A magazine that folded today was among the many that published Dorothy Parker’s work. In a story that was broken on Media Bistro’s blog, FishbowlNY, Condé Nast announced today that House and Garden would cease publication in both print and online. Others launched the magazine in 1901; according to the Chronology of New York by James Trager, Condé Nast acquired House and Garden in 1915 when it had a circulation of just 10,000 and almost no advertising.
Parker cut her teeth on Condé Nast publications, working for the company for six years, beginning in 1915, at both Vogue and Vanity Fair. She worked at company headquarters, when it was located at 25 West 44th Street, from 1915-1920. During World War II, she wrote a marvelous freelance piece about her house in Bucks County, recounting the time she and her second husband, Alan Campbell, bought and decorated a 200-year old colonial farmhouse. Published in the November 1942 issue of House and Garden, it is called “Destructive Decoration” and says,
Then there was the terrible day when they found that, on the outside of the house, we had painted the blinds, not tea-room blue, but Mediterranean pink. All shuddered, and several swooned. And then, when we cut down a clump of sickly, straggly maples so that we might have an uninterrupted view of dipping meadows and the hills of Jersey beyond – well, that did in even the hardest to die of the Fifty-Second Street Thoreaus. Now only the natives speak to us. We feel all right.
(The house Parker is writing about is the one we had a party in last year). The rest of this piece is included in the 2006 edition of the Portable Dorothy Parker, edited by Marion Meade.
House and Garden may be gone, but three other magazines Parker wrote extensively for are still chugging along: Vogue, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker.