If one were inquisitive enough to seek out various writerly types and query each about literary heroes, no doubt names like William Faulkner, Hank Charles Bukowski and that guy who wrote about bull fights would crop up pretty frequently. The thing is, with those last two fellows perhaps more than the first, is that not only were they each one trick ponies to a certain extent, their writing wasn’t too entertaining.

All of those gents, though, might be thought of as overtly masculine writers, though. And for that alone, each should be commended. With the likes of Tom Robbins and his cohort traipsing about on the outer lying edges of acceptable, mainstream lit, it serves everyone who takes an interest in the written word to figure out why there aren’t more women writers making huge gains in publishing – or anywhere.

Part of that, for me at least, is that a great portion of women writers, don’t throw their back into the craft, frequently falling into some sub-category of literature pulsating with emotive stories that should find a warm place to nestle in housewives’ hearts.

Dorothy Parker didn’t write flowery nonsense even when she pretty frequently discussed the human condition in prose. Her short stories were unquestionably given over to the examination of women under stress as a result of some man on the road, at war or otherwise occupied. She was, though, a poet of the highest order. And she wrote like a man.

There’s certainly someone out there willing to take umbrage with how Parker and those aforementioned scribes have been characterized here. But really, Old Man and the Sea is one of the most atrocious scourges to ever grace a high school reading list. And Parker’s criticism, mainly concentrating on theater and literature possess the acerbic tendencies one might associate with better known and more widely read folks like H. L. Mencken.

All of that aside, Parker was able to become one of the earliest and most widely read female critics of the twentieth century. I’d like to figure here for an all time heavy, but hacks like Virginia Woolf – her middle period novels were boss – seem fit for that mantle.

Either way, with the success that Parker achieved, although, never reaching that heights she deserved, seems like she might have been a bummer. Her stories, as previously noted and collected in The Dorothy Parker Reader, reveal sallow characters dealing with insecurities that everyone on the face of the earth encounters, they just don’t talk about. And that quality can easily figured as absent in most of those other writers – although Buk is well aware of the fact that he’s a dirty old man.

Making it through that compendium of Parker’s, though, reveals a range that most of here peers – Algonquin or otherwise – just couldn’t match. At times her subject material seems repetitive, it is. But Parker was that kind of uncanny talent who was able to rely messages, though similar, in language more thrilling, forceful and sure than anyone writing in the twentieth century. So, take issue with my characterization of women writers, Bukowski or whoever, but go read some Dorothy Parker.