The Penguin Dorothy Parker

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<i>The Penguin Dorothy Parker</i> contains stories and poems published collectively in 1944; late uncollected stories, articles and reviews; and the contents of <i>Constant Reader</i> (her New Yorker book reviews) - in all of which she sharpens her legendary wit on the foibles of others. Dorothy Parker was not all vitriol; indeed her disciplined technique and impeccable psychological timing by themselves mark her our as a writer of high calibre. But it is her constant preoccupation with death and with an ever-present pain that the reader perhaps finds most haunting. beneath her carapace of electrifying wit which reflected so brilliantly the age she lived in, was a woman for whom happiness was, at best, precarious. She was, as Brendan Gill remarks, one of the saddest people in the world.