The line travels as Dorothy Parker’s verdict on Los Angeles, but nothing pins it to her. Wikiquote files it under Misattributed ↗ and suggests it derives from a phrase of Aldous Huxley’s. We could not confirm that antecedent, and we found no documented first use of this wording by anyone — so no author is claimed here.
“Seventy-two suburbs in search of a city” widely misattributed to Dorothy Parker; no documented author. Via quotle.info · Verbatim: “72 suburbs in search of a city”
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Dorothy Parker. Use the credit shown above instead.
Can you use it?
? We couldn’t verify where this wording comes from, so there’s no rights status to give. Safe to present as an unverified or anonymous line — just don’t assert a specific author or source.
Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool
In context
Evoking the theme of creativity. Theme: "Seventy-two suburbs in search of a city". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Minimalist
Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Seventy-two suburbs in search of a city". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Provenance
The source
Usually credited to
Dorothy Parker
Wikiquote files it under
Misattributed
Earliest documented use
Not established
Antecedent proposed by Wikiquote
Aldous Huxley — unconfirmed
72 suburbs in search of a city
That is the wording as it stands in Wikiquote’s Misattributed section ↗. The spelled-out “Seventy-two” form is the one that circulates most widely online; neither has been traced to a dated first printing.
Wikiquote’s Dorothy Parker page ↗ lists “72 suburbs in search of a city” in its Misattributed section. That section opens with an editors’ warning that “a great many misquotations are attributed to Dorothy Parker” and asks readers to verify provenance before ascribing anything to her.
Wikiquote suggests the description is “based on” Aldous Huxley calling Los Angeles “nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis” in a 1925 book it names as Americana, adding that Huxley “was likely quoting someone else”. We could not confirm that citation: no Huxley book called Americana could be located, and his Wikiquote page ↗ records his travel book of the period as Jesting Pilate: The Diary of a Journey (1926). We report Wikiquote’s suggestion as Wikiquote’s, not as established fact.
We looked inside the Huxley book to settle it and could not. The Internet Archive’s scan of Jesting Pilate ↗ (London: Chatto & Windus) is lending-restricted, so its contents cannot be searched from here. An Internet Archive item search for “suburbs in search of a metropolis” also returned no match — but that index does not reach inside scanned books, so it settles nothing about what the book actually contains.
Quote Investigator, which has investigated several other quips pinned on Parker, has no article on this phrase — a site search returned no matches. So the strongest available finding remains Wikiquote’s: widely credited to Parker, not hers, origin open. Wikipedia’s biography of Parker ↗ does not mention the line either.
No copyright status is asserted, because the wording has not been tied to any identified publication or author. If a first printing is ever located, its date would decide the question; until then we claim nothing. This is not legal advice.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
Often misattributed
It is one of the most quoted insults ever aimed at Los Angeles, and it almost always arrives with Dorothy Parker’s name on it. That credit has no source behind it.
Wikiquote suggests the line is based on Huxley calling Los Angeles “nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis”, citing a 1925 book Americana. We could not confirm that a Huxley book of that title and year exists; his period travel book ↗ is Jesting Pilate (1926). Wikiquote itself adds that Huxley “was likely quoting someone else”.
✓The honest answer is that nobody knows who said it first. Parker is the name it carries, not the name behind it — see Wikiquote’s entry ↗.
Context
Why it mattered
The joke works by borrowing a shape everyone already knew: Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author had made “N somethings in search of a something” a ready-made template for describing anything that felt incomplete. Applied to Los Angeles it captured a real complaint of the 1920s and 1930s — that the city had arrived at metropolitan scale without ever growing a centre.
Because the template is so easy to refill, the number kept moving. Wikiquote records a nineteen-suburb version; the form that survived is seventy-two. A line that mutates freely is a line with no fixed author, which is roughly what the evidence shows here.
A line that mutates freely is a line with no fixed author.
Read the full story
We have deliberately left this page thinner than the claim usually is elsewhere. The common retelling names a specific Huxley book and year; we could not verify that book, so we do not repeat it as fact. Naming a source we have not seen would be the exact failure this site exists to correct — and a confident citation is precisely how an unsourced quip acquires a respectable-looking pedigree in the first place.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1893–1967 · American poet, critic and short-story writer
Dorothy Parker (born Dorothy Rothschild, 22 August 1893 — 7 June 1967) was an American poet, critic and short-story writer, and a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table. Her reputation for the devastating one-liner is exactly why orphaned wisecracks drift to her: a sharp, city-sized insult sounds like Parker, and that resemblance is doing all the work here. Wikiquote’s editors thought the problem serious enough to head her Misattributed section with a standing warning about it.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
The primary source (Chicago)
Wikiquote. “Dorothy Parker,” Misattributed section. Accessed 15 August 2026. Lists the line as misattributed; no originating publication is established.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Seventy-two suburbs in search of a city’?” Last verified 15 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/seventy-two-suburbs-in-search-of-a-city/