The Last Days of Dorothy Parker

Dorothy Parker biographer Marion Meade shares insight into the last days in the life of Dorothy Parker—the horrible and the hilarious—including her colorful friendship with Lillian Hellman, and the bizarre afterlife of Parker's remains from a file cabinet on Wall Street to a small burial site by the NAACP office in Baltimore. The Volney was a dignified residence hotel, favored by little old ladies and their dogs, on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Dorothy Parker died there, of a heart attack, on June 7, 1967. She was seventy-three and had been famous for almost half a century. As befitted a much loved humorist, poet, and story writer, The New York Times announced her exit in a front-page obituary. This was followed by a star-studded memorial service, also reported in the paper, which was attended by some 150 of her friends and admirers. More than twenty years later, on October 20, 1988, Parker was buried in Baltimore, in a memorial garden at the...