A short life of the author
Don Marquis was one of the great American humorists — a newspaper columnist, poet, novelist, and playwright whose creation of archy and mehitabel produced what is arguably the finest sustained work of comic poetry in American literature. A cockroach who had been a vers libre poet in a previous life and who typed his dispatches by hurling himself headfirst at the keys of Marquis’s typewriter (and who therefore could not operate the shift key, producing his characteristic all-lowercase style), archy was a vehicle for philosophical observation, social satire, and lyric poetry that transcended the daily newspaper column in which it appeared and became a permanent contribution to American letters.
The Columnist
Donald Robert Perry Marquis was born in Walnut, Illinois, in 1878. After working as a reporter in Atlanta — where he served as an associate editor on Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus’s Magazine — he moved to New York and in 1913 began writing “The Sun Dial,” a daily column for the New York Evening Sun. The column, which he later continued as “The Lantern” in the New York Herald Tribune, ran until 1925 and was the laboratory in which Marquis developed his most enduring creations.
The column format gave Marquis extraordinary freedom. On any given day, he might produce a satirical sketch, a lyric poem, a philosophical dialogue, a parody, or an instalment of one of his several running serial features. He was, as Christopher Morley observed, “one of those columnists who could use the form for literature.”
Archy and Mehitabel
Archy the cockroach first appeared in “The Sun Dial” on March 29, 1916. The conceit was simple and inspired: archy, a free-verse poet reincarnated as a cockroach, typed dispatches to Marquis on his office typewriter each night, producing copy that was all lowercase (no capital letters, no punctuation) because he could not hold down the shift key while jumping on a letter key. His companion and frequent subject was mehitabel, an alley cat who claimed to have been Cleopatra in a former life and who embodied a philosophy of cheerful, amoral hedonism summed up in her motto: “toujours gai, archy, toujours gai.”
The archy poems were collected in three volumes: archy and mehitabel (1927), archy’s life of mehitabel (1933), and archy does his part (1935). E. B. White selected and introduced the lives and times of archy and mehitabel (1940), the omnibus edition that became the standard text and kept the work in print for the rest of the century.
What made archy extraordinary was the range of Marquis’s achievement within the form. The poems moved between broad comedy (mehitabel’s adventures with tomcats), biting social satire (archy’s observations on human vanity and cruelty), genuine philosophical reflection (on mortality, art, the relationship between the body and the soul), and moments of real lyric beauty — as in archy’s meditation on the moth who immolated himself on a lightbulb because “beauty is more important than safety” and “it is better to be happy for a moment and be burned up with beauty than to live a long time and be bored all the while.”
Other Works
Marquis was far more prolific than the archy poems alone would suggest. The Old Soak (1921) — the monologues of a genial drunkard lamenting Prohibition — was a bestseller and a successful Broadway play. Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers (1916) satirised Greenwich Village intellectual pretension. The Cruise of the Jasper B (1916) was a comic adventure novel. Danny’s Own Story (1912) was an early novel of Midwestern boyhood.
His serious poetry — collected in Dreams and Dust (1915) and Sonnets to a Red-Haired Lady (1922) — was more conventional but showed genuine lyric talent. His plays, including The Dark Hours (1932), a dramatic treatment of the Passion, were ambitious but less successful.
Tragedy and Reputation
Marquis’s personal life was marked by devastating losses. His first wife, Reina, died in 1923; his son Robert died in infancy; his daughter Barbara died at thirteen. His second marriage was unhappy. He suffered a series of strokes beginning in 1936 and spent his last year unable to speak or write, dying in 1937 at fifty-nine.
E. B. White’s 1950 essay on Marquis — which served as the introduction to later editions of the lives and times of archy and mehitabel — is the definitive assessment of Marquis’s achievement and the primary reason his work survived into the second half of the century. White argued that Marquis was “a poet, a satirist, a novelist, a playwright, and a maker of light verse,” and that archy and mehitabel represented “the best humorous poetry in the English language.”
Collecting Marquis
archy and mehitabel (Doubleday, 1927) is the primary collecting target, particularly in the first edition with George Herriman’s illustrations. The two sequels — archy’s life of mehitabel (1933) and archy does his part (1935) — are collected as a set. The Old Soak (Doubleday, 1921) is sought in first edition. White’s omnibus the lives and times of archy and mehitabel (Doubleday, 1940) is the most commonly found edition but is itself collected for the White introduction. Association copies and signed Marquis material are rare because of his relatively early death.
