Grondahl: This Manhattan tour was 'lit'

Celebrating Dorothy Parker, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and a century of literature and journalism at The New Yorker

A group of Capital Region "literary nerds" begin their literary tour at the Algonquin Hotel.

Two dozen local writers and readers posed on the steps of the New York Public Library.

Author and tour guide Kevin C. Fitzpatrick at 412 W. 47th St., where The New Yorker was founded.

"A Century of the New Yorker" featured original cartoons, letters and manuscripts.

The Olympia SG1 typewriters used by Lillian Ross and William Shawn in the 1950s.

“A Century of the New Yorker” spanned the entire third floor of the New York Public Library.

By Paul Grondahl

First published in the Albany Times Union, June 25, 2025

Reprinted with permission

Dorothy Parker, an acerbic wit and celebrated humorist in the early years of The New Yorker, jotted down with pencil and loopy cursive her list of “Unattractive Authors Whose Work I Admire.”

Parker’s list included the literary luminaries William Faulkner, Aldous Huxley, Sinclair Lewis, H.G. Wells and Rudyard Kipling.

It was Parker, a poet, who gave us the oft-quoted rhyme: “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.”

Parker did not need spectacles. Her clear-eyed assessments and flinty pronouncements float like champagne bubbles across the illuminating, entertaining and sweeping exhibit, “A Century of The New Yorker,” at the New York Public Library’s spectacular main building on Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street in Manhattan. The structure is famously watched over by Patience and Fortitude, the world-renowned marble lions.

I joined two dozen other local folks — “literary nerds” one of them dubbed us — on a New York City literary tour on a sweltering Saturday, co-sponsored by the NYS Writers Institute and the University at Albany Alumni Association. It coincided with the 100th anniversary of the publication of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and the sophisticated literary magazine’s founding.  

“It’s remarkable for anything to endure for a century, especially a novel and magazine,” said our tour guide, Kevin C. Fitzpatrick, author of several books on literary New York, including The Lost Algonquin Round Table and a third revised edition of Dorothy Parker’s New York, due out Aug. 1 from SUNY Press.

Fitzpatrick started the tour at the Algonquin Hotel, a literary landmark, at 59 W. 44th St. A large round table past the bar in a back alcove became a six-day-a-week lunch spot for a group of writers known as “the vicious circle” for their lacerating humor.

Parker was a staff writer for Vanity Fair from 1917 to 1920 and was the first woman to be welcomed at the Round Table when it began in 1919. Other founding members were newspapermen who covered World War I, including Heywood Broun; critics Alexander Woollcott and Robert Benchley; playwright George S. Kaufman; and journalists Franklin P. Adams and Harold Ross, who wrote for the U.S. Army’s Stars and Stripes and co-founded the New Yorker with his wife, Jane Grant.

Each was known for rapid-fire ripostes, bon mots and highly quotable turns of phrase.

When a press agent asked Kaufman, “How do I get my leading lady’s name into your newspaper?” Kaufman replied: “Shoot her.”

Parker offered this aside about a passing ingenue: “That woman speaks 18 languages and can’t say ‘no’ in any of them.”

“The idea to start The New Yorker was hatched over lunches at the Round Table,” Fitzpatrick said. The writers were joined by a friendly feline they named Hamlet. The 12th-generation Hamlet still greets guests in the hotel lobby and has an Instagram feed with 41,000 followers. We missed Hamlet on our visit.

“He likes to nap up in his private room in the afternoon,” Fitzpatrick told us.

The first issue of The New Yorker appeared on Feb. 21, 1925, launched in the Jazz Age of flappers, Prohibition and speakeasies. Backed by the wealthy baking company scion, Raoul Fleischman, it was edited by Ross and Grant. They wrote in the inaugural edition: “Its general tenor will be one of gaiety, wit and satire, but it will be more than a jester…It will be what is commonly called sophisticated, in that it will assume a reasonable degree of enlightenment on the part of its readers.”

