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I have a Myspace account with the name "Algonquin Roundtable" and used to have "Mata Hari" as my name ... I changed it every few months. Crazy.

The Algonquin Round Table was a celebrated group of New York City writers, critics, actors and wits. Gathering initially as part of a practical joke, members of "The Vicious Circle," as they dubbed themselves, gathered for lunch each day at the Algonquin Hotel from 1919 until roughly 1929. At these luncheons they engaged in wisecracks, wordplay and witticisms that, through the newspaper columns of Round Table members, were disseminated across the country.

Daily association with each other both at the luncheons and outside of them inspired members of the Circle to collaborate creatively. The entire group worked together successfully only once, however, to create a revue called No Sirree! which helped launch a Hollywood career for Round Tabler Robert Benchley.

In its ten years of association, the Round Table and a number of its members acquired national reputations both for their contributions to literature and for their sparkling wit. Although some of their contemporaries, and later in life even some of its members, disparaged the group, its reputation has endured long after its dissolution.


Charter members of the Round Table included:
Franklin Pierce Adams, columnist
Robert Benchley, humorist and actor
Heywood Broun, columnist and sportswriter (married to Ruth Hale)
Marc Connelly, playwright
George S. Kaufman, playwright and director
Dorothy Parker, critic, poet, short-story writer, and screenwriter
Harold Ross, The New Yorker editor
Robert E. Sherwood, author and playwright
John Peter Toohey, publicist
Alexander Woollcott, critic and journalist

Membership was not official or fixed so many others moved in and out of the Circle. Some of these included:
Tallulah Bankhead, actress
Edna Ferber, author and playwright
Jane Grant, journalist and feminist (married to Ross)
Ruth Hale, journalist and feminist
Beatrice Kaufman, editor and playwright (married to George S. Kaufman)
Harpo Marx, comedian and actor
Neysa McMein, magazine illustrator
Donald Ogden Stewart, playwright and screenwriter
Deems Taylor, composer