There are two primary myths regarding the proper social structure of the writerly life — that of the recluse and that of the well-connected scribbler-about-town. Each has its constituents — Salinger, Pynchon, et al. suiting up for the former squad; the likes of Bloomsbury and, more currently, the McSweeney’s mob carrying colors for the latter — and its charms — the romance of flinty genius on the one hand, unceasingly brilliant comradeship on the other. Each is also somewhat a bunch of crap. Surely J.D. hits the town for a beer every now and again? Lytton Strachey must have at least occasionally worn out the gang with bad scat jokes around the dining room table?

Myths, though, are probably better judged by their endurance than their accuracy. And certainly these two have proven durable enough. It was in the spirit of the second, more sociable pole, then, that a group gathered recently at the bar of the Algonquin Hotel to honor that most iconic member of New York’s literary in-crowd, Dorothy Parker.

According to its website, the Dorothy Parker Society of New York (DPSNY) “is a non-academic social organization, extremely loose-knit, and exists without a thought toward rules, bylaws or parliamentary procedure.”

That said, midway through the evening, guests had taken to assigning themselves various titles of societal authority, each of which Kevin Fitzpatrick, the DPSNY’s president and founder, dutifully noted on a scrap of yellow legal paper.

“We’re divvying up positions,” Fitzpatrick said as a group of newcomers took seats at the far end of the table. A round of gin martinis followed quickly on their heels.

Like most everything these days, the Society started with a website. In 1998, Fitzpatrick came into a copy of Marion Meade’s Parker biography What Fresh Hell is This? He launched dorothyparkernyc.com shortly thereafter. A few months later he and a group of his site’s more regular visitors got together for a party, and the DPSNY was born. It remains a rigorously informal endeavor.

“The Dorothy Parker Society doesn’t have meetings,” Fitzpatrick said, “we have parties.” The most involved of these is the annual Parkerfest, wherein the group gets together in their Roaring Twenties best for a few days of Parker-related activity. At one recent Fest, the group drank its way to a $2,000 bar tab (“Champagne bottles,” Fitzpatrick explained), at another a few of Parker’s great nieces came down from upstate and regaled the crowd with family stories. Last year the affair included a booze cruise around Manhattan on a 1930s yacht. Towards the end of the evening, Fitzpatrick wandered downstairs to find a pair of revelers in flagrante delicto beneath the decks.

“I’m not sure if that was a high point or a low point,” he said. “But it was very Parker.”

The evening at the Algonquin was, alas, scandal-free. At the table, though, was a veteran of a fairly fresh literary squabble, one Ms. Barbara Weider. In addition to being a regular at the Parker Society, Weider is a Wodehouse devotee, and at a recent Broadway Special meeting (the New York chapter of the national P.G. Wodehouse Society) she had found herself in a trivia contest, answering questions about the Wodehouse book Picadilly Jim. She lost in the tiebreak round to a fellow Wodehousian from Maryland. However, upon discovering that her opponent had just read the novel while riding up on the train, Weider was overheard to have declared the proceedings “bullshit.” Now she looked on amusedly as Fitzpatrick regaled the table with the story. Her battle had been noted in a recent Observer article by Spencer Morgan, and the salmon-colored clipping circled around the party.

At the table’s other end Charlotte Phillips and Mordechai Shinefield, writers and students at CUNY and Yeshiva University, respectively, stood reciting poetry, both Parker’s and their own, to an increasingly inebriated crowd.

Shinefield, an editor at The Commentator, developed a love for Parker in high school after smuggling an anthology of her writing into the “very anti-literature” religious boarding school he attended. When, for a birthday present, a friend gave him the Parker biography You Might As Well Live, he learned that Parker had gone to Catholic school in Morristown, NJ — the same town where he was currently at school. In fact, Parker’s school had since been sold to an area Yeshiva, which had turned it into a boarding school for religious men — the very one where Shinefield was studying.

“That sealed the obsession-cum-fascination,” he said. “I later wrote a short story about the experience called Dorothy Parker’s Greatest Wit, Reincarnation as a Yeshiva Boy.”

In a laudable bit of ecumenism, Fitzpatrick has tried to plan events with other groups of enthusiasts around town, though, it must be admitted, with only middling success. He was in touch with the Fitzgerald Society, but, he said, “they pretty much blew me off.”

“I tried to work out something with the Art Deco Society, but their president pretty much blew me off, too. I phoned and wrote a letter and nothing happened. If someone contacts me, I always get back to them.”

The one group Fitzpatrick has made common cause with is the Robert Benchley Society.

“He and Parker were best friends, and we mix very well with them,” he said. Benchley aside, though, he’s had trouble finding other crews sympathetic to the Parker agenda.

“There don’t appear to be other literary groups like ours, which is about having fun while promoting the writer, not promoting your academic career on the back of the writer. I’d love to have a joint party with some other groups. It wouldn’t even have to be a literary group. Anyone except Civil War reenactors.”

The evening ended with a tour as Fitzpatrick took what remained of the table through the hotel lobby, pointing out the highlights. Pausing beneath a portrait of the Round Table’s regulars in the back of the lounge, he ticked off the famous names that once comprised the “Vicious Circle.”

“That’s Harold Ross, there’s George Kaufman, that’s Robert Benchley, there’s Edna Ferber, Alexander Woollcott, Dorothy Parker…”

We stood around Fitzpatrick, taking in the painting. Someone observed that Ross looked frighteningly like Ted Danson. There was a bit of talk about James Thurber and The New Yorker. Then bags were grabbed and tabs were settled and hands were shook all around. And the party left the hotel’s dark, quiet confines and dispersed into the humid June night — everyone off to their subway or after a taxi or down the block towards home. Or, in at least one confirmed case, on in search of a few more rounds.

The hotel keeps postcards of the Round Table portrait under which the party had come to a close, and I grabbed one on my way out to take home. Some 80 years after the fact, this batch of Algonquins still represents a certain ideal version of the writing life in New York. Sharing a drink with their ghosts had been the literary equivalent of sneaking onto Yankee Stadium for a few swings during batting practice or onstage at the Met to warble an off-key note or two. None of us were going to be mistaken for the real thing, but there was a definite fun to it all the same.