Dorothy Parker is known today for her three volumes of verse, Enough Rope (1926), Sunset Gun (1928), and Death and Taxes (1931)--not serious "poetry," she claimed--and two collections of well-wrought short stories, Laments for the Living (1930) and After Such Pleasures (1933). These stories, characterized by Alexander Woollcott as "a potent distillation of nectar and wormwood," focus on the superficial, empty, directionless lives of well-to-do women of the flapper and early Depression times. Like the supersophisticated but world-weary personae of many of Parker's poems, these women are devoid of intellectual or emotional resources of their own and are dependent on men for their economic and emotional well-being. There is generally an imbalance of feeling in the relationships depicted in the stories and the verse: the men are either indifferent or inconstant and so wound the faithful, lovelorn women, or vice versa.

Parker was born Dorothy Rothschild, the daughter of a prosperous Jewish...