he has never heard of the Algonquin Round Table

My editor continues to intrigue me. I discovered that he has never heard of the Algonquin Round Table.

If you haven't heard of it, don't worry. There is no reason why you should. It was a group of writers, wits, critics, and editors who regularly met around a "round table" at the Algonquin hotel in New York in the 1920s. Their number included Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, Robert Benchley, Franklin Pierce Adams, Heywood Broun, and so on. In their time, they were very famous. Though, today, they tend to be little known. Alas, they wrote and talked about their own times, and…like all those who address their present…sometimes fail to reach their future.

But that HE hadn't heard of them is astonishing. It means that he made it through English classes at several prestigious prep schools, as well as an important American college, and never once had his instructors refer to them. That's unnerving, because they were important. They helped establish the modernist style, and any time you read creative non-fiction today, you read something that was directly affected by the Round Tablers.

Yet, under the direction of his professors, my friend was ignorant of them. Moreover, he was clearly irritated when I mentioned them in my chapter on New York City, as though he suspected me of inventing them, or of wasting the reader's time with someone impossibly obscure.

Concerns me. I wonder who else has been, or will be deleted from the public memory by the academic elite? By Those Who Know Best? Will my children's children be permitted to read Shakespeare, Jane Austin, George Sand, Charles Dickens, Edger Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Henry James, Edith Wharton, George Orwell, William Faulkner, Truman Capote…?

All these were, of course, writers of genius. But they did not address the concerns of full professors (with tenure). Ergo, they are not worthy of study, and shall be cast into the outer darkness, unlamented, and unremembered for all eternity.