Parker Book Battle Exposed

Dot City hasn't been known to break any news stories, or to sniff out material that's outside the world of Dorothy Parker.

But this "book battle" story is both intriguing and fascinating to any true Parker fan. Briefly, it's about the legal wrangling going on right now in U.S. District Court between writer/editor Stuart Y. Silverstein and the publishing giant Penguin Putnam.

The two are at odds over his excellent 1996 book Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker (Scribner). It appears that when Penguin released Dorothy Parker Complete Poems in 1999 they took all of the "lost" material from NMF and tacked it onto the end of their book, without Silverstein's permission. The two parties have been going back in forth for about three years. Click here to read more than 20 documents in the case.

In addition, four Parker poems from the original microfilm are scanned and presented here.

We don't think Dot City and the Dorothy Parker Society of New York will end up on Court TV, but we sure wouldn't mind the attention! Check out these documents and court papers, they are an excellent read.

Posted by Kevin Fitzpatrick on Monday, April 23, 2001 at 11:21 PM | Permalink