Dottie, Edna, and Bea

The famed and fabled Algonquin Round Table sparkled throughout the 1920s as the height of New York sophistication, a colorful cast of playwrights, authors, critics, and columnists. And in the mostly male company, that included the likes of Alexander Woollcott, Robert Sherwood, Robert Benchley, Heywood Broun, Harold Ross, George S. Kaufman, and Franklin Pierce Adams, three Jewish women sat as equals, matching wits and talent: Dorothy Parker, at the time a Vanity Fair staffer and freelance poet; Edna Ferber, novelist, and short fiction dynamo; and Beatrice Kaufman, editor, playwright, fiction writer, and wife of George S.