While digging around for some Dorothy Parker clips today (see below), I was pleasantly surprised to find The Dorothy Parker Society, which offers an astounding variety of media devoted to the author.

Most surprisingly, the site features 35 recordings made by Ms. Parker of her writings, in addition to a handful of videos related to her life and work.

From the site description:

Dorothy Parker made two full-length LP recordings of her work in 1964. A record company, Verve, asked her to read her poems and stories for a record called The World of Dorothy Parker (Verve V-15029). Her other LP is from Spoken Arts called An Informal Hour with Dorothy Parker (Spoken Arts 726). It is the best of the two: Parker reads more than two dozen of her favorite poems. It is from the latter that most of these audio clips are taken.

At the time of the recording sessions, Mrs. Parker was approaching age 71. Her voice ravaged by years of Chesterfields and Johnny Walker, this offers a peek at the real Mrs. Parker. She died three years after recording her work.

Special thanks to Jon Bradley Snyder of Spokane, WA, and Catherine Chodack of New Jersey for loaning me recordings of these 2 LPs. Note: The NAACP owns the copyright to these recordings, so copying them for commercial use or performance is prohibited.

The recordings require Real Player. If you don’t already have it, you can download the free player here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 at 7:24 pm and is filed under *William's Posts, Site of the Day, Writers' Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.