The Annotated Archy and Mehitabel

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

1916

1917

1918

1919

1920

1921

1922

Notes

Acknowledgements

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THE ANNOTATED ARCHY AND MEHITABEL

DON MARQUIS was born in 1878, the second of four children of a physician in Walnut, Illinois. In 1898 he briefly attended Knox College in nearby Galesburg, but he was largely self-educated. As a teenager he began working for local printing offices and newspapers. After short-lived stints on newspapers in Washington and Philadelphia, Marquis moved to Atlanta in 1902 and worked for the News, the Journal, and Uncle Remus’s Magazine. Marquis moved to New York City in 1909 and soon became a well-known journalist. In 1912 he launched his now legendary column “The Sun Dial” in the New York Evening Sun and four years later Archy and Mehitabel began to appear.

Marquis published three novels—Danny’s Own Story (1912), The Cruise of the Jasper B. (1916), and Off the Arm (1930)—and four short story collections. He also collected the episodic adventures of his characters the Old Soak and Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers. His several plays include a successful run of The Old Soak (1922), in which he himself starred at one point; and The Dark Hours (1924), which his second wife later directed in an unsuccessful Broadway production. Prefaces (1919) consists of forewords to imaginary books, and Chapters for the Orthodox (1934) is religious satire. By far his best known works are the Archy and Mehitabel columns, which he collected into three volumes—Archy and Mehitabel (1927), Archy’s Life of Mehitabel (1933), and Archy Does His Part (1935).

Marquis’s personal life was plagued with illness and loss. He married his first wife, Reina Melcher, in 1909. They had one son, who lived only six years, and one daughter, who lived only thirteen years. Reina died suddenly in 1923. Marquis married Marjorie Vonnegut three years later; she died in 1936. After years of illness, including strokes that paralyzed him and prevented speech, Don Marquis died in 1937 in New York City.

MICHAEL SIMS is the author most recently of Adam’s Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form, which was a New York Times Notable Book and a Library Journal Best Science Book. He first wrote about Archy and Mehitabel, as well as other animal characters, in Darwin’s Orchestra: An Almanac of Nature in History and the Arts. His articles and essays have appeared in many periodicals, including the Los Angeles Times Book Review, New Statesman, American Archaeology, and Skep-tic . More information is available at www.michaelsimsbooks.com, including links to Archy and Mehitabel Web sites.

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Introduction

A VIEW FROM THE UNDER SIDE

Many books attain classic status primarily because teachers keep them alive for students. Some, in contrast, age into celebrity on their own, because readers continue to find them engaging and relevant. They wind up stuffed into backpacks, read aloud to friends, posted on favorite-quotation Web sites. Such has been the fate of the Archy and Mehitabel books. Long ago the characters outgrew the newspaper in which they were born in 1916.

Don Marquis wrote stories, novels, plays, and “serious” poetry. But by far his best known works are the satirical poems and sketches through which Archy and Mehitabel cavort. A free verse poet reincarnated as a cockroach, Archy reported faithfully to Marquis’s newspaper column “The Sun Dial,” in the New York Evening Sun.1 He narrated his adventures and those of his friend Mehitabel, an alley cat who once was (or at least claims to have once been) Cleopatra. In New York newspapers and later in magazines and syndication, hundreds of thousands of Americans followed their antics. Many newspaper columns in the early twentieth century featured poems, jokes, news commentary, and recurring characters—but none had been visited by such spirits as these. Generations of readers unacquainted with Marquis’s columns have enjoyed collections mined from them, following Archy’s sardonic accounts of his adventures with humans, with fellow animals (some of whom are also reincarnates), and even with ghosts and Martians.

No American humorist in the first three decades of the twentieth century was more acclaimed than Marquis.