You Can Lead A Horticulture But You Can't Make Her Think - Dorothy Parker

Dorothy Parker was born in New Jersey on August 22, 1893. Parker was a poet, a critic, a writer of short stories, and a satirist but was perhaps best known for her wisecracking witticisms. These are a few of my favorites:

• There's a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it;
  wise-cracking is simply calisthentics with words.

• I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.

• It serves me right for putting all my eggs in one bastard.

• Better be left by twenty dears
  Than lie in a love-less bed;
  Better a loaf that’s wet with tears,
  Than cold, unsalted bread.

Dorothy's early writing career started when she sold her first poem in 1914. In the two years
that followed, she worked for a pair of Conde Nast magazines, Vogue and Vanity Fair. While working at Vanity Fair,she met Robert Benchley and Robert E. Sherwood and together they formed the Algonquin Round Table. The trio regularly met for lunch at the Algonquin Hotel. Newspaper columnists Franklin Pierce Adams and Alexander Woollcott were also members of the Round Table and they started to print the witty remarks and short poems told by Dorothy during their daily luncheons. She gained her reputation nationwide as a satirist and a woman of wit.

Parker was very prolific through the next decade and half, publishing hundreds of poems, several full volumes of verse and short story collections.Following the breakup of the Round Table, Dorothy made her way to Boston, along with fellow Round Tabler Ruth Hale, to protest two upcoming executions. The pair were subsequently arrested for loitering. Thus began her journey into political activism and civil rights. The journey would last the rest of her days.

Parker met and married Alan Campbell, an aspiring screenwriter in 1932. They married shortly after and moved to Hollywood to pursue careers there. They were nominated for several awards including an academy award for Best Screenwriting-Screenplay along with Robert Carson for the 1937 film A Star Is Born. Parker was eventually blacklisted in Hollywood due to her left-wing political leanings. Parker's tempestuous marriage to Campbell, fueled by her alcohol abuse and his infidelity, ended in 1947. They remarried in 1950 and separated in 1952. They reconciled in 1961 after Dorothy returned to Hollywood, where they collaborated on several unfinished projects until Campbell died of a drug overdose in 1963.

Dorothy Parker died of a heart attack on June 7, 1967 at the age of 73. Parker left her entire estate to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and following his death, her estate passed into the hands of the NAACP. Her ashes went unclaimed for 17 years and rested in several different places including the filing cabinet belonging to her lawyer.

The NAACP claimed Parker's remains in 1988 and housed them in a memorial garden designed in her honor outside of their
Baltimore headquarters. The plaque reads:

Here lie the ashes of Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) humorist, writer, critic. Defender of human and civil rights. For her epitaph she suggested, 'Excuse my dust'. This memorial garden is dedicated to her noble spirit which celebrated the oneness of humankind and to the bonds of everlasting friendship between black and Jewish people. Dedicated by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. October 28, 1988

These are just snippets in the rich and colorful life led by Dorothy Parker. For more information and to explore her life more fully please visit the Dorothy Parker Society at http://www.dorothyparker.com/

Information sourced from dorothyparker.com and wikipedia

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