The Weary Blues was the most important book by the Harlem Renaissance’s most famous author. Hughes rose to fame fast and furiously amid a cultural movement that marked the first time in US history that white America began to pay attention to African American literature. And with this collection of poems, he – alongside a handful of others – gave voice to a generation.
With his masterful use of language, tone and rhythms of jazz and blues music of the time, he spoke personally and powerfully to the experiences of Black Americans. While the titular The Weary Blues (included in poetry anthology Blues Poems) is his most famous poem, it is Our Land that contains one of the most memorable lines in 20th-century literature: “I, too, am America.”
The period that followed the end of World War I was one of gaiety and optimism, and it sparked a new era of creativity in American culture. Surely one of the most profound — and outrageous — influences on the times was the group of a dozen or so tastemakers who lunched together at New York City’s Algonquin Hotel. For more than a decade they met daily and came to be known as the Algonquin Round Table. With members such as writers Dorothy Parker, Harold Ross (founder of The New Yorker) and Robert Benchley; columnists Franklin Pierce Adams and Heywood Broun, and Broun’s wife Ruth Hale; critic Alexander Woollcott; comedian Harpo Marx; and playwrights George S. Kaufman, Marc Connelly, Edna Ferber, and Robert Sherwood, the Round Table embodied an era and changed forever the face of American humor.
It all began with an afternoon roast of the New York Times drama critic, Alexander Wollcott. A number of writers met up at the Algonquin Hotel on 44th street and had such a good time that the event was repeated the next day, and the day after that, until the lunch table at the Algonquin was established as a ritual. The core group of friends was sometimes joined by others who attended for short periods or drifted about the periphery of the group, including such notables as actress Tallulah Bankhead and playwright Noel Coward. The Round Table was made up of people with a shared admiration for each other’s work. Outspoken and outrageous, they would often quote each other freely in their daily columns.
Round Tabler Edna Ferber, who called them “The Poison Squad,” wrote, “They were actually merciless if they disapproved. I have never encountered a more hard-bitten crew. But if they liked what you had done, they did say so publicly and whole-heartedly.” Their standards were high, their vocabulary fluent, fresh, astringent, and very, very tough. Both casual and incisive, they had a certain terrible integrity about their work and boundless ambition. Some of the most notable members of the Round Table came together to work on significant collaborative projects. George Kaufman teamed up with Edna Ferber and Marc Connelly on some of his best stage comedies, including Dulcy and The Royal Family. Harold Ross of The New Yorker hired both Dorothy Parker as a book reviewer and Robert Benchley as a drama critic.
By 1925, the Round Table was famous. What had started as a private clique became a public amusement. The country-at-large was now attentive to their every word—people often coming to stare at them during lunch. Some began to tire of the constant publicity. The time they spent entertaining and being entertained took its toll on several of the Algonquin members. Robert Sherwood and Robert Benchley moved out of the hotel in order to concentrate on and accomplish their work. In 1927, the controversial execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, whose case had divided the country and the Round Table for six years, seemed to cast a pall over the group’s unchecked antics. Dorothy Parker believed strongly in the pair’s innocence, and upon their deaths she remarked “I had heard someone say and so I said too, that ridicule is the most effective weapon. Well, now I know that there are things that never have been funny and never will be. And I know that ridicule may be a shield but it is not a weapon.”
As America entered the Depression and the more somber decade of the 1930s, the bonds that had held the group together loosened; many members moved to Hollywood or on to other interests. “It didn’t end, it just sort of faded,” recalled Marc Connelly. A decade after it began, the Algonquin Round Table was over. Not forgotten, the Round Table remains one of the great examples of an American artists’ community and the effects it can have on its time.
“That woman speaks eighteen languages and can’t say ‘no’ in any of them.”
~ Dorothy Parker
Once when asked by a press agent, “How do I get my leading lady’s name into your newspaper?” Kaufman replied, “Shoot her.”
~ George S. Kaufman
Reviewing cowboy hero Tom Mix: “They say he rides as if he’s part of the horse, but they don’t say which part.”
This was the biggest selling novel in 1924 and won its author a Pulitzer Prize a year later. Set in Chicago, So Big tells the story of the life of gambler’s daughter Selina as she navigates the many huge challenges life throws in her face – challenges to her dignity, to her family, and to her mental health.
But what truly makes her one of the 20th century’s great literary characters is her inextinguishable ability to find joy in the most unlikely of places. She is a flawed delight. But more than just a larger-than-life story of a go-getting ‘modern woman’, what makes it stand out as a timeless work of literature is the vivid snapshot it provides of a vanished time in history, through the high life and low life of 1920s Chicago society. ‘Critics of the 1920s and 1930s,’ wrote the New York Times, ‘did not hesitate to call [Ferber] the greatest American woman novelist of her day.’ This was her masterpiece.
A graduate of Harvard University (1912), Benchley held a variety of jobs in New York City before becoming managing editor of Vanity Fair in 1919. There he worked with Robert Sherwood and Dorothy Parker until January 1920, when both Sherwood and Benchley resigned to protest the firing of Parker. About this time Benchley, Parker, and other wits of the Algonquin Round Table—which its members referred to as the Vicious Circle—began their celebrated lunchtime meetings at Manhattan’s Algonquin Hotel. In April 1920 Benchley joined the staff of Life magazine as drama critic (1920–29). During this period he published his first collection of essays, Of All Things! (1921), and became a regular contributor to The New Yorker (1925). He was drama critic for The New Yorker from 1929 to 1940 and wrote its “The Wayward Press” column (under the pseudonym Guy Fawkes).
