Wonder Women: Dorothy Parker

The original queen of memes, Dorothy Parker, was a writer and poet best known for her acerbic wit and quick quips. Such as:

"To me, the most beautiful word in the English language is cellar-door. Isn’t it wonderful? The ones I like, though, are 'cheque' and 'enclosed'."

"Tell him I was too f*cking busy - or vice versa."

While quotes like these would be right at home in a present day instagram feed, Parker was dishing out zingers since the 1920s. She started as a staff writer at Vogue, later moving on to Vanity Fair and becoming one of the first editors of The New Yorker. She wrote numerous short stories, many volumes of poetry, contributing to most major magazines of her time as well as penning 2 Oscar-nominated screenplays.

Over lunch at a historic Manhattan hotel, The Algonquin, Parker and her pals Robert Benchley and Robert E. Sherwood, began a daily meet up of the early century literati. Over the span of ten years, the dozen or so writers, journalists and actors would spar in sarcasm, exchange wise cracks and play word games. Known as 'The Algoquin Round Table', this clever crowd would come to inspire the likes of legendary authors, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Even in her death she found humor and did it her way. Her epitaph reads "Excuse my dust" and her estate was bequeathed to none other than Martin Luther King Jr.