The Algonquin Wits: Dorothy Parker on Teaching Undergraduates

“Mrs. Parker taught for a time at Los Angeles State College, where she found the students very ‘narrow.’ When reading Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, for example, the students felt the book was too dirty. ‘But then Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize,’ Mrs. Parker recalled. ‘After that they behaved as if they had given it to him.’”

Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.