Sharp

Talent can be a kind of accident sometimes. It can choose people and set them up for lives they never would have dreamed of themselves. But that was really the only kind of accident that had any hand in making Dorothy Parker a writer.

Parker liked to present her father’s death as a tragedy and could sometimes sound bitter about how she’d been left to fend for herself

The family name was Rothschild—not those ones, as Parker reminded interviewers all her life. But still a respectable New York Jewish family, financially comfortable enough for Jersey Shore vacations and a large apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan

These women came from similar backgrounds: white, and often Jewish, and middle-class.

Pauline Kael to open the door to the celebration of popular art

Is there, after all, a voice that carries better through the ages than Parker’s? You can practically hear the scratch of her voice in every verse. Or is there a moral and political voice whose reach exceeds Hannah Arendt’s? Where would our vision of culture be without Susan Sontag? How would we think about movies without

One of the great pleasures of irony like this is being able to watch it refract in different directions. At least a few of those directions were paths women could walk down.

Having so few models to emulate, Crowninshield’s Vanity Fair turned out something like its editor’s personality: tart and impertinent, particularly in regard to the very rich. Something—perhaps the sufferings of his brother, perhaps the clear fact that Crowninshield’s family had always possessed more prestige than money—had made him a critic of the well-off. But he was not much for fire-and-brimstone social criticism. His method, instead, was ridicule. Even his editor’s note to the first issue of the revamped magazine was sardonic:
For women we intend to do something in a noble and missionary spirit, something which, so far as we can observe, has never before been done for them by an American magazine. We mean to make frequent appeals to their intellects. We dare to believe that they are, in their best moments, creatures of some cerebral activity; we even make bold to believe that it is they who are contributing what is more original, stimulating, and highly magnetized to the literature of our day, and we hereby announce ourselves as determined and bigoted feminists.

Edward Bernays, a nephew of Freud’s who is often credited with the invention of public relations, had only begun his career in the fall of 1913. Advertisers were only beginning to have some idea of their eventual power in America.

Talent can be a kind of accident sometimes. It can choose people and set them up for lives they never would have dreamed of themselves. But that was really the only kind of accident that had any hand in making Dorothy Parker a writer.