I started with research: William Faulkner September 25, 1897-July 6, 1963, born in New Albany, Mississippi, married Estelle Oldham in Oxford, Mississippi
F. Scott Fitzgerald--Born 9/23/1896 died December 21, 1940--a second heart attack. Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, went to Princeton. Married Zelda Sayre. The Great Gatsby. The lost generation--characterized as a lush in Hemingway's A Movable Feast. Maybe I could have Hemingway and Fitzgerald get into a fist-fight. Need to look up info on Hemingway.
Dorothy Parker (August 22, 1893-June 7, 1967), author, poet, critic, screenwriter. Also known as Dot or Dottie.
I found a bunch of her witticisms and might use some of them:
"Wit has truth in it...wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words."
"The two most beautiful words in the English language are 'check enclosed.'"
"As for helping me in the outside world, the Convent taught me only if you spit on a pencil eraser, it will erase ink."
"Maybe it is only I, but conditions are such these days that if you studiously correct grammar, people suspect you of homosexual tendencies."
"I was the toast of two continents: Greenland and Australia."
"Sorrow is tranquility remembered in emotion."
"It's not the tragedies that kill us. It' s the messes."
"He [Robert Benchley] and I had an office, so tiny that an inch smaller and it would have been adultery."
"Men seldom make passes/ At girls who wear glasses."
"She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B."
"As one delves deeper and deeper into Etiquette, disquieting thoughts come. That old Is-It-Worth-It blues starts up again softly, perhaps, but plainly. Those who have mastered etiquette, who are entirely, impeccably right, would seem to arrive at a point of exquisite dullness. The letters and the conversations of the correct, as quoted by Mrs. Post, seem scarcely worth the striving for. The rules for finding topics of conversation fall damply on the spirit."
"As artists they're rot, but as providers they're oil wells; they gush. Norris said she never wrote a story unless it was fun to do. I understand Ferber whistles at her typewriter. And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word."
"If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you."
About modern-dance innovator, Isadora Duncan: "Here was a great woman; a magnificent, generous, gallant, reckless, fated fool of a woman. There was never a place for her in the ranks of the terrible, slow army of the cautious. She ran ahead, where there were no paths."
"I went to a literary gathering once....The place was filled with people who looked as if they had been scraped up out of drains. The ladies ran to draped plush dresses--for Art; to wreaths of silken flowerets in the hair--for Femininity; and ,somewhere between the two adornments, to chain-drive pince-nez--for Astigmatism. The gentlemen were small and somewhat in need of dusting."
"I don' t want to review books any more. It cuts in too much on my reading."
"If this world were anything near what it should be there would be no more need of a Book Week than there would of a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children."
"I have heard it said that it took Messrs. Shipman and Hymer [the playwrights] just three-and-a-half days to write their drama. I should like to know what they were doing during the three days."
