Dorothy Parker is one of those literary figures who are more famous for being well known than for being a writer, and she is all the more glamorous for having been associated with every glittering myth that exists about the 1920s, the legendary decade of speakeasies, wisecracks, Vanity Fair, and “Ain’t We Got Fun?” Parker and the Algonquin group tend to be remembered with the kind of second-hand nostalgia one can feel only for those people and periods which one has heard about but never really known. That the Round Table regulars are remembered at all is a measure of the force of their personalities, for it is generally agreed that most of the writers among them produced little of lasting quality. Parker, despite her delicate literary reputation, was the most capable of the group.

Writing about Dorothy Parker in his notebooks from the Twenties, Edmund Wilson observed that she “was the only personality who interested me in this group . . . . She was naturally spontaneously witty, and the conflicts in her nature made her interesting.” While Wilson did not go on to define those conflicts, he pointed to Lillian Hellman’s portrait of Parker in An Unfinished Woman, which he said is “unlikely to be bettered by anyone else.” Heliman agreed with Wilson that “Dottie” was “a tangled fishnet of contradictions,” and speculated that her friend’s familiar habit of aiming sudden insults at people she seemed to like “came from a desire to charm,