Spend Valentine’s Day with Polly Adler and hear about the life story of New York’s most notorious brothel-owner from author Debby Applegate. A joint online talk and Q&A will bring together today’s leading speakeasy-era associations: the Dorothy Parker Society, the Robert Benchley Society, the Repeal Society, and the Marx Brothers Festival. The Zoom event is…
Tag: books
New Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of Jazz Age Vice, Publishes Today
Debby Applegate earned a Pulitzer Prize for writing The Most Famous Man in America, the Biography of Henry Ward Beecher, and now she turns her gaze to the Jazz Age and one of the most popular names in Manhattan: brothel owner Polly Adler. Applegate spent more than a decade researching and crafting the book. Get…
The St. Patrick’s Day Poem
With St. Patrick’s Day just around the corner, let’s remember the crossover Ireland-New York poem Dorothy Parker wrote for March 17. This was written 96 years ago when Dorothy was 28 years old and a member of the Algonquin Round Table. This gem, published March 16, 1922, in the old Life, came out when Dorothy…
Hemingway and Parker Lost Book Review
In 1940 Ernest Hemingway and Dorothy Parker had known each other socially for perhaps fifteen years. The two writers had crossed to France on an ocean liner with friends. Two of Hemingway’s pals, Robert Benchley and Donald Ogden Stewart, were Algonquin Round Table core members. The beloved expatriate couple Gerald and Sara Murphy had both…
Dorothy Parker Reviews the Ziegfeld Follies
On Saturday I debuted my W.C. Fields History Walking Tour as part of Fields Fest, a 6-week celebration of the life of the great comedian. Dorothy Parker was a huge fan of Fields. In my book The Algonquin Round Table New York: A Historical Guide, I was really happy to be able to include a…
Dorothy Parker-Dawn Powell Walking Tour June 26
Celebrate two of New York’s greatest fiction writers on a walking tour to trace their footsteps in the neighborhoods they made famous: Dorothy Parker and Dawn Powell. See their homes and haunts on a walk that begins at the landmark Algonquin Hotel and ends in Greenwich Village. The tour starts at Noon on Sunday, June…