Unknown author · Public domain

Dorothy Parker built a reputation on precision: caustic one-liners and sharp observation of Manhattan social life, delivered in magazine prose and as a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table. She moved into screenwriting in the early 1930s and earned two Academy Award nominations, before her involvement in left-wing politics got her placed on the Hollywood blacklist. She waved off her own reputation as a mere "wisecracker," but both her fiction and her wit have outlasted that dismissal — some of her poems have since been set to music.