The web page from Penn State that originally contained Rebekah Robertson's Essay on Dorothy Parker is no longer available.  I am reprinting the article below with the permission of the author (including the original location  in the headnote).

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Dorothy Parker in the Twenties: A Member of the Round Table

By Rebekah Robertson

 

During the Twenties, Dorothy Parker was a member of the Round Tablers. They would meet at the Algonquin Hotel for lunch
or dinner and would have witty conversations and dialogues while drinking each other under the table. This group of friends
became inseparable but as the Round Tablers changed through the decade, they began to spend less time together. The Round
Tablers were a wealthier, Ivy League group, full of people with college educations and ambitions to make money. While it
seemed that the Greenwich Villagers were more ambitious to write the abstract and oblique, the Round Tablers wrote witty,
straight, simply written entertainment. During the summers they would go to the shore at rich friend's lavish houses on Long
Island and indulge in late night drinking while sleeping all day. Dorothy Parker, like some of the other Round Tablers, was an
alcoholic and she had tried to commit suicide many times. She lived a rocky life and during the Twenties she went through a
failing marriage and thereafter had many romances and sexual encounters. She was a modern woman who had many causes
and ambitions and her strength was obvious to all that knew her. Her entrance into the Twenties marked the beginning of her
literary career and as the Twenties faded out, they marked her entrance into the life of Hollywood. Dorothy Parker has been
remembered as "an urban wit of the 1920's, a screenwriter, and one of America's first feminists." (Kinney 12)

Dorothy's writing style was biting and mean at times. "Her writing was both a disclosure of personal fears and a concealment of
them. Dorothy's drinking, promiscuity and suicidal behavior disgusted some members of the Round Table as well as becoming
the aim of the wisecracks at the table" (Kinney 12-13). Dorothy's unhappiness in her own life resulted in her harsh cold
comments she made towards friends and whatever subjects she wrote about. Throughout her good times and bad times she
constantly strove to make her writing better and aimed for "compactness of phrase, authenticity and precision of tone, and
clarity and simplicity of thought and feeling. Dorothy combined a personal self-consciousness in her writing with set pieces in the
formulas of the ladies' magazines; she was attracted to the world of entertainment but distanced herself by an easygoing
cynicism; she worked long and hard at her writing, although she wanted it to seem casual and spontaneous; she combined bitter
(if subtle) satire of others with a running self-condemnation (both light-hearted and serious). Throughout her life she was quick
to sympathize with others who suffered or were indentured-those she could pity because of misfortune in politics, money, race,
or sex. She admired the servant class who were defeated by conditions they could not understand or overcome, and she was
quick to attack the causes of their exploitation-the pretension and blindness in the middle and upper classes. But it is equally
clear, in studying her work, that she is also attracted to the status and possessions of those who are better off" (Kinney 15-18).

In 1914, Dorothy Parker at age twenty-one was working at a dance school while writing poetry and light verse on the side.
She was submitting her work to various newspapers and magazines, publications like the New York Tribune, where Franklin
Pierce Adams conducted a column called The Conning Tower. Getting into Adams' column was the biggest accomplishment
that could be attained by a poet at this time. In addition to submissions to The Conning Tower, Parker also submitted poetry to
The Saturday Evening Post. "Her typical subjects epitomized trivia: wrong telephone numbers, bloopers made at the bridge
table, and the pros and cons of nutmeg in rice pudding"(Meade 31). In late 1914 she wrote a poem, titled "Any Porch," poking
fun at married women who vacationed in the summer at resort hotels. Dorothy imitated their flighty, non-purposeful, boring
lives. She sent this poem to Vanity Fair, the new magazine published by Conde Nast, and it was accepted. When she received
the acceptance letter, Dorothy immediately went over to the offices of Vanity Fair and asked the editor, Frank Crowninshield
for a job; Crownie told her that he would keep her in mind. A few months later, Crownie informed her that there was a position
open at Vogue, Vanity Fair's sister magazine; Dorothy got the job. She worked under Edna Chase who was the editor of
Vogue. While working at Vogue, she kept writing and submitting poetry to Vanity Fair, and her work was often published. She
would usually write about her hatred of women, "Women: A Hate Song," and marriage, "Why I Haven't Married." In the latter
poem, Dorothy wrote about the many losers she had encountered and the idiots she had dated. She stated that there were only
three types of men in the world: "There was a classic chauvinist who thought women belonged at home--hardly anyone in 1916
believed they didn't, -- a Greenwich Village radical, and a lush in whose affections she would always rate third." (Meade 37)

