(It hardly helped that much of her verse flirted so drolly with the idea of doing away with herself.) In her final years, living alone with her dog in a hotel room on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, the most common response to anything she managed to write was surprise that she was still alive. Unfortunately, her work so embodied the era’s giddy mix of cynicism and sentimentality that once the Depression stilled the champagne corks and the clouds of war began gathering over Europe, Parker seemed dated, and was later presumed dead.
And, of course, it was during those years that she became part of that ultimate in-crowd, the informal literary luncheon club that sprang up at the Algonquin hotel and became known as the Round Table. At the same time, she was contributing short stories to The New Yorker, whose tone she helped shape from its launch in 1925. She published some 300 poems and free verses in various magazines, and in 1926, her first volume of poetry became a bestseller and garnered positive reviews, despite being dismissed as ‘flapper verse’ by The New York Times. The 1920s were to be Parker’s decade, however.
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