Bibliography
| Title | Year | Publisher | Language |
|---|---|---|---|
| archy and mehitabel Marquis's collection of free-verse poems — purportedly written by archy, a cockroach who throws himself headfirst onto typewriter keys (hence no capitals or punctuation), recording the adventures of mehitabel the alley cat who claims to be a reincarnated Cleopatra — created two of American literature's most beloved comic characters and produced genuine poetry disguised as newspaper humor, addressing mortality, art, love, and survival with a lightness that conceals real philosophical depth. | 1927 | Doubleday | English |
| archy does his part The third and final archy collection finds the cockroach-poet addressing the Depression, political demagoguery, and social upheaval — his observations on the human world becoming more explicitly satirical while retaining the philosophical whimsy and the poetic skill that distinguish the series, with mehitabel making appearances as an aging but undefeated figure whose refusal to surrender becomes genuinely heroic. | 1935 | Doubleday, Doran & Co. | English |
| archy's life of mehitabel The second archy collection focuses more intensely on mehitabel the alley cat — aging now, her beauty fading, her resilience tested by harder circumstances — while archy continues to observe the world from a cockroach's perspective, finding in the small dramas of insects and animals a commentary on human vanity, cruelty, and the persistence of joy in unpromising situations. | 1933 | Doubleday, Doran & Co. | English |
| Danny's Own Story Marquis's first novel — a picaresque tale narrated by a foundling boy traveling through the American Midwest in the decades after the Civil War — draws on the Huck Finn tradition of vernacular storytelling and frontier humor, revealing Marquis's roots in the tradition of Twain and establishing narrative skills that would later serve the archy poems' sustained comic voice. | 1912 | Doubleday, Page & Co. | English |
| Dreams and Dust Marquis's first poetry collection — published before the archy poems made him famous — reveals a serious lyric poet beneath the later humorist, with poems addressing mortality, loss, the nature of art, and the relationship between dreams and reality in formal verse that demonstrates genuine technical skill and emotional depth, establishing that Marquis's comic genius was built on a foundation of real poetic ability. | 1915 | Harper & Brothers | English |
| Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers Marquis's satirical collection skewers Greenwich Village intellectualism through Hermione — a wealthy young woman who collects fashionable ideas (suffragism, free love, psychoanalysis, Nietzsche, vers libre) without understanding any of them — creating a portrait of dilettante radicalism that remains mordantly funny a century later and establishing Marquis as a satirist of genuine sharpness beneath his genial newspaper-humorist persona. | 1916 | D. Appleton & Co. | English |
| Sonnets to a Red-Haired Lady (By a Gentleman with a Blue Beard) and Famous Love Affairs Marquis's collection of comic verse — sonnets addressed to an imaginary red-haired lady by an imaginary blue-bearded gentleman, alongside humorous retellings of famous love stories — demonstrates his skill as a formal versifier and his ability to find comedy in the conventions of love poetry, writing parody that is also, sometimes, genuine poetry. | 1922 | Doubleday, Page & Co. | English |
| The Cruise of the Jasper B Marquis's comic novel follows a newspaper editor who buys a derelict houseboat and discovers that it contains a skeleton, a treasure map, and various other complications — a lighthearted adventure that showcases Marquis's gift for absurdist plotting and verbal comedy in extended narrative form, demonstrating that his talents were not limited to the newspaper column format. | 1916 | D. Appleton & Co. | English |
| the lives and times of archy and mehitabel The posthumous omnibus edition combines all three archy collections — archy and mehitabel, archy's life of mehitabel, and archy does his part — with additional previously uncollected material and George Herriman's illustrations throughout, creating the definitive edition of Marquis's masterwork and introducing the cockroach-poet to new generations of readers who might otherwise have missed the individual volumes. | 1940 | Doubleday, Doran & Co. | English |
| The Old Soak Marquis's comic creation Clem Hawley — 'The Old Soak' — is a cheerful, unrepentant drunkard whose monologues on Prohibition, religion, marriage, and human nature appeared as newspaper columns before being collected, adapted into a successful Broadway play, and becoming one of the defining comic voices of the Prohibition era, arguing with amiable illogic for the God-given right to a drink. | 1921 | Doubleday, Page & Co. | English |