A small woman only five feet tall with piercingly beautiful dark eyes she was much pursued, much admired, and much lover-ed, if that is the word. She was like many small town people who come to the Big City, a fiercely loyal New Yorker who suffered in the years she and Campbell were on the Coast writing mediocre screenplays for Hollywood.At one point she was one of the most famous writers in America, and there is no denying her very tough and quick wit, her ability to condense in a line or two the definition of a situation, a mood. Parker became famous for her Algonquin Round Table wit,for her witty and often acidly pessimistic verses, for her short stories, for her book- reviews in the "New Yorker" in which she displayed a special excellence at demolishing the pretentions of others. Parker was married or rather connected with for twenty- nine years with her second husband Allan Campbell who was also like her half- Scottish and half- Jewish. Later in life however she became active in anti- Nazi causes. She had no Jewish education and apparently no real knowledge of much Jewish. Emotional warmth real love was not part of her childhood. Parker was not liked by her step-mother and her father too farmed her out most of the time.She was given a strict Catholic education which she deplored and rebelled against. She was the daughter of a wealthy Jewish industrialist and a non- Jewish mother of Scottish background who passed away before Parker ever came to know her. Keats does a very good job of explaining where Parker (nee Rothschild) came from, and why she hungered for dialogue with others yet was always quite alone. Somewhere in the middle I began to feel that I was just giving too much time to a personality which certainly was worthy of some interest, but perhaps not that much. In this book it is possible to learn much more about Dorothy Parker than most people I believe will ever want to know.