Editor: Kevin C. Fitzpatrick
Cover: Florence Vandamm
Publisher: Donald Books | iUniverse
Year: 2014
Formats: Hardcover, Softcover, and E-Book
Pages: 500
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-49172-267-1
Perfect Bound Softcover ISBN: 978-1-49172-265-7
E-Book ISBN: 978-1-49172-266-4
Order: Publisher | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Indiebound
The groundbreaking Broadway reviews of the inestimable Dorothy Parker are collected in one volume. For the first time in nearly 100 years readers can enjoy Mrs. Parker’s sharp wit and biting commentary on the Jazz Age hits and flops. Starting when she was 24 at Vanity Fair as New York’s only female theatre critic, Mrs. Parker reviewed some of the biggest names of the era: The Barrymores, George M. Cohan, W.C. Fields, Helen Hayes, Al Jolson, Eugene O’Neill, Will Rogers, and the Ziegfeld Follies. Her words of praise—and contempt—for the dramas, comedies, musicals, and revues are just as fresh and funny today as they were in the age of speakeasies and bathtub gin.
“If I were to tell you the plot of the piece, in detail, you would feel that the only honorable thing for you to do would be to marry me,” she wrote.
This collection brings together more than 150,000 words written by Dorothy Parker for Vanity Fair, Ainslee’s, and newspapers from 1918-1923. It is annotated with a notes section and foreword by Kevin C. Fitzpatrick, president of the Dorothy Parker Society and author of A Journey into Dorothy Parker’s New York.
Since her death in 1967, nearly all of Dorothy Parker’s poetry and fiction have been collected into handsome volumes. Now, for the first time, all of her Broadway reviews from 1918-1923 have been located and presented to a new generation of readers. These pieces were Mrs. Parker’s bread and butter in the era of the Algonquin Round Table, the day job that paid the bills while she wrote light verse and short stories on the side. This book is the first collection of more than sixty of her drama columns.