Hope & Question

a new hero

perhaps I should read up on this a bit more before I make such a statement, but I've added another to my list of heroes:

It's the birthday of poet and short-story writer Dorothy Parker, born in West End, New Jersey (1893). In 1920, she was fired from Vanity Fair because her drama reviews were so harsh, so she put her cynicism and wit into her first book of poems, Enough Rope, and it was a best-seller when it was published in 1926. She went to The New Yorker to write book reviews under the name "Constant Reader," and she was one of the founders of the famous Algonquin Round Table at the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan. She established a reputation as one of the sharpest conversationalists in New York, and she epitomized the liberated woman of the 1920s. Her poems were collected as Not So Deep as a Well (1936), and her short stories were collected in Here Lies (1939). When she was 70, she said, "If I had any decency, I'd be dead. Most of my friends are." And she said, "Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.

posted by Loren @ 9:04 AM