Throughout her life, Dorothy Parker was quick to sympathize with those who suffered or were indentured—those she could pity because of misfortune in politics, money race, or sex. She admired the servant class and those who, like her "Big Blonde," were defeated by conditions they could not understand or overcome. And she was as quick to attack the causes of their exploitation. From her early poetry of unrequited love to "Clothe the Naked" she attacks pretension and blindness in the middle and upper classes.

But it is equally clear, in studying her work, that she is also attracted to the status and possessions of those who are better off…. She combines the child's ambition and hope with an adult's sense of outrage and cynicism at shallowness and self-deception, at the uneven and unrequited distribution of favors in this world. She did not always understand that she held...