In February 2013, the English Department of our EOI Santiago organized a study trip to New York. One of the activities we offered was a literary tour, which included the Algonquin Hotel, on 44th Street, at the heart of New York's literary and theatrical life. Its "Round Table" was specially renowned in the 20es. Dorothy Parker, born on this day, and considered "the most New Yorker writer", worked at Vanity Fair during the First World War alongside Robert E. Sherwood, and Robert Benchley during the First World War. They began taking lunch together in the dining room at the Algonquin Hotel.
As this article duly points out, According to Brian Gallagher, the author of Anything Goes: The Jazz Age of Neysa McMein and her Extravagant Circle of Friends (1987) "the Algonquin group was at the center of a social revolution". Gallagher quotes Alice Duer Miller, as saying the First World War was partly responsible for the creation of the Algonquin Round Table: "Alice Duer Miller, the eldest member of the Round Table set, noted, the war broke up the old social crowds in New York and allowed new ones to form, and she threw her patrician lot in with a younger group of writers and wits. New kinds of elites were forming: often less rich and less grand than the older elites, but also more numerous and more varied. Over the next two decades the members of the Algonquin group would go far, usually under self-propulsion, on the group's reputation as an intellectual elite."
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| Both students and teachers were excited to visit the Algonquin |
A very short song
(1893-1967)
Once, when I was young and true,
Someone left me sad-
Broke my brittle heart in two;
And that is very bad.
Love is for unlucky folk,
Love is but a curse.
Once there was a heart I broke;
And that, I think, is worse.
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| Balconadas 2016 (Betanzos) |
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