Today, Dec. 5, 2025, is a day of celebration for members of the Don Marquis Double Scotch and Prohibition Society! Today is Repeal Day, marking the 93rd anniversary of the repeal of the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the end of Prohibition.

Don jokingly referred to the 18th Amendment as the 18th Commandment, a nod to the moral and religious fervor that brought Prohibition to our country like a scourge of locusts. The amendment was ratified in 1919 and effectively prohibited the sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages, but in doing so it created a nation of bootleggers and speakeasies. The 21st Amendment, ratified on Dec. 5, 1933, finally brought an end to the failed “Great Experiment.”

Don wasn’t the only writer to poke fun at Prohibition, but no one did it with a sharper wit than Don and his fictional friend Clem Hawley, a genial drunk who gained international fame as the Old Soak. In the opening chapter of his 1921 book “The Old Soak and Hail and Farewell,” Don introduces Clem as a forlorn champion of all that is decent, true and 80 proof:

“I see that some persons think there is still hope for a liberal interpretation of the law so that beer and light wines may be sold,” said we.

“Hope,” said he, moodily, “is a fine thing, but it don’t gurgle none when you pour it out of a bottle. Hope is all right, and so is Faith . . . but what I would like to see is a little Charity.

“As far as Hope is concerned, I’d rather have Despair combined with a case of Bourbon liquor than all the Hope in the world by itself.”

Marquis introduced the Old Soak in his Sun Dial column in 1914, when the Prohibition movement was picking up steam. His 1921 collection of Old Soak stories was followed in August 1922 with a hit Broadway comedy, “The Old Soak,” based on Clem’s boozy adventures.

The play had a corny and predictable plot — lazy, good-for-nothing husband agrees to leave home in disgrace after the family nest egg vanishes, then confronts the real villain and saves the day — but critics applauded Marquis’ deft writing. Alexander Woollcott, in The New York Times, called the play “gorgeously entertaining,” and drama critic Burns Mantle named “The Old Soak” one of the top 10 productions of the 1922-23 season.

Mantle said Clem Hawley was “representative of all the genial alcoholics, all the winning failures, all the domestic derelicts with weak characters but good hearts, who have both blessed and infested the world from the days of Bacchus to those of Volstead.”

“The Old Soak” ran for 421 performances at New York’s Plymouth Theatre before embarking on three simultaneous national tours. In 1926, Universal Pictures released “The Old Soak” as a silent movie, and in 1937 Clem reappeared in an MGM talkie, “Good Old Soak,” starring the aptly named Wallace Beery.

Today, we fondly recall the Old Soak, and Repeal Day, with a glass or three of our favorite beverage. Cheers, friends! Slainte! Prost! Salud! Na zdravie! L’chaim! Cin cin!

(The accompanying photo, by the way, is a first-ever colorized version of a photo of Don himself in the role of the Old Soak, in a 1926 summer-stock performance in Showhegan, Maine.)

It was 100 years ago, on March 20, 1916, that Don Marquis added a fanciful bit of filler material to his daily newspaper column in The Evening Sun. He claimed that a cockroach had crawled onto his typewriter the night before and left a message by diving on the keys, one at a time. Many more messages would follow from the labors of Archy the cockroach, including wild tales of a neighborhood alley cat, Mehitabel. It was brilliant stuff, and it’s still with us today. Let’s celebrate!

Plans in New York City include performances of actor Gale McNeeley’s one-man show, “Archy and Mehitabel”; a walking tour of New York’s old Newspaper Row on Sunday, March 27; and a special gathering of Marquis fans on the evening of Tuesday, March 29, at Jimmy’s No. 43, a bar/restaurant in the East Village, where tales will be told, Archy poems will be sung, and toasts will be raised to Don Marquis, Archy and Mehitabel.

Further events and exhibits will take place throughout 2016, all under the banner of archyFest! See below for event details:

GALE MCNEELEY’S ‘ARCHY AND MEHITABEL’

Gale has entertained audiences across the country with his “Archy and Mehitabel” show and is coming to New York from his home in Southern California. He will perform Sunday, March 20, at the West Hempstead Public Library on Long Island; Wednesday, March 23, at the Jericho Public Library on Long Island; Thursday, March 24, at the North Shore Public Library on Long Island;
Monday, March 28, at the New York Public Library’s Mid-Manhattan Library; and Saturday, April 2, at the Forest Hills Library in Queens.

For more information, visit Gale’s website at www.galemcneeley.com.

