With a not-so-subtle desire to "blazon her mark" upon the world, Dorothy Parker (August 22, 1893 – June 7, 1967) became a social and literary titan in the 1920s and 1930s. Her epigrammatic writing—quick, bright, and often caustic—appeared in The New Yorker for three decades, where she helped define The New Yorker Short Story genre.

 Dorothy Parker.

The Collected Dorothy Parker features Parker's short stories and poems originally published in 1944 as The Portable Dorothy Parker and book reviews Parker wrote for The New Yorker from 1927 to 1933.   The edition I reference was a 2001 reprint by Penguin Classics. It is introduced by Brendan Gill, a life-long New Yorker arts critic. Gill suggests that Parker's quick ascension from a strict Catholic upbringing to literary popularity happened at the same speed with which she later fell from favor.   
    
"Readers coming to Mrs. Parker for the first time may find it as hard to understand the high place she held in the literary world of forty or fifty years ago as to understand the critical disregard into which she subsequently felt. The first precaution for such readers is to bear in mind the fact that the so-called world that gave her her reputation was really only a province, and, like all provinces, it considered itself much bigger and more important than it was."   
Although Parker has lately again found favor, her story—according to Gill—is a cautionary one.

Solace

There was a rose that faded young;
I saw its shattered beauty hung
Upon a broken stem.
I heard them say, "What need to care
With roses budding everywhere?"
I did not answer them.
There was a bird, brought down to die;
They said "A hundred fill the sky - What reason to be sad?"
There was a girl, whose lover fled;
I did not wait, the while they said,
"There's many another lad."

Parker produced the kind of cynical critique and social commentary that we herald and even take for granted today. Still, when she first published, this kind of comedic diminishing was new. Vital. Vibrant. It edged in a group—including Hemingway—of celebrated and famous writers.

Parker on Hemingway:

Ernest Hemingway wrote a short novel called "The Sun Always Rises." Promptly upon its publication, Ernest Hemingway was discovered, the Stars and Stripes were reverentially raised over him, eight hundred and forty-seven book reviewers formed themselves into the word "welcome," and the band played "Hail to the Chief" in three concurrent keys.

Her social network elevated Parker's writing, The Algonquin Round Table, and other "middle class, urban intellectuals."

Do not, however, let that distract you from her trenchant observations of her environs and their limitations.

My life and my arms are now and hereafter consecrated to the services of the Society for the Abolition of Charm. It would be advisable, perhaps, for the Society to make a drive for the new members [...] yet there is little reason to fear that the Society will pine and die for want of new blood.

At the height of her popularity, Dorothy Parker was fearless. Parker on Vladimir Nabokov's highly controversial novel Lolita:

No. There is no good, I see at this late moment, to try to melt down the story. It is in its writing that Mr. Nabokov has made it the work of art that it is. Mr Nabokov—the same man, you know, that wrote the delicate stories in Pnin—started writing in English long after his first youth. His command of the language is absolute, and his Lolita is a fine book, a distinguished book—all right, then—a great book.

Ultimately, Parker became a victim of the same social whims she stoked and fed. Her writing lost critical momentum after The Depression because, according to Brendan Gill's introduction, she was never as sophisticated or talented as her clamoring social circle had others believe.

Above all, Parker struggled to rejigger her work to the conservative austerity of post-war New York.

Her post-War poem "Frustration" is painfully inappropriate:

Frustration

If I had a shiny gun,
I could have a world of fun
Speeding bullets through the brains
Of the folk who give me pains;

Or had I some poison gas,
I could make the moments pass
Bumping off a number of
People whom I do not love.

Parker wrote for magazines and journals until she died in 1967 but never published volumes after The Portable Dorothy Parker.

I find her writing deceptively heavy with things unexpressed. She was aware of death, memory's trickery, and especially her own limitations of meaningfulness.

 "Philosophy" by Dorothy Parker. My favorite Parker piece. Marks my own.

Parker covers her existential life-questioning with splashy rhymes and observations, but between the bars, it's there: a smile, a smirk, a sadness. She doubts her purpose while she lies awake at night.   The sort of self-questioning and universe-seeking that drove Patti Smith's elegant prose written from a place of melancholy.   
And, on a more optimistic note, Alan Lightman's contemplation of death and self while searching for stars. What is it about night that drives our deepest thinking?

Dorothy Parker resonated much more than expected. Her writing in The Collected Dorothy Parker was a bit of a revelation.   Knowing of our shared devotion to American writer Shirley Jackson—"God bless her, as ever unparalleled"—I was not surprised how much I liked Parker, only that she was so remarkably complex.   
Jackson is most well -known for her skin-pricking short story "The Lottery" and "The Haunting of Hill House" one of the best haunted house stories ever written according to Stephen King.

She shows barely contained pain, longing, and self-awareness crying to be seen. I doubt anyone would label Parker's work "mournful," but it can be.

Interior

Her mind lives in a quiet room,
A narrow room and tall,
With pretty lamps to quench the gloom
And mottoes on the wall.

There all the things are waxen neat,
And set in decorous lines;
And there are posies, round and sweet,
And little, straightened vines.

Her mind lives tidily, apart
From cold and noise and pain,
And bolts the door against her heart
Out wailing in the rain.

Parker's fantastic apology to her editor Pascal Covici, who was, incidentally, John Steinbeck's editor and friend.

Accompany The Collected Dorothy Parker with the personal journals of the young Hemingway, a man whose presence Parker compared to the Grand Canyon, or Italo Calvino's lucid self-positioning in a universe of uncertainty.

E.B. White, a generation behind Parker at The New Yorker, once wrote: "The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is one of general interest."

Dorothy Parker presented to be this person in every possible way.