SOURCE: Walker, Nancy A. “The Remarkably Constant Reader: Dorothy Parker as Book Reviewer.” Studies in American Humor 3, no. 4 (1997): 1-14.

In the following essay, Walker asserts that “the medium of the book review allowed for an expression of personal tastes that can provide insight into a woman of integrity and high standards.”

In her review of the Journal of Katherine Mansfield in 1927, Dorothy Parker made a statement that could equally well apply to herself: “Writing was the precious thing in life to her, but she was never truly pleased with anything she had written.”¹ Much later, in 1962, in her last book review for Esquire, Parker wrote of Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle in a similarly revealing way, “this novel brings back all my faith in terror and death. I can say no higher of it and her” (575). Of all the forms in which Parker wrote...