New Parker book for 2004

Great news for all Dorothy Parker fans: author Marion Meade has a new book coming out May 18, 2004 about our favorite person. Meade wrote the definitive and best Parker biography Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell is This? in 1987.

Now she goes back to the well one more time for Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties. This book features not only Parker, but 3 of her contemporaries: Zelda Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Edna Ferber.

Ms. Meade was kind enough to send us some information from the publisher:

Marion Meade recreates the aura of excitement, romance, and promise of the 1920s, a decade celebrated for cultural innovation — the birth of jazz, the beginning of modernism — and social and sexual liberation, bringing to light, as well, the anxiety and despair that lurked beneath the nonstop partying and outrageous, unconventional behavior. The literary heroines in BOBBED HAIR AND BATHTUB GIN did what they wanted, said what they thought. They drank gallons of cocktails and knew how to have fun in New York, the Rivera, and Hollywood, where they met and played with all the people worth knowing. They kicked open the door for twentieth-century female writers and set a new model for every woman trying to juggle the serious issues of economic independence, political power, and sexual freedom.

In a style and tone that perfectly captures the jazzy rhythms and tragic sense of impending doom that defined the era, Meade tells the individual stories of Parker, Fitzgerald, Millay, and Ferber, traces the intersections of their lives, and describes the men — including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson, Harold Ross, and Robert Benchley — who influenced them, loved them, and sometimes betrayed them. She describes their social and literary triumphs (Parker’s Round Table witticisms appeared almost daily in the newspapers and Ferber won a Pulitzer Prize for So Big) and writes movingly of the penances they paid: the crumbled love affairs, abortions, depression, lost beauty, nervous breakdowns, and finally, overdoses and even madness.

A vibrant mixture of literary scholarship, social history, and gossip, BOBBED HAIR AND BATHTUB GIN is a rich evocation of a period that continues to intrigue and captivate readers.

The book information: Hardcover, publisher Nan A. Talese, ISBN 0-385-50242-7, release date 05/18/2004, 304 pages.

We are very excited about another new Parker book for the bookshelves; stay tuned to the site for more information.