 |
 |
INTERVIEWER
What was it about the twenties that inspired people like yourself and Broun?
PARKER
Gertrude Stein did us the most harm when she said, “You’re all a lost generation.” That got around to certain people and we all said, “Whee! We’re lost.” Perhaps it suddenly brought to us the sense of change. Or irresponsibility. But don’t forget that, though the people in the twenties seemed like flops, they weren’t. Fitzgerald, the rest of them, reckless as they were, drinkers as they were, they worked damn hard and all the time.
INTERVIEWER
Did the “lost generation” attitude you speak of have a detrimental effect on your own work?
PARKER
Silly of me to blame it on dates, but so it happened to be. Dammit, it was the twenties and we had to be smarty—I wanted to be cute. That’s the terrible thing. I should have had more sense.
Find the complete Dorothy Parker interview in The Paris Review
Interviews, I available now from Picador. |
 Download a PDF of the full interview |
|
|
|
|
| Authors Mentioned |
| E. M. Forster, Norman Mailer, S. J. Perelman, Gertrude Stein, William Styron, James Thurber, P. G. Wodehouse, Heywood Broun, Paddy Chayefsky, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gustave Flaubert, Oveta Culp Hobby, George S. Kaufman, Clare Boothe Luce, W. Somerset Maugham, Carson McCullers, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Charles Reade, Edith Sitwell, Thorne Smith, Bram Stoker, William Makepeace Thackeray, Arnauld d'Usseau |
|
|
|
