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Marion Meade

Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? Paperback – March 3, 1989

by Marion Meade (Author)

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Marion Meade's engrossing and comprehensive biography of one of the twentieth century's most captivating women

In this lively, absorbing biography, Marion Meade illuminates both the charm and the dark side of Dorothy Parker, exploring her days of wicked wittiness at the Algonquin Round Table with the likes of Robert Benchley, George Kaufman, and Harold Ross, and in Hollywood with S. J. Perelman, William Faulkner, and Lillian Hellman. At the dazzling center of it all, Meade gives us the flamboyant, self-destructive, and brilliant Dorothy Parker.

This edition features a new afterword by Marion Meade.

Print length

459 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Penguin Books
Publication date

March 3, 1989
Grade level

12 and up
Reading age

18 years and up
Dimensions

9.11 x 6.08 x 1.27 inches
ISBN-10

0140116168
ISBN-13

978-0140116168
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"Meade's lively biography recounts the unhappy life of the wise-cracking versifier, short story writer and critic," reported PW. "So detailed is Meade's book that this, one imagines, is the last time a biographer will need to explain why so talented a writer could at the same time be so nasty a human being." Photos.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Marion Meade is the author of Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? and Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties. She has also written biographies of Woody Allen, Buster Keaton, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Victoria Woodhull, and Madame Blavatsky, as well as two novels about medieval France.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Books; Reprint edition (March 3, 1989)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 459 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0140116168
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0140116168
Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
Grade level ‏ : ‎ 12 and up
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.33 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 9.11 x 6.08 x 1.27 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #129,900 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #42 in Women Writers in Women Studies
- #405 in Literary Criticism & Theory
- #1,503 in Women's Biographies

Customer Reviews:
259 ratings

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Marion Meade

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Marion Meade is a biographer and novelist.

Her most recent biography is Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney. Other subjects include Eleanor of Aquitaine, Madame Blavatsky, Dorothy Parker, Buster Keaton, and Woody Allen. Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties tells the story of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Zelda Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, and Edna Ferber becoming writers in the Jazz Age.

She has also written two novels set in medieval France, Stealing Heaven: The Love Story of Heloise and Abelard and Sybille.

Aside from her writing, she edited Dorothy Parker's collected works, The Portable Dorothy Parker; Parker's play The Ladies of the Corridor; and introduced Parker's Complete Poems.

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5

259 global ratings

5 star		63%
4 star		23%
3 star		10%
2 star		1%
1 star		3%

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Kindle Customer

Algonquin under-the-table

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 27, 2022

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If you wanted to tell a tale of squandered opportunity, wasted talent and almost total dissipation, Dorothy Parker would make for a perfect model. A literary household name still today, and a founding member of the famously self-regarding Algonquin Roundtable, Parker's life was marred by an almost genius level capacity for near self-destruction. Making her mark in the literary pinnacles of both New York and Hollywood, Parker was equally renowned for missed deadlines and work habits that were an homage to sheer laziness.
Though no fault of the biographer ("Her writer’s block was invigorated by the country air," is one of Meade's great zingers) you marvel at the level of detail Meade had somehow managed to scour from a woman determined to keep her personal life a mystery. Yet, you do wind up asking yourself when after all is said and done, "did I really need to know all this?" (The answers is, "yes," if you want to learn how not to wreck what should have been an even more brilliant writing career.)

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Starlifter

Exhaustive Biography of a Sad, Brilliant Woman

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 28, 2013

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The phrase "exhaustively researched" has never applied more to a book I've read than it does to Marion Meade's splendid biography "Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?"

Mrs. Parker had a career spanning five decades. She wrote short stories, plays, movies, essays, war correspondence, book and drama criticism, and more. She was especially famous for her light verse, which she sold like mad when this commodity was hot.

Mrs. Parker was also depressed and alcoholic for most of her adult life. She was a founding member of the famous Algonquin Round Table, a group of writers, critics, wits, and actors that was to writing genius what Los Alamos was to scientific genius. On the surface, it was a bunch of friends and colleagues who met daily for lunch in New York's Algonquin Hotel, but in reality, it was a collection of some of the 20th Century's sharpest minds, all of them imbibing liberally, and zinging one another with insults. It was a means for them to hone their minds, preparing them for their future jobs and successes.

Often, when people think of Dorothy Parker, that's what comes to mind: "Oh, she was that vicious little woman in the Algonquin Round Table." She was, indeed, sharp-tongued and often vicious. That was just one part of her story, though, and that's where this book shines, in broadening our view of Dorothy Parker to include the rest of her sad, fascinating life.

"Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?", of course, deals with Dorothy's childhood, how she lost her mother as a child, then had a contentious relationship with her stepmother. We follow her as she moves into a hasty, pre-war marriage to Mr. Parker, and how she inches her way toward a career as a writer.

In many ways, the early to mid 20th Century was a high-water mark for writers. Few people had radios in their homes, and TV broadcasting was years away. The movies were popular, but to entertain and inform themselves, people read. New York City had multiple newspapers competing with one another; there were magazines publishing fiction, poetry, and art--basically, a bunch of "New Yorker" type magazines, though written to entertain even "housewives in Dubuque" (as a Vanity Fair editor described their scope).

