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Don(ald) (Robert Perry) Marquis |
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In any selection of important American humor columnists, Don Marquis deserves a place in the front row. Mainly remembered today for his characters archy the cockroach and mehitabel the cat, Marquis was also remarkable for his ability to intertwine the humorous and the melancholy, and for two other denizens of his imagination: Prohibition-era tippler Clem Hawley (the Old Soak) and Hermione, the air-headed New York dilettante, both of which are largely forgotten today but were household names in the 1920s and 1930s.
At age forty-seven Marquis left newspaper journalism to devote his time to a mixture of humorous and serious book writing--poetry, short stories, novels, and plays. Though most of his thirty-two books are out of print, and though his fame has faded badly, most of his work as a humorist was deftly done and is worth resurrecting. It was, in the words of E. B. White, "full of sad beauty, bawdy adventure, political wisdom, and wild surmise; full of pain and pity, full of exact and inspired writing."
He was born--during a solar eclipse--Donald Robert Perry Marquis (pronounced Markwis), the son of James Stewart Marquis, a country doctor in Walnut, Illinois, and Virginia Whitmore Marquis.
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