Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker Book

During the early years of her career, while struggling to "keep body and soul apart" (as she ruefully put it later), Dorothy Parker wrote more than three hundred poems and verses for a variety of popular magazines and newspapers. Between 1926 and 1933 she collected most of these pieces in three volumes of poetry: Enough Rope, Sunset Gun, and Death and Taxes. The remaining poems and verses from America's most renowned cynic make up this volume. Eclectic and exuberant, these 122 once-forgotten gems display Parker's distinctive wit, irony, and precision, as she dissects early-twentieth-century American urban life and gleefully skewers a rich array of targets that range from personal foible to popular culture. With an authoritative, immensely entertaining, and critically acclaimed introduction by Stuart Y. Silverstein, Not Much Fun is an essential addition to the Dorothy Parker library and a welcome gift to her many admirers and devoted fans.

Publishers Weekly

These poems are not "lost" in the way that we have come to expect from TV specials that celebrate never-seen episodes of, say, The Honeymooners. Rather, as Silverstein points out, these 122 poems appeared in popular magazines and newspapers of 1915-1938 yet have not previously been collected between hard covers. This does not bode well, nor does Silverstein, a journalist, attempt to build our hopeshis very lengthy introduction hits hard on Parker's alcoholism. But to engage the reader, he offers, via 113 footnotes, scores of "Dottie's" best witticisms. (The book's title is her response to a bartender's query: "What are you having?"). He succinctly observes that Parker's problem was a lack of artistic vision: "She needed ideas, not craft, and she failed." Indeed, this collection of light verse is built basically on two blunt ideas, which fortunately are not without their entertainment value: romance bad ("The most wonderful thing/ Is how well I get on without you"); money good ("Immortality ask I not/ All I want is a lot of jack"). (Aug.)