SOURCE: “Satire and Epigram in Dorothy Parker's Versicles,” in The New York Times Book Review, June 14, 1931, p. 4.

Hutchison reads Death and Taxes as a “small package of literary delights,” that reveals truth amid a mixture of the serious and lighthearted.

Since, according to the old proverb, death and taxes are the only certainties in life, we assume that Dorothy Parker means by her title that the poems of the collection were equally inevitable. But since all assumptions are likely to be fallible when dealing with the literary output of this pleasing and disconcerting lady, we discreetly withdraw from further pursuit of the subject. Death and Taxes is a thin book, housing something like half a hundred short poems—several are very short indeed. But invariably the quality is in inverse ratio to the quantity.

Dorothy Parker's function in the body literary and the body social is too well...