A little known, rediscovered letter: an SOS from a woman trapped on
a Swiss mountaintop in a TB colony with no idea how to escape—that
woman being Dorothy Parker. “Kids, I have started one thousand
(1,000) letters to you, but they all through no will of mine got to
sounding so gloomy and I was afraid of boring the combined tripe out
of you, so I never sent them.” Thus starts a little-known and until
now unpublished letter by Dorothy Parker from a Swiss mountaintop.
Parker wrote the letter in September 1930 to Viking publishers Harold
Guinzburg and George Oppenheimer—she went to France to write a novel
for them and wound up in a TB colony in Switzerland. Parker refers to
the letter as a “novelette,” yet there is nothing fictional about
it. More accurately, the biting composition reads like a gossipy diary
entry, typed out on Parker’s beautiful new German typewriter. She
namedrops notable figures like Ernest Hemingway and Scott and Zelda
Fitzgerald while covering topics running from her various accidents
and health problems to her opinions on dogs, literary critics and God.
The writing is vintage Parker: uncensored, unedited, deliciously
malicious, and certainly one of the most entertaining of her
letters—or for that matter any letter—that you’ll ever read.
This edition features an introduction, notes, and annotations on
notable figures by Parker biographer Marion Meade.
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How Dorothy Parker Set Out to Write the Great American Novel and Ended Up in a TB Colony Atop an Alpine Peak (A Penguin Classics Special)
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780698153776
Publisert
2017
Utgiver
Penguin US
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter