From the Introduction to The Best of Dorothy Parker

At Lit Hub, an excerpt from Mervyn Horder's introduction to The Best of Dorothy Parker (The Folio Society), in which Horder takes a look at the author's "restricted oeuvre," "ascribable to the egregious disorder of her life, to her efforts to overcome this disorder with the help of the Scotch bottle, and, perhaps, to the fact that her main creative period was almost exactly that of the Prohibition era in America." A further excerpt of the excerpt:

She hated Hollywood. Getting an interview with Cecil B. DeMille was, she said, “like riding a camel through the eye of a needle,” and she found it painfully lonely after the camaraderie of the Round Table days: “Unless someone comes near my office, I’m going to write MEN on the door.”

In 1963 [husband Alan Campbell] died, and she returned to New York to spend her last years in an obscure hotel: “the kind of hotel where businessmen install their mothers and then run. My fellow guests take excellent care of themselves, and may look forward to a good 20 years spent doing what they are doing at present, which is nothing at all.”

In the 1950s an English journalist interviewed her there, where she lived alone except for a pet poodle, and found her “very small, her black hair shingled in the 20s style. She was wearing a ‘Bohemian’ blouse covered in multicolored cross-stitching.” She seemed intensely sad and in need of encouragement, finding it hard to believe that anyone would still be interested in her.

She died in the same hotel in 1967, leaving an estate valued at no more than $20,488 net. Her residuary legatee was The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

More, it seems, from a wish to be in the swim than from any deep conviction, Dorothy Parker leaned politically towards the left. She was arrested in 1927 for demonstrating against the trials of Sacco and Vanzetti, two left-wing agitators who were executed—almost certainly wrongly—for a payroll murder. In 1937 she visited Spain during the Civil War: “The 1930s were progressive days. We thought we were going to make the world better. I forget why we thought it, but we did.”

Read on at Lit Hub.