Dorothy Parker was an American poet and writer of fiction, plays and screenplays based in New York; she was known for her caustic wisecracks, and eye for 20th-century urban foibles.

Also known as Dot or Dottie, Parker was born Dorothy Rothschild in 1893 to Jacob Henry Rothschild and his wife Eliza Annie (née Marston) (1851–1898) at 732 Ocean Avenue in Long Branch, New Jersey. Parker wrote in her essay "My Home Town" that her parents returned from their summer beach cottage there to their Manhattan apartment shortly after Labor Day (September 4) so that she could be called a true New Yorker.