Parker's critical reception has undergone several vicissitudes since she gained her first fame in the 1920s. In her heyday, Parker was celebrated and well known. As her life went on, she faded from public view, dying in virtual anonymity in 1967. She was as famous for her wit and her life as for her work itself. W. Somerset Maugham, writing in the book Dorothy Parker in 1944, said, "She seems to carry a hammer in her handbag to hit the appropriate nail on the head. She has a rare quickness of mind." That quickness, in poetry, in prose, and in the anecdotes of her life among the Algonquin Round Table, propelled her to notoriety. A reviewer in the New York Times Book Review in 1927, found Parker's poetry to be representative of her generation, saying "it is flapper verse. And as such it is wholesome, engaging, uncorseted and not...