DON MARQUIS WALKING TOUR

Please join us for a walking tour of Don Marquis’s old haunts along New York’s Newspaper Row on Sunday, March 27. Newspaper Row includes Park Row and the area surrounding New York City Hall in Lower Manhattan. We will visit the sites of the old Sun and New York Tribune offices on Nassau Street; the building where Don created Archy and Mehitabel; the former New York Times building, where Don was a regular at the tavern in the basement; and the last home of The Sun, which is still flanked by an ancient brass clock and a thermometer bearing the Sun motto, “It Shines for All.”

The walk (very easy) starts at noon and will take about an hour, and it will end with a drink and a toast to Don at a nearby tavern. Please meet at the Benjamin Franklin statue at the intersection of Park Row and Nassau and Spruce streets. The walk will be led by John Batteiger, creator of the DonMarquis.com website and the Don Marquis page on Facebook. There is no charge for the walk, but Batteiger won’t complain if you insist on tipping him. 

Reservations are encouraged. Please send email to johnbatt@me.com.

ARCHY’S 100TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION

We have reserved the back room at Jimmy’s No. 43 on the evening of Tuesday, March 29. The address is 43 East 7th Street (downstairs), between 2nd and 3rd Avenues, down the street from McSorely’s Old Ale House. We will gather in the bar area after 8 p.m. and move into the back room at 9. 

Your host, John Batteiger, has been digging up arcane facts about Don Marquis and Archy and Mehitabel for 20 years, and he will do his best to keep his fascinating and laugh-filled anecdotes as brief as possible (no promises!). With any luck he will have laryngitis, and we can quickly move along to snippets of Gale McNeeley’s “Archy and Mehitabel” show and a selection of Archy poems and sketches performed by Kathy Biehl and Seth Sheldon, stars in the upcoming New York production of the Marx Brothers musical “I’ll Say She Is.”

Did you say “party favors”? Sure, we’ll have some! And good times, too. Please join us! There will be no cover charge for the event, but we will pass around a hat if all goes well. There is a cash bar, and Jimmy’s offers a full restaurant menu. Reservations are not required, but they are requested so we can get a ballpark head count. Send email to John Batteiger at johnbatt@me.com. When all else fails, call him at 415-515-6174.

As Mehitabel says, “Cheerio my dearios!”

Archy the cockroach has reappeared quite a few times in newspapers, magazines and blog posts in the decades after Don Marquis’s death. Check out this classic scene, drawn by the ace New Yorker cartoonist Charles Barsotti in 1973:

Barsotti was one of the most prolific and best-loved of The New Yorker’s stable of cartoonists. He drew 1,400 cartoons for The New Yorker, from the 1960s until his death in 2014, and was famous for simple line drawings of dogs and kings, outlaw snails and talking pasta. Here’s an appreciation, with lots of classic images, from the magazine’s cartoon editor.

Without comment (except to note the errant spelling of “archy”), we reprint an article that appeared in The New York Times on January 3, 1938. Don Marquis had died at his home in Forest Hills, Queens, just five days earlier.

Alfred A. Knopf today published “The Best of Archy and Mehitabel,” a new anthology of Don Marquis’ popular Archy and Mehitabel poems and sketches.

The new hardback is an abridged version of “the lives and times of archy and mehitabel,” first published in 1940 by Doubleday, Doran, Marquis’ longtime publisher. Doubleday and Knopf are both part of the Random House publishing group.

“The Best of Archy and Mehitabel”sells for $13.50 ($15.95 in Canada) and is part of the Pocket Poets series from Knopf’s Everyman’s Library imprint. The book has 256 pages, measures 4 1/8 by 6 1/4 inches, and includes George Herriman’s beloved cartoon illustrations and E.B. White’s introduction to the 1950 edition of “the lives and times of archy and mehitabel.”

“The best of Archy and Mehitabel” appears 100 years after Marquis’ first book was published. Marquis was a reporter and copy editor at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1911 when the Eagle published a history of the Brooklyn State Militia’s 14th Regiment on the 50th anniversary of its formation at the start of the Civil War. Marquis and a co-worker at the Eagle compiled the volume, which was privately printed and distributed at a reunion of regiment survivors.

Unlike other recent anthologies that contain new works — Michael Sims’ “The Annotated Archy and Mehitabel” in 2006 and Jeff Adams’ “archyology” series, published in 1996 and 1998 — “The Best of Archy and Mehitabel” is an abridgment of the 1950 edition of “the lives and times,” which itself was an abridgment of the three Archy books published during Don Marquis’ lifetime: “archy and mehitabel” (1927), “archys life of mehitabel” (1933) and “archy does his part” (1935).

