The small literary set that centered on New York in the 1920s and 30s and that hailed writer Dorothy Parker as one of its leading lights was made up largely of second- and third-raters. Mrs. Parker perceived this in her middle years and passed judgment on her old colleagues with the acerbity of one who has been overpraised by people unfit to offer either praise or blame. She was one of their leading lights: to that, she might have said, it would have sufficed to be a glowworm. She pointed out that the major American writers of the period had not been members of any set or coterie. (10) Dorothy Parker's idol, her contemporary Edna St. Vincent Millay, is infrequently read, but Parker is still the subject of fascination. Her perspective and expression have somehow resonated through an influential slice of the literary public for more than seventy years and continue to do so in the present. Perhaps it is the iconoclasm or the calculated irreverence, or perhaps the gaunt and distinctly contemporary candor; but there is something there, particularly in her verses, that draws an audience far beyond what the polite but dismissive reviewers of her time could have dreamed.