In the fall of 1917, after working at Vogue for two and a half years, Crownie arranged for Dorothy's transfer to Vanity Fair.
By April 1918, Dorothy became New York's only woman drama critic. In June 1919, Dorothy was invited to a luncheon at the
Algonquin Hotel. The party was hosted by two theatrical press agents who were welcoming back Alexander Woollcott, The
New York Time's drama critic, who was returning from the war. Dorothy was invited because she was Vanity Fair's drama
critic, but her meeting of Woollcott at this party began the on-set of their friendship and their get-togethers and lunches at the
Algonquin Hotel. At the party Dorothy rubbed shoulders with the likes of Franklin Pierce Adams, Harold Ross (who later
founded The New Yorker), and Heywood Broun and Ruth Hale. It was shortly after this time that Dorothy and her office
buddies, Robert Benchley and Robert Sherwood would run off to the Algonquin Hotel for lunch to let off steam and talk about
their problems with Vanity Fair. They would meet up with Woollcott at Algonquin from time to time, as well as with two others,
Marc Connelly and George Kaufman. Soon Woollcott began eating at Algonquin daily and the manager Frank Case began
reserving a table for him. Algonquin was mainly known as meeting place for many actors such as Mary Pickford, John
Barrymore, Douglas Fairbanks, and Booth Tarkington; however, the group of writers who met and ate there for lunch grew
larger and larger. (Meade 57-61)

Dorothy was still writing reviews for Vanity Fair but was growing tired of the job. She enjoyed the theater, but she hated most
of the plays she was required to see. "Her reviews had begun to take on a sophisticated air and she used sardonic quips to
poke fun through the shallowness and commercialism of what she saw on stage." (Kinney 33) Her theater reviews had become
gradually more brutal and Vanity Fair had gotten many complaints from actors and producers (who advertised in the
magazine), to which Crownie had apologized and taken the blame. As a result, Crownie dismissed Dorothy in January 1921.
Dorothy's friends responded by announcing her dismissal in their paper, Woollcott in The New York Times and Adams in The
Conning Tower. On January 25, Dorothy cleaned out her desk and began her first free-lance job writing subtitles for a movie,
D.W. Griffith's Remodeling Her Husband, which was being produced by Lillian Gish. (Meade 67-70)

In the beginning of February, Dorothy moved into an office she shared with Benchley in the Metropolitan Opera House studios,
near Times Square. Friends often stopped by to hangout for a while; friends like Marc Connelly and Charles Baskerville.
Dorothy soon found a position, as drama critic at Ainslee's, a literary magazine. Her monthly column was titled "In Broadway
Playhouses," in which she was able to be as bitchy as she wanted to be. During the winter, along with writing her drama
column, Dorothy also wrote a long piece for The Saturday Evening Post on the Ouija-board craze, and contributed four
major articles to the Ladies' Home Journal. In addition, she joined forces with Crownie to co-author his book High Society.
During all this time, the cliquish group she was part of kept meeting at the Algonquin Hotel (called the Gonk by the group),
eating at a long table in the Pergola Room (now the Oak Room), and no one was allowed to their table without an invitation.
(Meade 70-74)

Frank Case, the manager of the Algonquin Hotel, seems to be an instrumental part of their fame; while he didn't think a whole
lot of their talent, he "provided a free clubhouse and an Arthurian table and a concept that lent itself to the creation of a legend."
(Meade 74) Case's daughter Margaret wrote in her book The Vicious Circle that, "the Algonquin Round Table came to the
Algonquin Hotel the way that lightning strikes a tree, by accident and mutual attraction." (Meade 74) As the group became
larger, Case moved them to a front table in the Rose Room, where the celebrities sat; there, there would be more room for
them all. This did not solve the problem though because even more people began eating with them, so Case seated them in the
rear of the dining room and gave them their own waiter. A cartoonist for the Brooklyn Edge, Edmund Duffy, published a
caricature of the group and titled it the "Algonquin Round Table" and the name stuck.

