archy and mehitabel was published by Doubleday in 1927, collecting the newspaper columns that Marquis had been publishing in the New York Sun and the New York Tribune since 1916. The conceit is that archy — a vers libre poet reincarnated as a cockroach — types his observations on a typewriter in the newspaper office after hours, diving headfirst onto each key one at a time. He cannot operate the shift key, so everything is lowercase and unpunctuated.
archy’s companion and subject is mehitabel, an alley cat of enormous personality who claims to have been Cleopatra in a former life (“toujours gai” is her motto) and who lives with magnificent disregard for conventional morality — taking lovers, abandoning kittens, drinking, fighting, and maintaining her self-regard through every catastrophe. She is one of the great comic characters in American literature: vain, resilient, amoral, and possessed of a vitality that nothing can extinguish.
The humor is genuine and consistent, but beneath it Marquis addresses real subjects: the artist’s isolation, the indifference of the universe, the persistence of hope in the face of evidence, the gap between aspiration and circumstance. archy is a poet trapped in a body that cannot even produce capital letters — a metaphor for every artist working under impossible constraints. mehitabel is life itself, refusing to be diminished by age, poverty, or respectability.
The lowercase format, initially a joke about the cockroach’s physical limitations, becomes an aesthetic statement: the stripped-down typography mirrors the stripped-down verse, creating a visual style that anticipates e.e. cummings’s typographical experiments.
Collecting archy and mehitabel
First edition (Doubleday, Garden City, NY, 1927): Cloth binding, dust jacket with George Herriman illustrations.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $200–$600
- Very good/very good: $80–$200
- Good: $30–$80