From its first issue, "The New Yorker" was designed to be a sophisticated magazine that didn't even try to reach the housewives in Dubuque--it was designed for a slick, intellectual New York set. Mrs. Parker and her friends epitomized that set. They met for long lunches at the Algonquin, did whatever their jobs required of them, then it was off to the theater, and afterwards touring the bars (and speakeasies, once Prohibition kicked-in). This was prime time for Mrs. Parker.

As all good things end, so did The Round Table group go their separate ways.

Despite her stellar reputation as a writer, Mrs Parker hated to write. She was filled with anxiety, agonizing over every sentence and paragraph. When she did write, she was brilliant. Her short stories and verse ended up in the biggest magazines; her criticism for various magazines was sharp and pulled no punches.

But Mrs. Parker was never truly happy. She was married three times, twice to the same man. Neither of those relationships brought her happiness, nor did the countless other men she bedded in her life. She traveled, spending long stretches in Europe, rubbing elbows with Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Books of her verse and stories were huge successes, but there were always money woes. There never seemed to be enough money. She spent it as fast as she earned it.

Ms Meade has surely examined every molecule of Dorothy Parker information on this planet. She has dug deeper than most biographers do, and I think she gets more inside her subject's head. Though I laughed numerous times at Mrs. Parker's wit, this book, in toto, is not a happy book. To present a happy biography would be disingenuous, an egregious disservice to the life Dorothy Parker lived.

She lived fully, too. She made it to lavish parties, but she also walked with protesters in the Sacco and Vanzetti uprisings. She visited Spain during the revolution, and worked stateside to raise money and supplies for Spain's impoverished, who were caught in the middle with nothing. She was investigated by the FBI and the HUAC for her political views and pro-union activities in Hollywood.

None of this made her happy. She was depressed, and she drank too much. She got to a point where nearly all of her friends had died. Fitzgerald died at 41; Mrs Parker made it to 73.

Her story is fascinating, and Marion Meade does an amazing job presenting this story seamlessly. So many biographies skip over huge gaps in their subjects' lives. With Dorothy Parker, one of the most compelling lifelong struggles is how she'll pay her bills from success to success. Her successes were many; the story of how (and why) they came to be is often surprising--because she needed the money.

Dorothy Parker's body of work speaks for itself. Nearly 50 years after her death, her works are still in print, her wit and skill still celebrated.

What I took away from this biography was a new appreciation for Mrs. Parker as a wordsmith. Even more, though, I felt a pall of sadness. Her life--for all its highs--never broke through her ennui. Ms Meade's biography so perfectly captures Dorothy Parker's pervasive sadness, that I couldn't help picking up a little myself--sadness along with deep admiration, both for Mrs. Parker's achievements, and for Marion Meade's.

Highly Recommended

12 people found this helpful

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elle

Fascinating

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 8, 2022

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This was a trip back to the era of my childhood seen through another lens.

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IzzyBizzy

A Life Worth Examining (and reading about)

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 7, 2015

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This is a beautifully written book and I've highlighted more passages than usual. The book mines Parker's life soup to nuts; the chapters are chronological and cover several years at a time. Hard to imagine a more thorough look at this amazing woman. But I give it four stars simply because for me the middle feels weighty and overwrought----how many times does one need to read about fantastical NYC parties and Mrs. Parker's boozy binges that stem from her poor self-esteem? Yet, in this way, I felt that the author has given insight into what it meant to be Dorothy Parker----a life of high society, intense and complex friendships, passionate and volatile love, difficult and inspired sessions of creativity, loneliness, and non-stop revelry that wasn't always that fun.

All that said, the author thoroughly records the origins and circumstances that bred her pitch-perfect wisecracks. Always, they came from within without a moment's notice, her sharp mind ever at work even when altered by drink or depression. This book doesn't settle for what made her popular and well known, it explores her poetry, reviews, short stories, novels, movie scripts, and even her personal notes and telegrams. Her writing and wit survive her era, still fresh and apt. It’s hard to overstate her popularity and influence in her time, and a little puzzling as to why she hasn’t continued to attract a wider audience. Had it been around in her day she surely would have won a MacArthur's Genius Grant and while she might have accepted it, in need of cash, she certainly would have disparaged their selection----a la Groucho’s “I can’t join a country club that would have me for a member”----and then found a way to mock the whole institution just to underline her unworthiness. Such was Dorothy Parker: in desperate need of love and attention, genius enough to have earned it, but doubting intentions when it was acknowledged.

Still, do not be turned away from reading this powerful book---even if you have to take a rest at the hard parts---she occupied a part of American literary history that no one has since filled. If you are unsure, start with her obituary in the New York Times, which appeared on page one and continued on an entire inside page---a distinction reserved for few. http://www.dorothyparker.com/nytobit.html

30 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Anne Davies

Love it and her

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 14, 2017

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Recently was in New York and stumbled on Algonquin Hotel and had a drink there. Prompted me to download book which I read before many years ago. Love it and her!!

Rory Carr

...but Heaven for the reader.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 24, 2011

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A biographer worthy of her subject. And what a subject. Readers already familiar with the wit and wisdom of Dorothy Parker will know what I mean; those who first find her in these pages are in for the literary treat of their lives.

That's for the book. For the seller my praise is just as unstinting. Great condition, prompt delivery, god price and a truly great biography.

One person found this helpful

Simon

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 18, 2017

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Great thanks

The Pathologist

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 9, 2015

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