Parker, Dorothy | Nancy A. Walker (essay date 1997)
Nancy A. Walker (essay date 1997)
SOURCE: Walker, Nancy A. “The Remarkably Constant Reader: Dorothy Parker as Book Reviewer.” Studies in American Humor 3, no. 4 (1997): 1-14.
[In the following essay, Walker asserts that “the medium of the book review allowed for an expression of personal tastes that can provide insight into a woman of integrity and high standards.”]
In her review of the Journal of Katherine Mansfield in 1927, Dorothy Parker made a statement that could equally well apply to herself: “Writing was the precious thing in life to her, but she was never truly pleased with anything she had written.”1 Much later, in 1962, in her last book review for Esquire, Parker wrote of Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle in a similarly revealing way, “this novel brings back all my faith in terror and death. I can say no higher of it and her” (575). Of all the forms in which...
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