Danny’s Own Story was published by Doubleday, Page & Co. in 1912. The novel is Marquis’s first published book and his most clearly indebted to Mark Twain: the narrator, Danny, is a foundling boy in a small Illinois town who tells his own story in colloquial first-person dialect, traveling through the Midwest and encountering confidence men, patent-medicine salesmen, circus performers, and various other specimens of American frontier life.
The narrative voice is Danny’s primary virtue: ungrammatical, digressive, occasionally malapropistic, but sharp-eyed and fundamentally honest. Danny observes the world with the same combination of innocence and shrewdness that characterizes Huck Finn’s narration, and his adventures expose the same kinds of small-town hypocrisy and human weakness that Twain documented.
The novel’s picaresque structure — Danny moves from place to place, encountering new characters and situations in each chapter — allows Marquis to exercise his gift for comic characterization and dialogue. The individual episodes are better than the overall plot, which is somewhat arbitrary; Marquis’s talents were always episodic rather than architectural.
The book was a modest commercial success and established Marquis as a writer of promise. In retrospect, it serves primarily as evidence that the skills he would deploy in the archy poems — the sustained comic voice, the ear for vernacular speech, the ability to make wisdom sound casual — were already developed in his first published work.
Collecting Danny’s Own Story
First edition (Doubleday, Page & Co., Garden City, NY, 1912): Cloth binding.
Market values:
- First edition, fine: $30–$75
- Very good: $10–$30