archy does his part was published by Doubleday, Doran & Co. in 1935. The title — with its echo of New Deal rhetoric (“doing one’s part”) — signals the collection’s engagement with the social and political crises of the 1930s. archy, observing the Depression from his nocturnal vantage point, offers commentary on unemployment, political demagoguery, social inequality, and the various schemes by which humans attempt to manage a world that remains stubbornly unmanageable.
The political satire is sharper than in the earlier collections: archy addresses fascism, communism, capitalism, and the various ideological certainties that 1930s America offered as solutions to its problems. His perspective — that of a creature so small that all human enterprises look equally absurd — gives the satire a philosophical dimension that purely topical humor lacks. The political systems come and go; the cockroach endures.
mehitabel appears in several poems, older now and harder-worn, but still maintaining her claim to aristocratic reincarnation and her refusal to accept diminishment. Her resilience, which was comic in the first volume, has become something closer to heroism in the third: she persists against evidence, against age, against the world’s indifference, and her persistence is both funny and moving.
The collection was the last archy book published during Marquis’s lifetime (he died in 1937). The accumulated work — three volumes spanning nearly twenty years of newspaper columns — represents one of the most sustained acts of comic imagination in American letters.
Collecting archy does his part
First edition (Doubleday, Doran & Co., Garden City, NY, 1935): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $75–$200
- Very good/very good: $30–$75