"Charter members of the Round Table were Aleck Woollcott, Heywood Broun, Frank Adams, John Peters Toohey, Robert
Benchley, George Kaufman, Marc Connelly, Robert Sherwood, Harold Ross, and Dorothy." (Meade 75) Throughout the early
twenties the number of regulars would increase and it eventually reached thirty or more. From time to time others would join in:
Frank Sullivan, Charles MacArthur, Herman Mankiewicz, Harpo Marx, Donald Ogden Stewart, Murdock Pemberton, Deems
Taylor, Arthur Samuels, Alice Duer, Laurence Stallings, Edna Ferber, Ring Lardner, John V. A. Weaver, Margaret Leech,
actresses- Margalo Gillmore, Tallulah Bankhead, and Peggy Wood, and writer-wives-Ruth Hale, and Jane Grant. Soon the
Round Tablers hated to part after lunch; they were attached and needed each other. Eventually they began to spend afternoons
together and during the afternoon they planned where they would go to eat dinner together. (Meade 74-76)

During the summer of 1920, Dorothy and her husband moved midtown, renting a flat on the top floor of a shabby, brick,
three-story building on 57 West fifty-seventh street. Dorothy became friends with an artist, Neysa McMein, who lived in a
studio across the hall. Neysa had become increasingly in demand by top magazines who wanted her to draw their covers and
by advertisers who wanted her to draw their advertisements. Soon The Round Table established the studio as its second home,
dropping in every afternoon between four and seven, and for Dorothy it became a regular stop in her daily agenda. In addition
to The Round Table, guests included people from the theater and show business--celebrities like Charlie Chaplin, Paul
Robeson, Ethel Barrymore, Jascha Heifet, Irving Berlin, and George Gershwin. (Meade 80-81) "The Round Tablers were
having the time of their lives. Very quickly they become essential to one another, theirs was a special affection, magical, fierce,
childlike." They met for breakfast and dinner, slept together in each other's apartments, worked cooperatively, and went on
group vacations. If they found themselves apart for any length of time they suffered from separation anxiety; none of them could
tolerate being alone. Being a part of the large group made it possible for them as individuals to avoid loneliness and
self-examination. "Their habit was to shove the troublesome parts of life, all the painful stuff they found hard to acknowledge,
under Frank Case's big table and pull the cloth down." (Meade 83-84)

Throughout 1921 Dorothy wrote a lot of "fluff" for Life and The Saturday Evening Post, "much of it humorous light verse that
appealed to the audience who gobbled up Scott Fitzgerald's frothy flapper stories. Fluff was short, silly, easy to write, and it
paid the bills" (Meade 88). In the spring of 1922, The Round Tablers presented an amateur musical called No Sirree. The
musical ran at the Forty-ninth Street Theater on a Sunday evening. Dorothy's contribution was the lyrics for a song called "The
Everlastin' Ingenue Blues," sung by Robert Sherwood with a chorus line of actresses. In No Sirree, Deems Taylor wrote the
music, Irving Berlin conducted the orchestra, and Jascha Heifetz provided offstage accompaniment. While the reviews were not
favorable, they were beside the point; The Round Tablers had done the performance for fun and did have fun. (Meade 95)

In 1922 Dorothy made her first attempt at writing short fiction and her subject was male oppression. Often her writing was
about the lives of her fellow Round Tablers. For her first short story entitled, "Such a Pretty Little Picture," Dorothy chose the
failing marriage of her best friend Robert Benchley. Dorothy, whose own marriage was failing, could not write about her own
marriage because that was too painful and difficult. By the end of the summer Dorothy was finished perfecting her work she
sold it to The Smart Set, "a nonconformist literary magazine which doted on realistic stories that spoke out against the ignorance
and pretensions of the so-called average American." (Meade 100) The Smart Set published various superior writers like
Eugene O'Neill and D.H. Lawrence. "Such a Pretty Little Picture" marked the beginning of Dorothy's literary career. (Meade
99-100)

Later the same year, Dorothy worked on a piece for The Saturday Evening Post about "novelists who, like Scott Fitzgerald,
make fortunes writing about the rebellious younger generation." (Meade 104) During the fall, The Round Table was busy
rehearsing for another theatrical production called The Forty-niners. This show got poor reviews also, but unlike No Sirree,
The Round Tablers did not have fun with this production. Dorothy and Franklin Pierce Adams published a book of light free
verse titled, Women I'm Not Married To; Men I'm Not Married To. (Kinney 41)

