November 29, 2016
The Algonquin Round Table: A Historical Guide
Kevin C. Fitzpatrick
“You might as well live” – I finished reading this book, a Who’s-Who
What’s-What Guide to the famous and infamous literary rat pack of the 1920s and
1930s, tucked in a cozy room at the Algonquin Hotel. I wasn’t checked into
suite 1005, where, I learned, Marc Connelly wrote the banquet scene from To the Ladies. Nor was I huddled in
suite 908, where Lerner and Lowe composed much of My Fair Lady. One hopes I wasn’t in the room where James Thurber
died, where, in the words of The New
Yorker, “He died sad and gassy and alone, in the Algonquin Hotel, after too
much coleslaw and beer.” Ouch. But that snakebite is what made the Round
Tablers – Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Franklin P. Adams, George S. Kaufman
and the others – the Vicious Circle.

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