Dorothy Parker was born in West End, New Jersey, in 1893 and grew up in New York, attending a Catholic convent school and Miss Dana's School in Morristown, New Jersey. In 1916 she sold some of her poetry to the editor of Vogue and was subsequently given an editorial position on the magazine, writing captions for fashion photographs and drawings. She then became drama critic of Vanity Fair and the central figure of the celebrated Algonquin Round Table.

Famous for her spoken wit, she showed the same trenchant commentary in her book reviews for the New Yorker and Esquire and in her poems and sketches. She wrote several poetry collections, including Not So Deep as a Well and Enough Rope, which became a best seller, along with numerous short-story collections, including Here Lies. She also collaborated with Elmer Rice on a play, Close Harmony, and with Arnaud d'Usseau on the play the The Ladies of the Corridor. She had two Broadway plays written about her and was portrayed as a character in a third. Renowned for her cynicism and the concentration of her judgments, Parker’s name remains practically synonymous with modern urbane humor.

Parker (née Rothschild) married Edwin Pond Parker II, and although they were divorced some years later, she continued to use his name, which she much preferred to her own. Her second husband was actor-writer Alan Campbell. They went to Hollywood as a writing team in 1934 and maintained a tempestuous marriage until his death in 1963, when she returned to New York. Dorothy Parker died in New York of a heart attack in 1967.

Marion Meade is the author of Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? and Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties. She has also written biographies of Woody Allen, Buster Keaton, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Victoria Woodhull, and Madame Blavatsky, as well as two novels about medieval France. For Penguin Classics, Meade has edited The Portable Dorothy Parker and has introduced Parker’s Complete Poems.