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The writer and celebrated conversationalist Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) remains overshadowed by the legends about her. Active during the Depression and the Jazz Age, she was then known as a wit, as the only female member of the Algonquin round table, and as a poet of light verse and amusing, but slight, short stories. Her satiric, shrewd analyses of American life, however, earned her a place on Hollywood's blacklist as well as, in 1988, the year the first scholarly biography of Parker was published, a memorial plaque from the NAACP, where Parker's ashes are interred: "Here lie the ashes of Dorothy Parker . . . humorist, writer, critic. Defender of human and civil rights. This memorial garden is dedicated to her noble spirit which celebrated the oneness of humankind and to the bonds of everlasting friendship between black and Jewish people." Parker herself had suggested as an epitaph merely the phrase "Excuse my dust."
Because she did not appear to take herself seriously, she was, until relatively recently, considered a lightweight by the more influential literary critics and contemporaries. Her interest in civil rights, in feminism, in gender roles, in social inequalities, is increasingly recognized, one of the defining testaments to her literary and cultural worth being the frequency with which she has become a subject for scholarly biography.
This course will cover Parker's major works as well as critical and biographic writings about her by Ann Douglas, Marion Meade, Barry Day, and others. We will set Parker mainly in the context of the twenties and thirties, the decades in which she left her mark through stories and poems demonstrating the impact of poverty, lack of education, social ideas about gender and alcoholism on women, as well as crusading commentary on race relations in the United States long before the civil rights movement. Some selections from writers contemporary with Parker will be covered in order to put her work in context.
Students should purchase The Portable Dorothy Parker, ed. Brendan Gill, and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. A reader will be provided.
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