Fitzpatrick brought us to the crucible of The New Yorker, a townhouse at 412 W. 47th St., where Ross and Grant lived and rented rooms to Woollcott and the Round Table set. The illicit-booze-fueled parties got so raucous that the couple hired heavyweight boxers Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey as bouncers.

“Jane Grant’s bootlegger couldn’t keep up with demand and she started making her own bathtub gin with a recipe from the Waldorf Astoria staff,” Fitzpatrick told us.

Ross and Grant built a formidable stable of correspondents, cherry-picked from writers working for the 16 daily newspapers published in New York City at the time.

Despite extended chatty lunches, carousing and boozing late into the wee hours at speakeasies, the Round Table writers churned out sparkling prose on relentless deadlines.

“Heywood Broun was a writing machine,” Fitzpatrick said, noting that he churned out his 1,000-word syndicated column “It Seems to Me” daily for more than a million readers.

Woollcott, considered the original influencer, could dash out a stellar play or book review in a single draft in less than 30 minutes.

Parker, whose deep traumas led to alcoholism and suicide attempts, was keenly attuned to the fragility of the human condition. “Her writing lasted because she wrote about bad jobs, bad relationships and heartache, universal things that never go out of style,” said Fitzpatrick, founder and president of the Dorothy Parker Society.

F. Scott Fitzgerald arrived in New York City in 1919 from St. Paul, Minn., worked for an ad agency, and married Zelda the following year. Their daughter, Francis (called “Scottie”) was born in 1920. He had published two novels, This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and the Damned, as well as a short story collection, Tales of the Jazz Age, by 1922. They moved to Great Neck on Long Island that year.

Fitzgerald completed The Great Gatsby in France. It sold fewer than 20,000 copies in its first year and was close to being out of print when the author died in 1940. It has since come to be considered a 20th-century classic and has sold more than 30 million copies. He set key scenes in the novel in Central Park and The Plaza hotel.

Fitzgerald published two poems and three humorous short pieces in The New Yorker, but wrote more frequently for The Saturday Evening Post because it paid better.

The most prolific contributor to The New Yorker, John O’Hara, who published more than 200 short stories in the magazine, complained Ross was not paying him enough.

“I want more money,” he wrote in 1939, a letter that repeated the phrase 11 more times for emphasis.

Even the acclaimed author John Updike, who started contributing Talk of the Town pieces in 1955, had eight of his 38 submissions labeled “killed,” or not accepted, in his early years.

The exhibit also contains correspondence and edited pages from John Hersey’s groundbreaking article Hiroshima that explored how six survivors experienced the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, and its aftermath. It ran 30,000 words and the editors decided to devote all of the August 31, 1946, issue's editorial space to its publication.

The exhibit contains a 1950 letter from E.B. White to Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita and a noted lepidopterist, asking for information about a large, gray spider he saw at his farm in Maine as part of his research for his book, Charlotte’s Web. That same year, Nabokov traveled to Albany’s Pine Bush and named the Karner Blue butterfly, now an endangered species.

“The tour really brought literary history to life for me,” said Todd Snyder, a Siena College English professor and author of four books. “No other magazine is as important to American literature as The New Yorker.”

His wife, Stephanie Snyder, a communication strategist for the UAlbany Alumni Association, was drawn to the cartoons because she was a cartoonist for her high school newspaper in West Virginia.

“The tour made me want to read a biography of Jane Grant because she deserves to be better known,” said Naomi Woolsey, of Saratoga Springs, a retired federal employee and essayist.

“It was an unforgettable experience,” said Phyllis Borel, who lives at the Beverwyck senior community with her husband, John.

Good things happen when literary nerds unite.

Paul Grondahl is the Opalka Endowed Director of the New York State Writers Institute at the University at Albany and a former Times Union reporter. He can be reached at pgrondahl@albany.edu

Side note: Kevin C. Fitzpatrick, our tour guide, was featured in a New York Times story published yesterday, "Can’t Repeat the Past? A Gatsby Boat Tour Can."