Dorothy Parker’s FBI File Is Available to Public for First Time in a Decade

In the 1930s, the FBI began keeping a file on Dorothy Parker.
One of wittiest voices of the 20th century, the prolific critic, poet and screenwriter became active in the political scene after Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were convicted of first-degree murder on shaky evidence in the 1920s. Parker herself was arrested in 1927 at a rally for Sacco and Vanzetti just months before their execution, where she was slapped with a $5 fine for “loitering and sauntering.”
“This,” writes Michelle Dean, in her new book Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion, was Parker’s first taste of protest and it “gave her an appetite for more.”

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