The new book includes 65 sketches and poems, a third less than “the lives and times.” But even if this new book doesn’t contain every single gem from the original “archy and mehitabel,” fans will be grateful that Don’s publisher finally saw fit to set these classic poems and sketches in new type for the first time in 51 years. It gets painful to pick up a recent, reprinted paperback copy of “archy and mehitabel” and try to read through type that had degraded into inky smudges in the decades since it was last typeset in 1960.

Also notable: This new edition marks the first hardback edition of Archy material from Don’s publisher in more than 30 years.

Link

Hello world.

You’re looking at a redesigned and expanded DonMarquis.com web site, which goes live today, Tuesday, Oct. 25, 2011. The site has a fresh new look and lots of new content, including a scrolling display of aphorisms on the home page and a blog that will be updated frequently with stories from Don’s rich life and extraordinary imagination. Most of the photos and drawings added to the site are making their first appearance online; some haven’t been published in more than 100 years.

DonMarquis.com homepage, 2002-2011.

The blog is a handy vehicle for sharing some fascinating tidbits that were lost to history until now. It draws on 10 years of research incidental to my work on a full, descriptive bibliography of Don’s publishing history — an effort (still ongoing) that has taken me to research libraries across the United States and countless web pages hidden in the far corners of the Internet. But these aren’t dusty stories fit for an encyclopedia entry. They are flashes of wit and warmth and life from a clever man who, in the words of Christopher Morley, “was, in his own circle, the best loved man of his time.”

This marks the third version of this web site, which first appeared online in October 1995. Many thanks to web programmer Kai Christiansen, who designed this version and engineered its construction using open-source WordPress software.

Christopher Morley

The essayist and novelist Christopher Morley (1890-1957) was one of Don Marquis’ dearest friends. As a young writer Morley was an unabashed fan of Don’s breezy, brilliant humor, and Morley looked to him as a mentor. They became frequent lunch companions (the Three Hours for Lunch Club), fellow collaborators (“Pandora Lifts the Lid,” 1924) and lifelong boosters of each other’s works.

It’s no surprise that Morley would dedicate a poem to Marquis, but the subject matter makes the poem copied here a special treat. It first appeared in Morley’s Bowling Green column in the New York Evening Post and was reprinted in his 1920 book of light poetry, “Hide and Seek.” Enjoy.

NURSERY RHYMES FOR THE TENDER-HEARTED
By Christopher Morley
From “Hide and Seek,” 1920

Dedicated to Don Marquis

Scuttle, scuttle, little roach —
How you run when I approach:
Up above the pantry shelf,
Hastening to secrete yourself.

Most adventurous of vermin,
How I wish I could determine
How you spend your hours of ease,
Perhaps reclining on the cheese.

Cook has gone, and all is dark —
Then the kitchen is your park:
In the garbage heap that she leaves
Do you browse among the tea leaves?

How delightful to suspect
All the places you have trekked:
Does your long antenna whisk its
Gentle tip across the biscuits?

Do you linger, little soul,
Drowsing in our sugar bowl?
Or, abandonment most utter,
Shake a shimmy on the butter?

Do you chant your simple tunes
Swimming in the baby’s prunes?
Then, when dawn comes, do you slink
Homeward to the kitchen sink?

Timid roach, why be so shy?
We are brothers, thou and I.
In the midnight, like yourself,
I explore the pantry shelf!

“Don Marquis and Rosita Alvarado in a pulsing dance of Spanish blood.” — photo caption on the cover of the Los Angeles Times’ Rotogravure section, May 1, 1927.

An online search for the name “Don Marquis” can yield some surprising results.

Perhaps you’ve seen links to those strident anti-abortion essays Don wrote. And maybe you’ve been tempted to read what Don had to say on the history of jazz since, after all, he wrote that biography of jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden. But if what you wanted was new insight into the life and times of the creator of “archy and mehitabel,” you would have been mistaken.

“Disambiguation” is the term used by Wikipedia, the online reference site, to distinguish among various entries bearing the same title or keyword. And it might be useful here, near the start of this blog, to disambiguate among the several Don Marquises who have made a name for themselves in disparate endeavors.

Don Marquis is indeed an opponent of abortion rights. He is a philosophy professor and medical ethicist at the University of Kansas, and his 1989 essay “Why Abortion Is Immoral” is widely quoted by adherents.

Don Marquis is also the author of “In Search of Buddy Bolden: First Man of Jazz,” a 1978 biography of the cornet player who, in the words of Wikipedia, “is regarded by contemporaries as a key figure in the development of a New Orleans style of rag-time music which later came to be known as jazz.”