In 1923, Dorothy resigned her theater column in Ainslee's. This year was a changing point in the style of her prose. In the past
she had written light verse, "she mined and remained familiar terrain-cynical flappers, mothers from Montclair obsessed with
Junior's tonsils, self-conscious young marrieds desperate to be thoroughly modern, America's obsession with prosperity and
mediocrity. Nearly everything she wrote found a buyer, in itself a comment on her work." (Meade 108) Her reputation was as
a humorous poet, but in 1923 her verse changed to the theme of female rage. Instead of using other's experiences in her writing
she began using her own. She recounted her marriage's demise in the story "Too Bad," which appeared in the July 1923 issue
of The Smart Set. Her life was running smoothly during 1923, she was no longer writing for The Saturday Evening Post but
continued to contribute articles to Life. Dorothy also began working for the Bell Syndicate, which paid very well. She would
interview and write the profile of famous people and Neysa would sketch their portrait. Many of her subjects she already knew
like Charlie Chaplin and Irene Castle. (Meade 112).

In January 1924, Dorothy's marriage ended and she moved into the Algonquin Hotel. Now her friends were only an elevator
ride away. Dorothy began writing plays; the first play was entitled Soft Music, which occupied a lot of her time. She wrote an
offbeat story about "unfaithful husbands who impregnate their mistresses," which was accepted to Henry Mencken's magazine,
The American Mercury. (Meade 123-130) Dorothy's play titled "Soft Music," which was later changed to "Close Harmony,"
was a success on the opening night. However, even with great reviews, the play did not last long in the playhouse in New York
City. (Meade 138)

On February 1, 1925 the first issue of The New Yorker was published. Dorothy contributed drama reviews and poetry for the
first two issues. By May it looked like The New Yorker would fold. Harold Ross "was trying to keep the magazine going with
a tiny, inexperienced staff and an office that had only one typewriter. In August circulation fell to 2700 copies." (Meade 155)
Dorothy's play Close Harmony was still making money and was in its third month in Chicago.

On February 20, 1926 Dorothy sailed to France. She decided on the spur of the moment that she wanted to go to Paris, as
many writers were also leaving for Paris. "Dorothy noted that 'everybody did that then,' and Paris was a fashionable address for
writers who took their work seriously. By 1926 the exchange rate had become so favorable that it would be possible for her to
live there more cheaply, certainly more grandly, than in New York. Dorothy wanted to believe that in France she could
somehow become a different person and a real writer."(Meade 164) During her first two months abroad, Dorothy wrote some
poetry for The New Yorker and worked on a book of poetry that she compiling titled Sobbing in the Conning Tower.
Meanwhile, for the rest of her time while abroad, she wrote articles for Life and short stories for The New Yorker. While in
France, Dorothy befriended Earnest Hemingway and Gilbert Seldes, both whom she left on bad terms when she returned to the
states. At a party that a friend had had, Hemingway was quoted as having made a toast saying, " 'Here's to Dorothy Parker.
Life will never become her so much as her almost leaving it.' He then accused her of taking his typewriter and told a dirty joke
at her expense." All of this Dorothy was not pleased about but she buried the incident and forgot about it. (Kinney 43) She
sailed back home to New York in early November.

Back in New York Dorothy was reunited with her friends, and her book of poetry, initially titled Sobbing on the Conning
Tower, was published with the title Enough Rope. After the book of poetry was published everything was different for
Dorothy. Before the spring of 1927, Enough Rope was in its third edition and was receiving positive reviews from The Nation,
the New York Herald Tribune, The New Republic, The Bookman, and Poetry. Praise of any kind always made Dorothy
uncomfortable and even though she was pleased about her books acceptance, she "dismissed compliments and tended to
downplay her new popularity." McCall's magazine invited Dorothy to join Edna Millay, Edward Arlington Robinson, and Elinor
Wylie in "contributing to a Christmas feature that would be titled 'Christmas Poems by America's Greatest Poets.'" Dorothy
was happy to submit a poem but she did not regard herself as one of the greatest poets in the world. "As Dorothy later wrote in
The New Yorker, 'There is poetry and there is not.' Her writing, she believed, fell into the latter group." (Meade 178)

