Dorothy Parker

The Penguin Dorothy Parker contains stories and poems published collectively in 1944; late uncollected stories, articles and reviews; and the contents of Constant Reader (her New Yorker book reviews) - in all of which she sharpens her legendary wit on the foibles of others.

Dorothy Parker was not all vitriol; indeed her disciplined technique and impeccable psychological timing by themselves mark her our as a writer of high calibre. But it is her constant preoccupation with death and with an ever-present pain that the reader perhaps finds most haunting. beneath her carapace of electrifying wit which reflected so brilliantly the age she lived in, was a woman for whom happiness was, at best, precarious. She was, as Brendan Gill remarks, one of the saddest people in the world.