SOURCE: “The Rueful, Frostbitten Laughter of Dorothy Parker,” The New York Times Book Review, December 13, 1936, pp. 2, 28.

In this review, Kronenberger discussed Parker's exploration of emotion and sentimentality through her use of wit and cynicism.

It is just ten years since Mrs. Parker first made plain that the world is safe enough for girls who wear glasses, but reasonably precarious for most others. It is ten years or thereabouts since people began to repeat at dinner tables those bright sayings of hers which could not always have been repeated in print. She achieved, as she deserved, the title of wit; and here are her three volumes of poetry, now collected into one, to reassert her claim. Here is, I think, much the best light verse of our day which is highly personal in tone, which gains its effects through describing some one in a situation; and over and over...