Marion Meade Dorothy Parker Biographer Dies at 88

With her 1988 memoir, Marion Meade revived interest in Dorothy Parker, the famous creator and harsh mind of the Algonquin Round Table.

Marion Meade died on December 29 at her Manhattan home. She was 88.

Ashley Sprague, a grandkid, affirmed her downfall. She asserted that Ms. Meade had as of late had Coronavirus yet that the specific reason was obscure. Ms. Meade’s “Dorothy Parker: What New Damnation Is This?” itemized the lively if troublesome existence of a huge figure on the scholarly scene of the 1920s and ’30s.

As well as begetting expressions like “You can lead a cultivation yet you can’t make her think” and “Men only from time to time make elapses at young ladies who wear glasses,” Mrs. Parker joined Vanity Fair magazine as its theatrics pundit at 24 years old. She was likewise an establishing individual from the round table at the Algonquin Inn in Midtown Manhattan.

She, creator Robert Benchley, pundit Alexander Woollcott, and others took part in the clever discourse. She reveled in liquor, struggled wretchedness, and got hitched two times (and separated once) to writer Alan Campbell after a bombed union with Edwin Parker II. She made two self destruction endeavors.

As per Ms. Meade, Mrs. Parker “panicked and gulped a container of shoe clean” in 1930 after she was unable to finish a clever she had vowed to her supervisor at Viking, sending her to the emergency clinic. Mrs. Parker gave her commemoration, “Excuse my residue,” prior to dying in 1967.

At the point when Ms. Meade chose to zero in on an alternate figure, she had recently distributed a history of Eleanor of Aquitaine, who reigned as the sovereign of Britain and France in the twelfth hundred years. She at first focused on the writer Edna St. Vincent Millay, however she immediately found that an alternate creator was making a history out of the lady.

Marion Meade wrote biographies of Buster Keaton, Woody Allen and Eleanor of Aquitaine. But she was best known for writing about the celebrated author and wit Dorothy Parker. Marion Meade has died at 88.

— NYT Obituaries (@NYTObits) January 24, 2023

She moved her regard for Mrs. Parker — whom she called “one of the most clever ladies of the twentieth hundred years, whose mind and better than average never neglect to engage me,” in a paper numerous years after the fact for Contemporary Creators.

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“Every now and then perusers will share with me, ‘Gracious, she had such a miserable life,'” she added. Be that as it may, she said, she conflicted: While liquor abuse and gloom wrecked her on occasion, she composed, they “didn’t keep her from finding true success, the multitalented creator of refrain, stories, plays, film contents, and analysis.”

Surveys of the book were blended. In The Pittsburgh Press, Roy McHugh considered it an “outstandingly clear memoir” that “makes sense of more than is conceivable and doesn’t pardon anything.” However in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani expressed, “Parker’s negative mind, obviously, can’t have made it simple for companions or biographers to enter her guarded defensive layer, yet rather than endeavoring to find some peace with her close to home life, Ms. Meade basically agrees to expressions, ascribing her concerns to uncertainty or self-hatred.”

The book raised Mrs. Parker’s ubiquity enough, as per Kevin Fitzpatrick, leader of the Dorothy Parker Society, that Penguin Works of art chose to reissue assortments of her brief tales and verse during the 1990s. What’s more, he said that Ms. Meade thought the screenplay for the 1994 Alan Rudolph film “Mrs. Parker and the Endless loop,” which was composed by Mr. Rudolph and Randy Sue Coburn and featured Jennifer Jason Leigh in the title character, was to some degree in light of her life.

“She conversed with a legal counselor, yet she didn’t sue,” Mr. Fitzpatrick said in a telephone interview. “It was a depressed spot for her.”

On January 7, 1934, Marion Lolita Sidhu was born in Pittsburgh. Her dad, Indian settler Surain Sidhu, was a physicist who regulated the College of Pittsburgh’s X-beam office and later took part in highly confidential examination at the Argonne Public Research center. Mary (Homoney) Sidhu, her mom, was a housewife.

At the point when Marion was youthful, she had the desire to turn into an essayist. She got a four year certification in reporting from Northwestern College in 1955. S

ometime thereafter, when she showed up in Manhattan to sign up for Columbia College’s Doctoral level college of News-casting, she rushed to the Algonquin, sat on a couch in the entryway’s mixed drink bar, lit a cigarette, requested a Tom Collins, and took in the scene that Mrs. Parker probably seen regularly.

She endured a year meeting celebrities and truth checking for the partnered tattle feature writer Baron Wilson subsequent to procuring her graduate degree in 1956. Ms. Meade filled in as a specialist for magazines like Mccall’s, Cosmopolitan, and The Town Voice for the accompanying twenty years.

Marion Meade wrote biographies of Buster Keaton, Woody Allen and Eleanor of Aquitaine. But she was best known for writing about the celebrated author and wit Dorothy Parker. Marion Meade has died at 88.

— New York Times Books (@nytimesbooks) January 24, 2023

She likewise joined the New York Revolutionary Women’s activists, a gathering that in 1970 involved the workplaces of Ladies’ Home Diary for 11 hours in return for a commitment — satisfied — to distribute a unique “ladies’ freedom” supplement in an ensuing issue. She likewise functioned as a proofreader for Flying Week for quite a while.

Her presentation book, “Bitching,” delivered in 1973, depended on discussions with ladies about what it resembled to be a lady and how they had an outlook on guys. She then, at that point, distributed a memoir of Victoria Woodhull, a ladies’ testimonial development pioneer, in 1976.

Ms. Meade’s “Eleanor of Aquitaine” (1977) was commended by the pundit Robert Kirsch of The Los Angeles Times for her “practically uncanny compassion for her subject,” which he said caused it to show up as though “she can see the world through Eleanor’s eyes.”

The Parker book required seven years to study and compose. She then, at that point, distributed histories of Woody Allen in 2000 and the quiet film comic Buster Keaton in 1995. With “Weaved Hair and Home brew: Journalists Going crazy in the Twenties,” a representation of Mrs working together. Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Edna Ferber, she got back to Dorothy Parker in 2004.

Dorothy Parker biographer Marion Meade has died of #COVID19 entanglements, matured 88.
— Alexandra Halaby🏳️‍⚧️ (@iskandrah) January 20, 2023

Notwithstanding Ms. Sprague, she is made due by one incredible granddaughter, Alison Linkhorn, her little girl, and another granddaughter, Katharine Sprague. Her associations with Milton Viorst, an essayist who spent away last month, Forbes Linkhorn, and Charles Meade finished in separate.

Ms. Meade returned to her most notable subject a couple of times. The prologue to another release of “The Convenient Dorothy Parker” was altered and composed by her (2006). In an Encourage book named “The Last Long periods of Dorothy Parker” distributed in 2014, she developed a 2006 Bookforum paper about Mrs. Parker.

She related the tale of how Mrs. Parker’s urn turned out to be concealed in Manhattan in a file organizer possessed via prepared lawmaker Paul O’Dwyer, who filled in as the legitimate direction for creator Lillian Hellman, the scholarly agent of the Parker domain. (After a winding outing, the urn was covered at the Bronx’s Woodlawn Graveyard in 2020.)

Ms. Meade called Mr. O’Dwyer in 1987 to tell him she was gone to the Westchester burial ground where she trusted the urn to be entombed. Ms. Meade needed to offer her appreciation now that Ms. Hellman was expired and her history of Mrs. Parker was done.

“Goodness, she’s not there,” Mr. O’Dwyer told her.

“Obviously she is,” Ms. Meade said.

“No, no,” Mr. O’Dwyer said, “I’m checking her out.”