“What a deeply humorous man Don is,” wrote fellow columnist Franklin P. Adams, “and far closer to Mark Twain than anybody I know....”2 Marquis was already thirty-two when Twain died in 1910, and he was often proclaimed the heir to the grand old man of American humor; one of his many awards came from the Mark Twain Society. Marquis was a finalist three times for the O. Henry Memorial Prize for short fiction and was elected a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He would have been amused to learn that during World War II, after he had been safely dead for several years, the U.S. Navy even christened a carrier the SS Don Marquis.

As epigrammatical as Ambrose Bierce in The Devil’s Dictionary , as irreverent as Lord Byron in Don Juan, as happy to puncture humbug as his contemporary H. L. Mencken, Don Marquis at his best stands among the great satirists. In 1973, more than three decades after Marquis’s death, E. B. White admitted to a correspondent that he didn’t like to see the words humorist and classic applied to Marquis and his books (perhaps because such terms were applied to himself and his own work), but also made it clear that Marquis’s best writing was here to stay:

“Archy and Mehitabel” is, to my mind, a distinguished work in American letters, and whether it is a classic or not, it doesn’t deserve the adjective “minor.” There is not a minor word in it.3

 

E. B. White protested the designation humorist because it wasn’t broad enough to contain Don Marquis. True, much of his daily writing falls into the category of “mere” humor; and, as was the case for every writer paid by the column inch to amuse, not all of it rises above flippancy. We think of humorists as comedians, deriving amusement from topics no more controversial than marital squabbles. Marquis produced plenty of this kind of humor, but he was also a satirist.

“Satire,” wrote Philip Roth, “is moral outrage transformed into comic art.”4 Different people might describe a satirist as the watchdog of society, a humorist whose wit is barbed with insight, or a danger to the state. Roth’s definition admits plays by Aristophanes in ancient Greece, political caricatures by Honoré Daumier in nineteenth-century France, and stand-up comedy by Lenny Bruce in mid-twentieth-century America. It embraces Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove, Cintra Wilson’s pop-culture criticism, and Aaron McGruder’s comic strip Boondocks.5

Literary taxonomists used to herd every satirist into one of two great phylla, Horatian or Juvenalian. The Latin poet Horace, who lived in the first century BCE, comes across in his satires as mildly amused by his fellow human beings, shaking his head in a will-they-ever-learn sort of way. More than a century later, his countryman Juvenal is distinctly not amused. His satires are born in outrage; he is as morally offended as a television evangelist. Don Marquis employs both styles, sometimes in the same poem. “A man can’t write successful satire,” wrote Mark Twain to William Dean Howells the year after Marquis was born, “unless he be in a calm judicial good humor. I don’t ever seem to be in a good enough humor with ANYthing to satirize it; no, I want to stand up before it and curse it, and foam at the mouth—or take a club and pound it to rags and pulp.”6

Don Marquis often felt the same way. For him, as for his readers, the virtue and risk in his newspaper column was that he could write as the mood struck him. Like earlier satirists such as Pope, Swift, and Voltaire, he found folly and vice depressingly common and couldn’t resist flailing them. The Archy and Mehitabel series wrestles with the signature issues of its era—unemployment, Prohibition, unionization, barriers of class and race, the growing influence of science and technology, the League of Nations, isolationism versus internationalism, the progress of World War I, and the religious yearning behind spiritualism.

To ripen toward inclusion in the world’s shared culture, however, satire must avoid the historical dead end of mere topicality. Newspaper editorials and barroom quarrels—however effectively they mock the buffoonery du jour—seldom age well. They tend to be long on complaint and short on art.