Confusing Don Marquis the columnist and humor writer with other men of the same name is nothing new. Don himself once wrote, with perhaps just a bit of exaggeration, that he had been inundated with angry letters from women in California claiming that he had promised them love and marriage and then abandoned them at the altar. In fact, at least two other Don Marquises are known to have lived in California during the 1920s and ’30s, one of them a Latin dancer in Los Angeles and the other a Stanford grad and car dealer in Oakland.

And then there is Don Marquis the director of the 1923 silent movie “Blood Test.”

Except for his name in the credits of that one movie, virtually nothing is known today about the director of “Blood Test,” itself a forgettable Western melodrama that was released in April 1923. Yet IMDb, a leading Internet movie database, has linked “Blood Test” director Marquis to the writer responsible for the 1926 silent movie “The Old Soak,” the 1937 talkie “Good Old Soak” and the 1971 animated movie “Shinbone Alley” based on the Archy and Mehitabel stories.

Other online movie databases have followed IMDb’s lead, further compounding the confusion, even though a look at Don’s life in 1922 and early 1923 makes it clear that he had no time to dabble in silent movies.

Besides writing six newspaper columns every week, Don was busy at the time shepherding his first play, “The Old Soak,” through a successful 10-month run on Broadway. The comedy opened August 22, 1922, and a few weeks later Don took a new job writing a daily column for the New York Tribune. That Tribune job was a big, big deal for Don, and he certainly wouldn’t have risked it, or the success of his play, by tackling a whole new undertaking — a silent movie, and a guns-blazing Western, at that.

(Apologies, by the way, to all you other Don Marquises whose accomplishments haven’t been acknowledged!)

Here’s a bittersweet photo from the pages of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, published January 11, 1920, showing proud papa Don Marquis and his two young children. Daughter Barbara, on Don’s knee, is just 16 months old, and Bobby, standing, is 4 years old.

The photo appeared on a feature page of the Eagle that Sunday under the headline “Brooklyn Kiddies Smile at the Camera-Man.” Among other celebrities smiling for the camera that day was former President Theodore Roosevelt, holding his Brooklyn granddaughter Edith Derby.

Don was a famous columnist by 1920, and the Eagle — where he had worked for a year before moving to the New York Evening Sun in 1911 — took pleasure in tracking his career and also his exploits as a Brooklyn resident. (More on that in a few days.)

The bittersweet aspect to this photo comes from events looming in the future. Bobby, always a sickly child, would die barely a year later, on February 15, 1921. Barbara also suffered from a frail constitution and died of pneumonia on October 24, 1931, at the age of 13.

Absent from this photo is Don’s wife and the children’s mother, Reina Marquis. Her story only adds to the impending gloom. On the evening of Dec. 2, 1923, just a few weeks after she and Don and Barbara returned from a three-month trip to Paris and London, Reina became violently ill and died within an hour from myocarditis, an inflammation of heart muscle.

Don, who would live to also see his second wife die, somehow endured these tragedies while wearing the mantle of a funny man. One can only imagine the heartache that lived inside.

How many public buildings in the United States pay homage to a lowly cockroach? Just one: the Brooklyn (N.Y.) Public Library’s Central Library at Grand Army Plaza. There, atop a majestic, 50-foot-high entryway, Don Marquis’s Archy is cast in bronze and coated in gilt, standing tall (well, as much as a cockroach can) beneath Mehitabel the cat.

Archy, who always dreamed of public acclaim yet endured a life in lowercase letters, must indeed be proud.

Archy and Mehitabel occupy one of fifteen panels that make a massive screen above the library’s front doors. Cockroach and cat are in the the top row, front and center, near other famous characters from America’s literary past such as Tom Sawyer, Rip Van Winkle, Moby Dick and Poe’s raven.

Brooklyn was proud to call itself home to Marquis during his most creative years. He lived there, with only a brief interruption, from 1910 to 1921, before moving his family to Forest Hills in nearby Queens (and later Manhattan). Marquis died three years before the Central Library opened in February 1941, but he was still fondly remembered and “archy and mehitabel” was still selling strong — and would continue to for another 20 years.

The bronze screen was designed by sculptor Thomas Hudson Jones and the massive pylons on either side by Carl Paul Jennewin. The Central Library, shaped to look like an open book, was designed by the architectural firm Githens & Keally and built of Indiana limestone in the Modern Classical style.

For more on the Central Library and a full description of all 15 panels in the bronze screen, visit the Brooklyn Public Library’s web site at www.brooklynpubliclibrary.org/central.

(Credits: Accompanying photos were found on Flickr.com and used according to their Creative Commons licenses. Wally Gobetz shot the photos of the Central Library entryway and the cropped close-up of Archy and Mehitabel’s panel. Thanks!)