Product Description

Dorothy Parker, more than any of her contemporaries, captured the spirit of her age in her writing. The decadent 1920S and 1930s in New York were a time of great experiment and daring for women. For the rich, life seemed a continual party, but the excesses took their emotional toll. With a biting wit and perceptive insight, Dorothy Parker examines the social mores of her day and exposes the darkness beneath the dazzle. Her own life exemplified this duality, for a while she was one of the most talked-about women of her day, she was also known as a "masochist whose passion for unhappiness knew no bounds". As philosopher Irwin Edman said, she was "a Sappho who could combine a heartbreak with a wisecrack". Her dissection of the jazz age in poetry and prose is collected in this volume along with articles and reviews.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #89827 in Books
• Published on: 2001-05-31
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 640 pages

Synopsis
Dorothy Parker, more than any of her contemporaries, captured the spirit of her age in her writing. The decadent 1920S and 1930s in New York were a time of great experiment and daring for women. For the rich, life seemed a continual party, but the excesses took their emotional toll. With a biting wit and perceptive insight, Dorothy Parker examines the social mores of her day and exposes the darkness beneath the dazzle. Her own life exemplified this duality, for a while she was one of the most talked-about women of her day, she was also known as a "masochist whose passion for unhappiness knew no bounds". As philosopher Irwin Edman said, she was "a Sappho who could combine a heartbreak with a wisecrack". Her dissection of the jazz age in poetry and prose is collected in this volume along with articles and reviews.

Customer Reviews

a great book from a great woman
what can i say? this comprises some of the best work written in this catergory, and all by one woman! Dorothy Parker has a great wit and conveys her point extremly well using humor and her amazing intellect. this is a book i read with some friends and we laugh and agree with her! well worth it!

Sharp wit and biting observations withstanding time.
Dorothy Parker uses her own indomitable style to observe in a dry, precise manner the intricate, and often misunderstood, relationships between the sexes and the classes. This book is inspirational, tragic, comic and far too close to home even now, up to seventy years after some of the material was first written. Parker's own sad life is reflected in each page of ascerbic social comment and I cannot recommend it enough. For anyone who has been more keen on a lover than they were upon one, read 'The Telephone' with a familiar heart - from there on in I guarantee you will be hooked. The poems are quite short, the theatre and book reviews can be scathing and the language/ terminology is somewhat dated, but none of this detracts from Mrs Parkers vast talent for accurately dissecting the human condition in all of its guises. This collection of her work will leave the reader feeling like they have found a very prickly friend, who is well worth taking the time to become familiar with.