We got a press release today about a new self-published book based on the Algonquin Round Table. The PR says…
A new book, Lunch at the Algonquin, featuring the 1920s celebrities now known as the Algonquin Round Table, or “The Vicious Circle,” is now available in paperback and in Kindle format.
The author, Mr. Kim Goldsworthy of Rosemead, California, describes his historical fiction novelette as a re-creation of a one-hour luncheon attended by the famous Algonquin Wits of the Roaring Twenties or the Jazz Age. Specifically, the dialogue features the wit and sarcasm of Dorothy Parker (writer/screenwriter), Robert Benchley (writer/actor), Harold Ross (editor and founder of The New Yorker magazine), George S. Kaufman (Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright), and Marc Connelly (Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright), and others.
Like a fly-on-the-wall, the book records a typical conversation of this group as they eat lunch in the Algonquin Hotel in mid-town Manhattan, one afternoon in 1921, as they gab about the hot issues of the day: Prohibition; women’s rights; radio; film; the Red Scare; the Sacco-Vanzetti trial of the century. They likewise converse about the little things, like pets, the theater, and what to do this weekend. In between bites, they spit their venom on each other as they toss off their insults and sexual innuendos between puns, word-play, literary allusions, and quotable quotes.
The author has included historical background to allow the reader to pick up the vibration of post-World War I America as expressed by the most literate New Yorkers living through the Jazz Age. For example, the newest interests of the early 1920s were mainly: the spread of the deadly Spanish flu epidemic; the spreading of jazz music; the propagation of radio as a consumer good; and the two newest Amendments to the U.S. Constitution concerning the right to vote (“women’s suffrage”) and the banning of alcoholic beverages (“Prohibition”).