Life of Dorothy Parker

Dorothy Parker was born to Jacob Henry Rothschild and Annie Eliza (Maston) Rothschild in West End, New Jersey on August 22, 1893 (“Biography of Dorothy Parker”). She was the youngest of four children and had a childhood marked with sadness and loss. Her mother died in 1897. In 1899, her father remarried. Parker was not close to her stepmother, Eleanor Frances Lewis, who died 3 years after the marriage. In 1912, Parker also lost her uncle when the Titanic sunk. The next year, her father passed away (“Dorothy Parker”). Her formal education was brief and incomplete- she attended the Blessed Sacrament Academy as a child, went to a finishing school in New Jersey, and finally attended the Art Student's League in Manhattan. Her education ended when she was 14 and, while she never received her high school diploma, she gained much of her knowledge through avid reading (Pettit).

In 1914, Dorothy Parker sold her first poem "Any Porch" to Frank Crowninshield, the editor of the magazine Vanity Fair (“Biography of Dorothy Parker”). He helped her establish a career writing for various newspapers and magazines for the rest of the 1910 decade. At first she wrote captions for pictures, then worked as a staff writer, before being ultimately promoted to drama critic in 1917 to 1920 for Vanity Fair. She was fired in 1920 for writing a sharp critique about actress Billie Burke, who was the wife of one of the magazine's major advertisers (Pettit).

At the same time, Dorothy married Edwin P. Parker in 1917. However, due to a rocky marriage they divorced in 1928 (“Dorothy Parker”). Also during this time, she developed friendships with Robert Benchley, Robert Sherwood, Alexander Woollcott, and Franklin Pierce Adams, people she would later form the Algonquin Round Table with in 1919 (Quartermain 302). Throughout the 1920s, her life took off: she spent much time traveling Europe, partying, drinking, going to speak-easy bars, and at the Algonquin Hotel. She also had many unsuccessful love affairs during this time, mostly with men who used her to get a career advantage. The most notable affair was with writer Charles MacArthur that left her pregnant and ended with abortion and a suicide attempt (Baechler 402). A second suicide attempt was made later in 1925 (Pettit). Overall, a lonely depression plagued Parker throughout most of her life (“Dorothy Parker: 1893-1967”).

In 1934, she married Alan Campbell, with whom she moved to Hollywood and began screenwriting with. With her pro-communist sympathies, Parker later got blacklisted by the government. Parker was also a very active supporter in the civil rights movement. After 16 years of marriage, she and Campbell divorced, only to remarry in 1950. They stayed together until he died in 1964 (“Dorothy Rothschild Parker”).

On June 7, 1967, Parker died in a New York hotel, leaving all of her property to Martin Luther King, Jr., which was later passed on to the NAACP following King's death (“Dorothy Parker”).