry

  • The Portable Dorothy Parker (1944), expanded new editions with theater reviews, reviews by Jack Kerouac and much more in 1973 and 2006

German-language editions

  • The sexes . German by Ursula-Maria Mössner, Zurich: Haffmans, 1988. ISBN 3-251-01022-0
  • A strong blonde (translation: Pieke Biermann ). Zurich: Haffmans, 1988. ISBN 3-251-01018-2
  • Ladies in the hotel - a spectacle. Zurich: Haffmans, 1989. ISBN 978-3-251-01071-4
  • Twilight Before Fireworks: New York Stories. German by Pieke Biermann and Ursula-Maria Mössner. Reinbek near Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1996. ISBN 3-499-22083-0
  • New York stories . Collected stories. German by Pieke Biermann and Ursula-Maria Mössner. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1997 ISBN 978-3-499-22325-9
  • You were great. New York stories . From the American by Pieke Biermann and Ursula-Maria Mössner. Zurich / Berlin: No & But 2011
  • The morning hour has poison in its mouth. New York stories . Zurich: No & But, 2011. ISBN 978-3-0369-5616-9
  • Butter Cream Heart: New York Stories . Zurich: No & But, 2012. ISBN 3-0369-5647-6
  • Because my heart is freshly broken. Poems. Bilingual edition, German. by Ulrich Blumenbach . Epilogue, Biographical Data Maria Hummitzsch . Dörlemann, Zurich 2017, ISBN 978-3-03820-044-4

Filmography

Movie song

script

Literary template

  • 1990 - Women and men - stories of seduction - Short story by Dorothy Parker as a template for the 2nd episode, directed by Ken Russell

Films about Dorothy Parker

Her life was the subject of a 1994 film by director Alan Rudolph with Jennifer Jason Leigh in the lead role: Mrs. Parker and her vicious circle (English original title: Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle or Mrs. Parker and the Round Table ).

There are also the documentaries The Ten-Year Lunch: The Wit and Legend of the Algonquin Round Table (1987, awarded the Oscar for best documentary) and Would You Kindly Direct Me to Hell ?: The Infamous Dorothy Parker (1994) .

literature

  • Pieke Biermann: Vitrio and lace hats. In: Bad Women. Luder, Schlampen und Xanthippen , Elefanten Press, Berlin 1989, ISBN 3-88520-315-4 .
  • Kevin C. Fitzpatrick: A Journey into Dorothy Parker's New York. Roaring Forties Press, Berkeley 2005, ISBN 0-9766706-0-7 .
  • Leslie Frewin: The Late Mrs. Dorothy Parker. MacMillan, 1986.
  • Michaela Karl : "Another martini and I'll lie under the host". Dorothy Parker. A biography. Residenz Verlag, Salzburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-7017-3190-9 .
  • John Keats: You Might As Well Live. The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker. Simon & Schuster, New York 1970.
  • Arthur F. Kinney: Dorothy Parker. Twayne / GK Hall Co., Boston 1978.
  • Marion Meade: Dorothy Parker. What Fresh Hell is This? A biography. Villard, New York 1988.

Web links

Commons : Dorothy Parker  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Members: Dorothy Parker. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed April 18, 2019 .
  2. ↑ Portrait of Matthias Penzel in Frida ( Memento from July 31, 2012 in the web archive archive.today )
  3. ↑ The AlgonQueen , radio play / feature of Pieke Biermann, SDR / SFB 1986; and in The Raven
  4. ↑ The Ten-Year Lunch: The Wit and Legend of the Algonquin Round Table in the Internet Movie Database (English)
  5. ↑ Would You Kindly Direct Me to Hell ?: The Infamous Dorothy Parker in the Internet Movie Database (English)
personal data
SURNAME Parker, Dorothy
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rothschild, Dorothy (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer, theater and literary critic
DATE OF BIRTH August 22, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH Long Branch , New Jersey , USA
DATE OF DEATH June 7, 1967
Place of death New York City