Despite her reputation as the witty gal of the Algonquin Round Table, DOROTHY PARKER (1893-1967) dismissed the clique as “just a lot of people telling jokes and telling each other how good they were.” They did help her gain a national renown, though, by quoting her lunchtime ad libs and verses in their newspaper columns. Those mordant verses (“Razors pain you/rivers are damp…”) don’t really endure (though they are fun to discover, and certainly I was one of those girls who would moan “What fresh hell is this?” when her dorm-room phone rang), and Parker’s numerous book and theater reviews for the New Yorker and Vanity Fair are remarkable more for their voice than their contribution to modern criticism.