Dorothy Parker Society - Seattle Chapter

Dorothy Parker was the center of a literary and cultural movement in the 1920s. She and her friends became known as the Algonquin Round Table - writers who met daily at the big round table at NYC's Algonquin Hotel restaurant. Alex Woollcott, F.P. Adams, Robert Benchley, Edna Ferber, Heywood Broun, Ruth Hale, Marc Connelly, Charles MacArthur, George S. Kaufman, Robert Sherwood, Harold Ross, Harpo Marx, Neysa McMein, Donald Ogden Stewart, Noel Coward, Tallulah Bankhead... all of these and more drifted in overlapping circles of creativity and social excess of parties, salons, and playhouses of New York's Roaring Twenties.

We read books (and plays and poetry) by these writers. We read books about these writers. We read books by their contemporaries in the Lost Generation, the Harlem Renaissance, the Bloomsbury Set.

We hold discussions online but also meet in person a few times a year for social outings à la the Algonquins, for example: lawn bowling, croquet, or bocce in the summer, curling on ice in the winter, attending a play or relevant event, our February Book Brunch, and the occasional dinner.

We think of this group more like a historical and cultural study group than strictly a book club. We discuss influences, compare books and writers, fact and fiction...all to better understand the shifts in history and their mirrored present-day counterparts and effects.

We'd love to have you join us! You'll pick it up as we go along, I promise.