Algonquin Round Table

Algonquin Round Table, informal group of American literary figures who met daily for lunch on weekdays at a large round table in the Algonquin Hotel in New York City during the 1920s and ’30s. The Algonquin Round Table began meeting in June 1919, and within a few years its participants included many of the best-known writers, journalists, and artists in New York City. Among them were:

• Dorothy Parker: poet, short-story writer, screenwriter, and critic
• Alexander Woollcott: author, critic, and actor 
• Heywood Broun: journalist
• Robert Benchley: humorist, actor, drama critic, and managing editor of Vanity Fair
• Robert Sherwood: playwright
• George S. Kaufman: playwright and journalist
• Franklin Pierce Adams: newspaper columnist, translator, poet, and radio personality
• Marc Connelly: playwright, journalist, teacher, actor, and director
• Harold W. Ross: founder and editor of The New Yorker
• Harpo Marx: comedian, film actor, and member of the Marx Brothers
• Russell Crouse: actor, director, and playwright (with Howard Lindsay)
• Edna Ferber: novelist and short-story writer

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Legend has it that the group’s first lunch was a welcome home gathering (and literary roast) for Woollcott, who had recently returned from service in the U.S. Army in World War I. That event was such a success that the group decided to meet again the next day. Despite its name, the group dined at square-shaped tables in the Pergola Room (now called the Oak Room) during its first year of meeting.

The Round Table became celebrated in the 1920s for its members’ lively, witty conversation and urbane sophistication. Much of that conversation came with a razor-sharp edge. In her autobiography, Edna Ferber wrote of the group:

Far from boosting one another they were actually merciless if they disapproved. I have never encountered a more hard-bitten crew. But if they liked what you had done they did say so, publicly and wholeheartedly. Their standards were high, their vocabulary fluent, fresh, astringent and very, very tough. Theirs was a tonic influence, one on the other, and all on the world of American letters.

Its members gradually went their separate ways, and the last meeting of the Round Table took place in 1943. The Algonquin Hotel was made a historic landmark by New York City in 1987, in part because of the Round Table’s cultural legacy. That same year saw the release of the film The Algonquin Round Table: The Ten Year Lunch, which won the Academy Award for best documentary in 1988. Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994) is a film by Alan Rudolph starring Jennifer Jason Leigh as Dorothy Parker; the movie presents the group through Parker’s singular point of view.