Kevin Fitzpatrick, president of the Dorothy Parker Society, said that the book elevated Mrs. Parker’s profile enough to persuade Penguin Classics to rerelease collections of her short stories and poems in the 1990s. And, he said, Ms. Meade believed the screenplay of “Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle” (1994), directed by Alan Rudolph, written by Mr. Rudolph and Randy Sue Coburn and starring Jennifer Jason Leigh in the title role, was based in part on her biography.
“She talked to a lawyer, but she did not sue,” Mr. Fitzpatrick said in a phone interview. “It was a low point for her.”
Marion Lolita Sidhu was born on Jan. 7, 1934, in Pittsburgh. Her father, Surain Sidhu, an Indian immigrant, was a physicist who directed the X-ray laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh and later worked on top secret research at the Argonne National Laboratory. Her mother, Mary (Homoney) Sidhu, was a homemaker.
Marion’s desire to be a writer started in childhood. She studied journalism at Northwestern University, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in 1955.
Arriving in Manhattan later that year to attend the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, she quickly headed to the Algonquin, sat on a settee in the lobby’s cocktail lounge, lit up a cigarette, ordered a Tom Collins and soaked in the view that must have been familiar to Mrs. Parker.
After receiving her master’s degree in 1956, she spent a year interviewing celebrities and checking facts for the syndicated gossip columnist Earl Wilson.
Over the next two decades, Ms. Meade freelanced for publications including McCall’s, Cosmopolitan and The Village Voice; and joined the New York Radical Feminists, a group that occupied the offices of Ladies’ Home Journal for 11 hours in 1970 and secured a promise, which was fulfilled, to put out a special “women’s liberation” supplement in a forthcoming issue. She was also a longtime editor at Aviation Week magazine.
