"When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: 'Whose?'" -- Don Marquis
Donald Robert Perry Marquis (, ; born July 29, 1878, in Walnut, Illinois — died December 29, 1937, in New York City) was an American humorist, journalist and author. He was variously a novelist, poet, newspaper columnist and playwright. He is remembered best for creating the characters "Archy" and "Mehitabel", supposed authors of humorous verse.
"A demagogue is a person with whom we disagree as to which gang should mismanage the country.""A hypocrite is a person who - but who isn't?""A pessimist is a person who has had to listen to too many optimists.""A sequel is an admission that you've been reduced to imitating yourself.""Age is not a particularly interesting subject. Anyone can get old. All you have to do is live long enough.""An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it.""An idea isn't responsible for the people who believe in it.""An optimist is a guy that has never had much experience.""Blood will tell, but often it tells too much.""Bores bore each other too; but it never seems to teach them anything.""By the time a bartender knows what drink a man will have before he orders, there is little else about him worth knowing.""Did you ever notice that when a politician does get an idea he usually gets it all wrong.""Every cloud has its silver lining but it is sometimes a little difficult to get it to the mint.""Fate often puts all the material for happiness and prosperity into a man's hands just to see how miserable he can make himself with them.""Fishing is a delusion entirely surrounded by liars in old clothes.""Happiness is the interval between periods of unhappiness.""Honesty is a good thing, but it is not profitable to its possessor unless it is kept under control.""I have often noticed that ancestors never boast of the descendants who boast of ancestors. I would rather start a family than finish one. Blood will tell, but often it tells too much.""I would rather start a family than finish one.""Ideas pull the trigger, but instinct loads the gun.""If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves.""In all systems of theology the devil figures as a male person. Yes, it is women who keep the church going.""In order to influence a child, one must be careful not to be that child's parent or grandparent.""It takes all sorts of people to make the underworld.""Man cannot be uplifted; he must be seduced into virtue.""Middle age is the time when a man is always thinking that in a week or two he will feel as good as ever.""Of middle age the best that can be said is that a middle-aged person has likely learned how to have a little fun in spite of his troubles.""One of the most important things to remember about infant care is: don't change diapers in midstream.""Ours is a world where people don't know what they want and are willing to go through hell to get it.""Pity the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.""Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.""Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.""Prohibition makes you want to cry into your beer and denies you the beer to cry into.""Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.""Punctuality is one of the cardinal business virtues: always insist on it in your subordinates.""Some persons are likeable in spite of their unswerving integrity.""Successful people are the ones who think up things for the rest of the world to keep busy at.""The art of newspaper paragraphing is to stroke a platitude until it purrs like an epigram.""The chief obstacle to the progress of the human race is the human race.""The trouble with the public is that there is too much of it; what we need in public is less quantity and more quality.""There is luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel no one else has a right to blame us.""There is nothing so habit-forming as money.""We pay for the mistakes of our ancestors, and it seems only fair that they should leave us the money to pay with.""Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo."
Marquis grew up in Walnut, Illinois. His brother David died in 1892 at the age of 20; his father James died in 1897. After graduating from Walnut High School in 1894, he attended Knox Academy, a now-defunct preparatory program run by Knox College, in 1896, but left after three months. From 1902 to 1907 he served on the editorial board of the Atlanta Journal where he wrote many editorials during the heated election between his publisher Hoke Smith and future Pulitzer Prize winner, Clark Howell (Smith was the victor).
During 1909, Marquis married Reina Melcher, with whom he had a son, Robert (1915-1921) and a daughter, Barbara (1918-1931). Reina died on December 2, 1923. Three years later he married the actress Marjorie Potts Vonnegut. She died in her sleep on October 25, 1936. Marquis died of a stroke after having suffered three earlier strokes that partly disabled him.
On August 23, 1943, the United States Navy christened a Liberty ship, the USS Don Marquis , in his memory.
Marquis began work for the newspaper The Evening Sun during 1912 and edited for the next eleven years a daily column "The Sun Dial.". During 1922 he left The Evening Sun (shortened to The Sun in 1920) for the New York Tribune (renamed the New York Herald Tribune in 1924), where his daily column, "The Tower" (later "The Lantern") was a great success. He regularly contributed columns and short stories to the Saturday Evening Post, Collier's and American magazines and also appeared in Harper's, Scribners, Golden Book, and Cosmopolitan.
Marquis's best-known creation was Archy, a fictional cockroach (developed as a character during 1916) who had been a free-verse poet in a previous life, and who supposedly left poems on Marquis's typewriter by jumping on the keys. Archy usually typed only lower-case letters, without punctuation, because he could not operate the shift key. His supposed writings were a type of social satire, and were used by Marquis as a newspaper column named "archy and mehitabel" (Archy's best friend was a fictional alley cat named Mehitabel). Other characters developed by Marquis included Pete the Pup, Clarence the ghost, and an egomaniacal toad named Warty Bliggins.
Marquis was the author of about 35 books. He co-wrote (or contributed posthumously) to the films The Sports Pages, Shinbone Alley, The Good Old Soak and Skippy. The 1926 film The Cruise of the Jasper B was supposedly based on his 1916 novel of the same name, although the plots have little in common.
1916: Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers (sketches)
1919: Prefaces (essays)
1921: The Old Soak and Hail and Farewell (sketches) Dramatized 1921, 1926, 1937.
1921: Carter and Other People (short stories)
1921: Noah an' Jonah an' Cap'n John Smith (poems, sketches)
1922: Poems and Portraits (poems)
1922: Sonnets to a Red-Haired Lady and Famous Love Affairs (poems)
1922: The Revolt of the Oyster (short stories)
1924: The Dark Hours (play) This story of the trial, passion and crucifixion of Jesus had its professional premiere on 14 March 1932 at the Maryland Theatre in Baltimore, Maryland. Bretaigne Windust directed the University Players with a cast of more than 50, which included Joshua Logan as Caiaphas, Charles Crane Leatherbee as Pilate, Henry Fonda as Peter, and Kent Smith as Jesus. The play subsequently opened on Broadway on 14 November 1932 and ran 8 performances. See, Houghton, Norris. But Not Forgotten: The Adventure of the University Players, New York, William Sloane Associates: 1951, pp. 285-6.
1924: Pandora Lifts the Lid (novel)
1924: Words and Thoughts (play)
1924: The Awakening (poems)
1927: Out of the Sea (play)
1927: The Almost Perfect State (essays)
1927: archy and mehitabel (poems, sketches)
1928: Love Sonnets of a Cave Man (poems)
1928: When the Turtles Sing (short stories)
1929: A Variety of People (short stories)
1930: Off the Arm (novel)
1933: archys life of mehitabel (poems, sketches)
1934: Master of the Revels (play)
1934: Chapters for the Orthodox (short stories)
1935: archy does his part (poems, sketches)
1936: Sun Dial Time (short stories)
1939: Sons of the Puritans (novel)
1940: the lives and times of archy and mehitabel (omnibus)
1946: The Best of Don Marquis (omnibus)
1978: Everything's Jake (play)
1982: Selected Letters of Don Marquis (letters) Edited by William McCollum Jr.
1996: archyology (poems, sketches) Edited by Jeff Adams.
1998: archyology ii (poems, sketches) Edited by Jeff Adams.
2006: The Annotated Archy and Mehitabel (poems, sketches) Edited by Michael Sims.