A Truly Fresh Hell, Courtesy of Dorothy Parker

While Dorothy Parker’s life and work have been thoroughly examined, there lingered a missing piece of the puzzle, “a period, like a gap year, between the end of her childhood and the beginnings of her career as a poet, wisecracker and author of joyfully spiky social commentary,” said The Times of London. No longer. Parker, née Rothschild, grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan but moved in some surprising circles in Connecticut a century ago, a literary researcher has discovered. “It’s just astonishing that [she] would be in the society pages of the Hartford Courant, again and again,” said Stuart Y. Silverstein. “Jews were non-persons. There were a lot of Jews in Hartford but they weren’t part of [high] society.”

The revelation that Parker was “swanning about” with her friend Frances Billings—“the 1910s equivalent of an ‘It girl,’” as The Times put it—has even caught the experts by surprise. “Most writers, you know everything about their life,” the president of the Dorothy Parker Society, Kevin Fitzpatrick, told the newspaper. “With Dorothy Parker there are these big gaps. She never graduated high school, much less college. Next thing you know, she’s working for [the publisher] Condé Nast.”