The defining wisecracker of the 1920s spent 17 years after her death as unclaimed ashes in a lawyer's filing cabinet. This episode looks past the gin-soaked caricature to the real Dorothy Parker: a girl who lost her mother days before her fifth birthday and her stepmother at nine, who got expelled from Catholic school for treating doctrine as a punchline, and whose marriage to a stockbroker collapsed when he returned from the First World War traumatized and addicted.

We follow her from Vogue and Vanity Fair, where brutally honest theater reviews got her fired and Robert Benchley resigned in solidarity, to the Algonquin Round Table and the syndicated quips that made her the patron saint of the modern urban woman. We look at the New Yorker fiction that captured women waiting by the telephone, the O. Henry Award, the suicide verses that were n ...