The First Word on the Algonquin Round Table

Soon after twenty or thirty of the cleverest youngish things from New York's literary, entertainment, and journalism industries started eating lunch together at a circular table in a prominent midtown Manhattan hotel, a popular newspaper cartoonist invoked Arthurian legend and depicted them as the modern-day knights of an Algonquin Round Table. The name stuck. They were self-promoters whose table-talk tended toward calculatedly sparkling malice, and much of the rest of New York waited to hear the latest from Dorothy Parker and her group. The lunches started in June 1919 with a parody of a welcome-home party for the New York Times drama critic Alexander Woollcott (1887-1943), who had just returned from war service in France. More than thirty of Woollcott's 'friends' attended, mainly to needle him, but he lapped up the attention and launched into a series of war stories that all seemed to begin 'When I was in the theatre of war...' This caused one listener to reply: 'Aleck, if you ever were in the theatre of war, it was in the last-row seat nearest the exit'.

The lunches became a daily routine. Between five and fifteen 'Algonks' were apt to appear on any given day - others had to be invited - and of these, perhaps eight or ten are fixed in the public memory as the nucleus of what its members called the Vicious Circle. The witty aphorisms of this group are quite widely known, but they have also proved to be a valuable source of antedatings for the OED.

Woollcott himself was one of the circle. He left the Times a few years later, and after short stints at other newspapers he succumbed to his theatrical instincts and became a popular radio personality and, ultimately, a recognizable 'type', the model for the obnoxious lead character of the hit 1939 comedy The Man Who Came to Dinner. He is also the source of the first known uses of to break (verb, to disclose news: Woollcott's use 1929/previous first known use 1934), horsetrader (figurative: 1929/1932), and to cruise (verb, taxi trolling: 1929/1930).

Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) was fired by Vanity Fair in early 1920, then kept 'body and soul apart' as a freelance poet and short- story writer, as an acerbic New Yorker book and theatre reviewer, and later as a Hollywood screenwriter. Her hobbies were whisky, smokes, the wrong men, and attempted suicide. Her contributions to the OED include bobbed (hairstyle: 1915/1918), queer (homosexual: 1929/1932), bundle of nerves (1915/1940), it's a small world (1915/1959), and what the hell (colloquial: 1923/1968).

Franklin P. Adams (1881-1960), a.k.a. 'F.P.A.', edited the erudite Conning Tower column in the New York Tribune, The (New York) World, and the New York Herald Tribune between 1914 and 1937. 'The Comma Hunter of Park Row' stoutly defended the purity of the language while prolifically disseminating neologisms: between January 1914, when he joined the Tribune, and October 1917, when he left for France (he served with Woollcott on the U.S. Army newspaper The Stars and Stripes), Adams's writings supply several dozen antedatings, including columnist (1914/1920), edge (an advantage: 1914/1958), leak (information breach: 1917/1950), one-way-street (figurative: 1917/1956), second-guess (1915/1946), to watch one's step (1917/1934), to whistle in the dark (1915/1939), and to lose one's shirt (1916/1935) - and other contributors to the column provide nearly as many.

George S. Kaufman (1889-1961) was a New York Times drama critic when not moonlighting as a playwright who collaborated on a string of successful plays. His first partner was another Algonk, Marc Connelly (1890-1980), a reporter with the New York Morning Telegram; their first effort was the hit comedy Dulcy, which was based on a recurring character in The Conning Tower.

Together, Kaufman and Connelly provide the first known uses of media (mass communications vehicles: 1921/1923), make it snappy (1922/1926), widget (1924/1931), and sex (re carnality: 1922/1929). Alone, Kaufman contributes to think on one's feet (1925/1935), whodunit (1925/1930), and give one's eye-teeth (1925/1930). Kaufman also collaborated on the aforementioned The Man Who Came to Dinner, and was co-recipient of two Pulitzer Prizes for drama. Connelly's contributions include a kick in the pants (1929/1933), carbon copy (figurative: 1926/1944), and hot damn (1929/1936); he also won a drama Pulitzer.

Robert Benchley (1889-1945) was managing editor of Vanity Fair until he quit to protest Parker's dismissal. He found work as a drama critic, first at Life, a humour magazine, then at The New Yorker. Meanwhile, he produced dozens of extraordinarily funny essays. During the thirties he moved to Hollywood, where he was a popular comic actor. His contributions include jittery (1929/ 1931), dirty look (1921/1928), in conference (1919/1926), and blueprint (figurative: 1922/1926).

Robert Sherwood (1896-1955) was also fired by Vanity Fair, and also caught on at Life, where he was a film reviewer and then managing editor. He was later a critically acclaimed playwright (three drama Pulitzers, including The Petrified Forest), screenwriter (the Academy Award-winning The Best Years of Our Lives ), and historian (another Pulitzer). His contributions include double standard (1922/1951), to knock for a loop (1922/1936), to have one's name in lights (1922/1929), lost in the shuffle (1922/1930), to get one's teeth into (figurative: 1922/1935), and sizzling (figurative, as in romance: 1922/1923).

Harold Ross (1892-1951) was an itinerant reporter from a Colorado mining town who met Adams and Woollcott at The Stars and Stripes. After the armistice he moved to New York to pursue his dream of editing a sophisticated urban weekly magazine. It was a bizarre notion, as Ross's defining quality was a gauche, if endearing, provincialism. As he told Benchley: 'Now, Bob, I don't want you to think I'm not incoherent'. Yet in 1925, Ross actually launched his magazine. He called it The New Yorker. His contributions include supper club (1924/1927) and to back-stop (verb, provide support: 1945/1956).

Heywood Broun (1888-1939) was a respected newspaperman whose popular column appeared next to Adams's in the Tribune and The World. Broun was a fluid writer but muddled thinker, whose life was a sentimental jumble of theoretical socialism and practical hedonism. His contributions include soak-the-rich (1934/1935), red-baiting (1928/1934), smear (defamation attempt: 1939/1943), and fellow-travelling (1939/1941).

The novelist Edna Ferber (1887-1968) and the satirist Donald Ogden Stewart (1894-1980) were eventually invited to the Table, but by the end of the twenties most of the Algonquins had moved on to other things. In 1932, after some months away, Ferber found a family from Iowa eating lunch at the Table. She admitted to some shock but accepted it philosophically: it was, as one 'Thersites' had put it in The Conning Tower some years before, nothing to lose sleep over (1916/1942).