Born of a July 29, midwestern humorist, poet, novelist, playwright and newspaperman Don Marquis (1878-1937).
Hailing from Walnut, Illinois (two hours west of Chicago), Marquis's career included stints at the Atlanta Journal, The New York Evening Sun, and The New York Tribune, with later contributions to Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, Harper's, Scribner's, and Cosmopolitan. He wrote columns and short stories for these publications, which became the platform from which he developed novels, plays, and collections of poems, sketches and stories.
Marquis is best known for creating archy and mehitabel, a series of playfully philosophical verse libre interactions between a typewriting cockroach (who's a reincarnated poet) and his gal pal, an alley cat. The series of pieces launched in 1916. They were initially published in his column "The Sun Dial", and collected in books that were published in 1927, 1933 and 1935 with illustrations by George Herriman, creator of the comic strip Krazy Kat.
I first discovered these charming and romantic confections around 30 years ago and was so enraptured that I naively sought out Marquis's estate and wrote to them to see if I could get the rights for a theatrical adaptation. (This should give you a sense of how much I loved it. I literally have hundreds of my own original ideas for plays, screenplays, works of fiction and so forth, way more than I could ever turn out in ten lifetimes.). Anyway, this was before the internet, so I had no idea of the existence of Shinbone Alley, the musical adaptation co-written by Mel Brooks that saw life as a 1954 concept album, a 1957 Broadway show, and a 1970 animated movie with the voices of Eddie Bracken and Carol Channing (Eartha Kitt in the stage original -- "Cat Woman", indeed). I also had no idea (surprise, surprise) that I was hardly unique in being susceptive to this franchise's jazzy ash can charms. There is an entire cult of rabid archy and mehitabel freaks. I only learned recently that I had many good friends among them! Anyway, long story short, I got a curt and scary letter from a lawyer in response to my query warning me never to so much as whisper a line from archy and mehitabel into a hollow log in the forest, so that was that. It didn't diminish my love for archy and mehitabel, but it certainly redoubled my animus toward lawyers. It's okay; they're used to it.
Marquis' second most successful creation is The Old Soak, a drunken sot whose bete noir is temperance, and later, Prohibition. Begun as a series of columns in 1914, it was published in book form in 1921, became a hit Broadway show in 1922 (it ran for well over a year), and was made into two films, a silent one in 1926 with Jean Hersholt, and a sound one, retitled The Good Old Soak in 1937 with Wallace Beery. How I wish W.C. Fields or Thomas Mitchell had been cast!
His third most notable project is the 1916 novel The Cruise of the Jasper B, which was made into a 1926 film with Rod La Rocque, Mildred Harris, and Snitz Edwards. Marquis wrote about a dozen other books, and a few more Broadway plays, most of them shortlived (his 1932 play The Dark Hours, about the crucifixion of Jesus, sounds particularly ill-conceived, and ran about a week). He also dabbled in Hollywood a little, contribution to the screenplays of Skippy (1931), The Champ (1931), and Captain January (1936). '
Through it all, Marquis endured an incredible amount of tragedy. His son died of age 6 in 1921, his first wife passed in 1923, and then he lost his 13 year old daughter in 1931. He married his second wife Marjorie in 1926. She was the ex-wife of a cousin of Kurt Vonnegut. Through it all he sought to remain, "Toujours gai, toujours gai!"
BTW, there is a cool Don Marquis website, cooked up for the archie and mehitabel centennial back in 2016. Check it out here.
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