His monologue “The Treasurer’s Report,” initially delivered as a skit in an amateur revue for the Algonquin group in 1922, was the basis for one of the first all-talking cinema short subjects. He subsequently acted in and sometimes wrote motion-picture short subjects—The Sex Life of a Polyp (1928), Stewed, Fried, and Boiled (1929), How to Sleep (1935; Academy Award for best live-action short film), The Romance of Digestion (1937), and The Courtship of the Newt (1938)—among them. In all, he made more than 40 short subjects and appeared in minor roles and a few supporting roles in some 50 feature films. He often played a confused, annoyed, and mildly sarcastic drunk. It was a role that suited him. He once said, “I know I’m drinking myself to a slow death, but then I’m in no hurry”; he died of cirrhosis of the liver.
Although films and radio brought Benchley wide public acclaim, his writings constitute his most lasting achievement. His essays are collected in 15 books and illustrated with Gluyas Williams’s superb caricatures; the books include Pluck and Luck (1925), The Early Worm (1927), My Ten Years in a Quandary, and How They Grew (1936), and Benchley Beside Himself (1943). As he grew older, however, his whimsical, even absurd humor became increasingly at odds with his darker vision of the world. Many critics consider his early writing his best, and he himself said in 1943:
It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.
The Ten-Year Lunch: The Wit and Legend of the Algonquin Round Table
A 1987 American documentary film about the Algonquin Round Table, a floating group of writers and actors during the Jazz Age in New York City, which included great names such as Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman, Edna Ferber, Marc Connelly, Harold Ross and Harpo Marx. It was produced and directed by Aviva Slesin and narrated by Heywood Hale Broun.
The title refers to how the members of the Round Table met over lunch at the Algonquin Hotel from 1919 until roughly 1929. The film shows how the group drifted apart once the 1920’s ended, as Hollywood beckoned for some and as they grew older.
The film premiered on the PBS series American Masters on September 28, 1987. On April 11, 1988, it won the 1987 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
The Bloomsbury Group was a small, informal association of artists and intellectuals who lived and worked in the Bloomsbury area of central London. Most prominent of these was novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf. In all, only about a dozen people at any one time could have called themselves members of the group. Beginning shortly before 1910, the Bloomsbury Group gathered at irregular intervals for conversation, companionship, and the refueling of creative energy. The members of Bloomsbury, or “Bloomsberries,” would more or less maintain allegiance to their mutual philosophy of an ideal society, even through a World War and three decades of tectonic shifts in the political climate. They had no codified agenda or mission. They were not political in the ordinary sense of the word. Most importantly, there was no application or initiation required to become a member. Bloomsbury was an informal hodgepodge of intellectual friends, and one either merited inclusion to that circle or one did not. No rules of order, as in a committee, governed the way in which Bloomsbury managed their interactions. Instead, they held impromptu dinners and gatherings where any number of topics was the subject of serious discussion and contemplation. These intellectual exchanges served as the main influence on later work by individual members. By no means were all members in full agreement on all subjects. Some of Bloomsbury’s most stimulating ideas and writings were borne out of internal disagreement and strife. One can safely say that each member of Bloomsbury was leftist in his or her politics, although as individuals they expressed their politics in very different ways.
A significant fact about the Bloomsbury Group is that the members, for the most part, did not achieve their greatest fame until later in life. The Group held its discussions and parties while all the participants were still virtually unknown. The men of Bloomsbury were students at King’s College and Trinity College, constituents of Cambridge University. They were almost all high achievers and active in student life, yet one must imagine that they didn’t quite fit in as well as other students. Many of the Bloomsberries held particular ideas on human society which at the time seemed beyond radical. For example, the noncritical assessment of homosexuality, however appropriate today, was considered a serious moral error in the early twentieth century. Indeed, many of the Bloomsberries called into question the idea of traditional monogamous marriage. Several advocated for and practiced polyamory – multiple, consensual romantic partners. The idea of this level of sexual liberation in Edwardian England was unspeakable. In a sense, they made it very easy for their generation to dismiss them as quacks and deviants. However, none could deny that the Bloomsbury Group brought a great deal of intellectual clout to bear on any issue of the day.
The de facto leader of the Bloomsbury Group was Virginia Woolf, born Adeline Virginia Stephen, who descended from an eminently Victorian and moneyed household. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was an accomplished writer, and most certainly a powerful influence on his daughter’s intellectual development. Upon his death in 1904, Woolf and her two brothers, Thoby and Adrian, moved into a dwelling in the Bloomsbury neighborhood of London, and thus the foundation of the Group was firmly in place. Woolf was a gifted writer from her earliest years. Her essays, such as A Room of One’s Own, are cornerstone pieces in the history of feminist literature. She also wrote extensively on more strictly literary topics, and her theories on fiction have continued to draw the attention of critics. The novel, though, is where Virginia Woolf found her truest and most natural form of expression. Mrs. Dalloway, published in 1925, showcases the full range of her talents, as well as demonstrating the effervescent stream of consciousness style for which she was famous. Without a doubt, the writings of Sigmund Freud made a profound influence on the artist Virginia Woolf, but she gave her creative outputs a vitality entirely her own. There is poignancy to Woolf’s characterizations that raw psychoanalysis does not achieve.
Mark Beré Peterson: Hauntings, Urban Legends, History, Folklore, Mythology and Witchcraft 