Penguin Hopes to Waddle Away From Suit Unhurt

Dorothy Parker is perhaps best known for the short poem, "News Item" -- "Men seldom make passes /At girls who wear glasses." But the literary lioness and legendary wit compiled three collections of her poetry during her lifetime.

Still, she let nearly a third of her early works essentially vanish because, according to literary critics, she considered them inferior.

So it's ironic that these "lost" poems are in the limelight as the subject of a six-year lawsuit.

The case, which comes to trial later this month, pits Stuart Y. Silverstein, a Los Angeles attorney, against Penguin Group, a unit of Pearson(PSO Quote - Cramer on PSO - Stock Picks) and one of the world's top three publishers of consumer books on the basis of sales.

And fittingly, the story of the "lost" poems has enough twists and turns to compete with any of Penguin's top sellers.

As I have chronicled in The Wall Street Journal, Silverstein sued the publishing house for copyright infringement in 2001. He alleges the company stole his book, Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker and appropriated it for use in a Penguin book without giving him a dime, or any credit.

Parker earned her reputation as America's wittiest woman while a member of the Algonquin Round Table, a group of New York literati who met for lunch every day at the Algonquin Hotel in 1920s Manhattan.