A Glimpse of Dorothy Parkers Life Essay -- Biography Biographies Writ

A Glimpse of Dorothy Parker's Life Dorothy Rothschild, later to become the famous writer Dorothy Parker, was born on August 22, 1893 to J. Henry Rothschild and Eliza A (Marston) Rothschild in West End, New Jersey. Parker’s father, Mr. Rothschild, was a Jewish business man while Mrs. Rothschild, in contrast, was of Scottish descent. Parker was the youngest of four; her only sister Helen was 12 and her two brothers, Harold and Bertram, were aged 9 and 6, respectively. Just before her fifth birthday, Dorothy’s mother became very ill and died on July 20, 1897. Three years later in 1900, Mr. Rothschild remarried to a 48 year-old spinster widow, Eleanor Frances Lewis, who Dorothy referred to as â€Å"the housekeeper.† The new Mrs. Rothschild entered Dorothy in the Blessed Sacrament Convent School, where the Catholic ways of thinking were instilled in her. Fortunately or unfortunately, in 1903 Dorothy’s stepmother dropped dead of an acute cerebral hemorrhage and consequently Dorothy di d not have to continue at the Blessed Sacrament Convent. A few years later, in the fall of 1907, Dorothy entered Miss Dana’s school, a junior college, where she studied several different disciplines and was exposed to current events and cultural activities. This environment nourished Dorothy’s intellectual appetite, but this too was short-lived; Miss Dana died in March 1908. Dorothy, now aged 14, was only at the school for one year, the fall of 1907 to the spring of 1908 (Miss Dana’s school had to file for bankruptcy). In 1913, Mr. Rothschild died leaving Dorothy, age 19, to find her own way and support herself. In search of a way to support herself, Dorothy turned to Mr. Crowninshield, an editor at Vanity Fair who published her ... ...ceiving the credit she deserves. Bibliography â€Å"Dorothy Parker†. Grolier Incorporated 1993. [2004] Available Online: http://www.levity.com/corduroy/parker.htm, accessed April 14, 2004. Keats, John. The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker: You Might As Well Live. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970. Kinney, Arthur F. Dorothy Parker, Revised. New York, NW: Twayne Publishers, 1998. Melzer, Sondra. The Rhetoric of Rage: Women in Dorothy Parker. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 1997. Pettit, Rhonda S. A Gendered Collision: Sentimentalism and Modernism in Dorothy Parker’s Poetry and Fiction. New Jersey: Associated University Presses, Inc., 2000. Related Links: http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/parker/ http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/parker/parker.htm http://webpages.marshall.edu/~Armada2/Parker.html