Tin Pan Alley’s hall of fame is a boy’s club: Berlin, Porter, Gershwin, Rodgers, Hart, Hammerstein, Arlen, Mercer, Kern, et al. Leading the line in the anteroom, however, is the finest female lyricist of American popular song, Dorothy Fields. Like other wordsmiths, her name is as little known as her lyrics are indelible. Think “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” “I Won’t Dance,” “I’m in the Mood for Love,” “You Couldn’t Be Cuter.” Think Bobby Short and “My Personal Property.” Think “Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off,” which Barack Obama quoted in his inauguration speech and which Charlotte Greenspan has borrowed for her bizarrely inept gesture at a biography.

Dorothy Fields (1905–74) was a showbiz pro, to the boards born. Her father was Lew Fields, of Weber and Fields, the celebrated performers and theatrical entrepreneurs. (The most repeated anecdote about Dorothy has her father objecting to her work on shows for the Cotton Club: “Ladies don’t write lyrics!” To which she responded, “I’m no lady, I’m your daughter.”) Her Broadway career stretched from Blackbirds of 1928 to Sweet Charity (1966); when she didn’t provide the lyrics, she wrote the libretto, most famously for Annie Get Your Gun. During the great age of the Hollywood musical in the 1930s, Fields was a steady worker, principally with Jerome Kern. (Their initial collaboration was “Lovely to Look At.” Fields tended to set the bar high from the outset: her first hit with her first collaborator,