Historically famous critics

Dorothy Parker

1893-1967 · American · 20th century

Sharp-tongued poet and critic who skewered high society and gender pretensions

As a founding wit of the Algonquin Round Table and an early critic at The New Yorker, Parker made brevity and irony into weapons against the pretensions of American cultural life. Her verse, often dismissed as light, quietly pulled apart the fabric of society, exposing power dynamics, especially those involving gender, and the vanities of the fashionable set. She earns a place among the great satirists because she proved a compact, funny couplet could carry as much social criticism as an essay.