Dorothy Parker

 Dorothy Parker was an American writer and wit.  She was famous for her wry poems about modern life, bitter jokes and also for being a left wing activist.  She was born in 1893, to a Jewish father and a mother who had Scottish ancestry.  Her family lived in New York and were comfortably off.  Her mother died when she was small and her father remarried.  Parker claimed to dislike her stepmother and to accuse her of unkindness but in fact her childhood was mostly a comfortable one.  She attended a Catholic school and was to be ambivalent about  her Jewish ancestry.  She was born a Rothschild but when she became a writer she used her first husbands name Parker as her writing name.  She claimed that she had only married to get rid of her surname. 

Dorothy wanted to be a writer and began to publish some of her short poems.  She got regular work for the smart New York magazines such as Vogue and Vanity Fair and in 1917, she got married.  Her husband Edwin Parker, was a stockbroker, who left to serve in the Army...  Their marriage fell apart and they divorced later, in 1928.   Dorothy became friends with various other American wits and writers who met regularly in the Algonquin Hotel.. and she had a barbed tongue.  When Calvin Coolidge, the very silent dull President died, Dorothy quipped, "How can they tell?"  

She mused on suicide a lot and some of her comic poems were about this...