Overwhelmed? You’re not alone. So was Dorothy Parker. The witty writer penned hundreds of poems and short stories, and was also a popular book critic for The New Yorker. She even tried her hand at screenwriting – and two of the scripts she co-wrote won Oscars. The wisecracking writer, critic, and satirist, was also one of the leading lights at the legendary Algonquin Table circle of writers, columnists, and hard-drinking journalists who gathered daily for lunch at the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan.
No wonder she couldn’t get everything done. Here’s a 1945 telegram she sent to her editor at Viking, Pascal Covici. And it’s for all of you readers, too, as you struggle to catch up with deadlines over the weekend.
Author: Cynthia Haven
Cynthia Haven has written for The Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, World Literature Today, and other publications. Her work has also appeared in Le Monde, La Repubblica, The Kenyon Review, Quarterly Conversation, The Georgia Review, Civilization, and others. She has been a Milena Jesenská Journalism Fellow with the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna. Peter Dale in Conversation with Cynthia Haven was published in London, 2005. Her Czestaw Mitosz: Conversations was published in 2006; Joseph Brodsky: Conversations in 2003; An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czestaw Mitosz was published in 2011 with Ohio University Press / Swallow Press. She is currently a visiting scholar at Stanford. Her biography René Girard, A Life will be published next year.
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