Includes bibliographical references (pages 169-176).

"In the nineteen-twenties and thirties the hub of America's wit and humor was the famed Round Table in the Rose Room of the Algonquin Hotel in New York City. Gathering there regularly were some of the sharpest minds (and pens) of literature and the theatre: Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman, Franklin P. Adams, Alexander Woollcott, Heywood Broun, and Ring Lardner foremost among them. Frequent visitors to the Round Table were such luminaries as Marc Connelly, Edna Ferber, Noel Coward, John Peter Toohey, Harold Ross, Tallulah Bankhead, Harpo Marx, and Robert E. Sherwood. Collectively, they formed a group they themselves preferred to call the "Vicious Circle," with a poker-playing subsidiary called the Thanatopsis Literary and Inside Straight Club. For decades now, their bons mots have been quoted wherever urbane people gather, until many of them have become part of the language. Do you know, for example, who first said, "Let's get out of wet clothes and into a dry martini"? Or "All the things I really like to do are either immoral, illegal or fattening"? This delightful book has the answers--plus hundreds of other quotable sayings from the golden days of the Algonquin wits."--Jacket.

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