In the following essay, Kinney covers Parker's background and influences as a writer, before examining her autobiographical character in "Big Blonde," Hazel Morse.

Dorothy Parker first attracted attention as a flippant and bittersweet poet and irreverent and acerbic satirist whose aim at the shallow and superficial social customs and social climbers often turned on a bon mot, a turn of phrase or perspective or a pun that was both striking and memorable. Closer attention to her work, however, shows a talented and dedicated artist whose persistent concern with spare, economical, pure language - even when cliched and colloquial, which she often used for effect - drew both on her classical education at Dana's School in Morristown, New Jersey, a private secondary school where she took several years of Latin, and her less formal teachers, especially Ernest Hemingway. Like him, she learned to foreshorten time and place in...