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Written by Ogden Nash, Dorothy Parker and Phyllis McGinley - Unabridged Selections - Fiction - 1 COMPACT DISC - 54 minutes

Publisher, Random House Audio (March 2003)

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Made from rare archival recordings - this audio, part of The Voice of the Poet series, features celebrated poets reading their own works. Includes never-before released recordings. The compact disc is accompanied by a 64-page book containing the text of the poems and a commentary by series editor J.D. McClatchy.

American Wits from Mark Twain to James Thurber to David Sedans have offered a trenchant commentary on the fortunes and foibles of American society. And from colonial days, some of our best poets have joined in. From eighteenth-century satires to twenty-first-century epigrams, gimlet eyes and sharp tongues have been at work dissecting the Great institutions (like government and marriage) and Timeless Emotions (like love and loyalty) with hilarious consequences. Three of this country's most celebrated wits are gathered together here for the first time. Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) was famous as a screenwriter, story writer, columnist, and as scourge and queen of the Algonquin Round Table. But as a poet she was at her most trenchant. "Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses" may be her best-known couplet, but her poems everywhere gleam with funny-sad asides. Ogden Nash (1902-1971) was one of the most popular and beloved poets of his time. His preposterous rhymes created a style all his own, and his affectionate vignettes of domestic routines and popular culture are both endearing and enduring. Phyllis McGinley (1905-1978) was the first writer to win a Pulitzer Prize for a collection of light verse. Her elegant, beguiling poems skewer suburban life and social customs, and offer as well a rare woman's self-portrait: exasperated, affectionate, paradoxical.