In the summer of 1927, Dorothy published a poem in The New Yorker titled "Frustration." The poem was about Dorothy's
unhappiness and frustration with the world she was living in. "Among those she hated were the powerful who had no qualms
taking advantage of the weak. That summer Dorothy became absorbed in a political cause, freeing Sacco and Vanzetti. Like
Katherine Anne Porter and Edna St. Vincent Millay, she was drawn to this particular issue because of her conviction that a
shocking miscarriage of justice was taking place. She entered the fight with the intention of stopping the execution of men she
believed innocent, but by its conclusion, her experiences had thoroughly radicalized her. She would remain unalterably
committed to radical principles for the rest of her life, even when it meant sacrificing her livelihood." (Meade 179)

Dorothy went to Boston to fight for the freedom of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian-American anarchists
who were waiting in their jail cells to be executed. "On April 15, 1920, two Italian immigrants, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo
Vanzetti, were arrested for robbery and murder in South Braintree, Massachusetts, and subsequently went through seven years
of litigation. There was great protest, at home and abroad, of the men's ignorance of American ways. Their avowed anarchism,
it was claimed, prevented a fair trial and thus condemned the two. What had begun as an obscure, routine murder trial had
developed into an international cause. Motions and petitions had held off the electric chair until all legal remedies had been
exhausted." (Frewin 73) The day that Dorothy arrived in Boston, Sacco and Vanzetti were to die at midnight and she had come
to march for their freedom. (Meade 180)

Demonstrations and strikes were going on all over the world but only a small group had developed in Boston, a much smaller
group than had been expected. The only person Dorothy recognized was John Dos Passos who was covering the execution for
the Worker; Passos squeezed ahead of her in the demonstration line. The group sang "The Internationale," and "The Red Flag,"
and soon after the singing began, officers tried to break up the demonstration. Dorothy refused to stop singing and marching.
"The number of gogglers that watched the marchers had grown to several hundred. The crowd wanted a glimpse of Dorothy
Parker, who was being exotically identified as 'the Greenwich Village poetess.' Some people addressed Dorothy by name,
some called her names, and one man warned her that the police were coming and she better run." Dorothy yelled that she did
not mind being arrested. Two police officers herded her towards the patrol wagon but she refused to get in and "insisted
walking the three blocks to the station. Before long, Ruth Hale came to bail her out." Sacco and Vanzetti were not executed
until the fall, and because of what Dorothy had experienced in Boston, being a part of the uprising, she began to call herself a
Socialist. (Meade 185-186)

In October, Dorothy took over the "Recent Books" column in The New Yorker under the pseudonym "Constant Reader." She
needed money so she took the weekly column, when normally she only liked to do freelancing. "She started out cautiously and
the reviews were relatively benign during the early weeks. As a reviewer she did poorly with quality books, usually slopping
adjectives like "beautiful" and "exquisite' all over the page." During this period of time, Dorothy wrote some of her best stories,
"among them "Arrangement in Black and White," a rather bold attack on racism that appeared in The New Yorker, and the
comic but deadly serious monologue she called "A Telephone Call," published in The Bookman." Dorothy continued to write
poetry and accepted another regular assignment, writing an editorial column for McCall's, "that required her to write a chatty
personal essay about New York or any subject she cared to write about each month." (Meade 189)

In May 1928, Dorothy published her second book of verse titled Sunset Gun. She had begun working on a short story, "Big
Blonde," that was "perhaps the most intensely autobiographical of all her fiction." After working on the story on and off for the
rest of the year, Dorothy allowed her friend Seward Collins to publish it in The Bookman. When "Big Blonde" appeared in
February 1929, "it brought her unanimous praise." Franklin Pierce Adams gushed over it in his column The Conning Tower and
all of Dorothy's friends loved the story. "The prestigious O. Henry competition selected it as the best short story of 1929. The
publication of "Big Blonde" marked another leap forward in her literary reputation." (Meade 196)

In 1929, Dorothy began doing film writing in Hollywood. Her need of money lured her but she also felt that writing scripts
would be easy. She signed a contract with Howard Dietz of MGM that offered her three hundred dollars a week for three
months. The down side to doing film writing was that Dorothy would be three thousand miles from New York. "But the film
company wooed her with excessive flattery, praising her wit and talent and telling her how much they needed clever writers like
herself."

This closed out the Twenties for Dorothy Parker as she exited the New York life and entered the life of Hollywood. (Meade
196) From this point on Dorothy would continue writing for publications in New York, but she also entered the world of
Hollywood and throughout the rest of her life, moved back and forth between both worlds.