“Excuse my dust”: these are the words that Dorothy Parker suggested for her own epitaph. They made it onto the plaque that marks the spot where her ashes rest – somewhat incongruously – in Baltimore. But though they encapsulate the pitchy humour that made her the feared darling of literary New York in her prime, on the 50th anniversary of her death, it’s another of her suggested epitaphs that is most revealing: “If you can read this, you're standing too close”.

Like so many funny folk, the critic, poet and short story writer ‘Dottie’ Parker was a woman of gloomy depths, and she used her sharp tongue to keep people at a distance, even as she spun comedy from her misadventures. She was also fond of self-dramatisation. As her friend Wyatt Cooper put it in a 1968 Esquire profile tellingly titled Whatever You Think Dorothy Parker Was Like, She Wasn’t, she had an “affinity for distress”. Still, it seems fair to say that her childhood was far from happy.