"The one advantage though of having to deal with such primitive little shits is that they don't ask stupid questions about the Algonquin." (Image by Bain News Service.)

From the always interesting Letters of Note comes this missive that Dorothy Parker wrote in the early 1960s when she was teaching at CalTech. The students were apparently not the best and the brightest, at least in Parker’s estimation. An excerpt:

“I am horrified to think what a pig I have been about writing, but it honestly is no reflection of lack of thought or love. I have been busy teaching a class at Cal Tech. The term just ended and I am celebrating my manumission by writing to you. The students there are a grievous lot, hopeless, unattractive, and not even young. I threw my hands up the second week when one of the brighter lights defended Peyton Place as a work of substance and value. The one advantage though of having to deal with such primitive little shits is that they don’t ask stupid questions about the Algonquin. They have apparently never heard of the hotel or me.”