The Algonquin Round Table

I went there in my twenties. Had to see the place where the elite writers gathered and drank so awfully together. I was drinking awfully in those days too. It was smaller than I expected, darker, dimmer.

I was the only one there. Lonely, dark, and no one home.

Do any of you know about the Roundtable?

“The group first gathered in the Algonquin's Pergola Room (later called the Oak Room) at a long rectangular table. As they increased in number, Algonquin manager Frank Case moved them to the Rose Room and a round table.[2] Initially the group called itself "The Board" and the luncheons "Board meetings". After being assigned a waiter named Luigi, the group re-christened itself "Luigi Board". Finally they became "The Vicious Circle" although "The Round Table" gained wide currency after a caricature by cartoonist Edmund Duffy of the Brooklyn Eagleportrayed the group sitting at a round table and wearing armor.[3]...

“In addition to the daily luncheons, members of the Round Table worked and associated with each other almost constantly. The group was devoted to games, including cribbage and poker. The group had its own poker club, the Thanatopsis Literary and Inside Straight Club, which met at the hotel on Saturday nights. Regulars at the game included Kaufman, Adams, Broun, Ross and Woollcott, with non-Round Tablers Herbert Bayard Swope, silk merchant Paul Hyde Bonner, baking heir Raoul Fleischmann, actor Harpo Marx, and writer Ring Lardner sometimes sitting in.[9] The group also played charades (which they called simply "The Game") and the "I can give you a sentence" game, which spawned Dorothy Parker's memorable sentence using the word horticulture: "You can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think."[10]

“Members often visited Neshobe Island, a private island co-owned by several "Algonks"—but governed by Woollcott as a "benevolent tyrant", as his biographer Samuel Hopkins Adamscharitably put it[11]—located on several acres in the middle of Lake Bomoseen in Vermont.[12] There they would engage in their usual array of games including Wink murder, which they called simply "Murder", plus croquet.

“A number of Round Tablers were inveterate practical jokers, constantly pulling pranks on one another. As time went on the jokes became ever more elaborate. Harold Ross and Jane Grant once spent weeks playing a particularly memorable joke on Woollcott involving a prized portrait of himself. They had several copies made, each slightly more askew than the last, and would periodically secretly swap them out and then later comment to Woollcott "What on earth is wrong with your portrait?" until Woollcott was beside himself. Eventually they returned the original portrait.[13]”

I was there for Robert Benchley, James Thurber, Ring Lardner, and Dorothy Parker. The rest I didn’t really care about. I kind of liked The New Yorker Magazine. I had a sorrowful drink or two and got on the bus to New Jersey, where I belonged.