WELCOME TO DONMARQUIS.COM, an online omnibus with biographical bits and bibliographic notes, rare photos and illustrations, and the largest online collection of the writings of Don Marquis. The links below will help you navigate the miscellany on this page.

FIRST, A FEW FACTS about the writer and his works:

Don’s surname is pronounced MAR-kwiss, not Mar-KEE. Don himself said it’s so.

Archy the cockroach wrote his name in lowercase letters because he couldn’t maneuver the shift bar of Don’s typewriter. But Archy was no e.e. cummings and he clearly preferred to see his name in capital letters. Don always used capital letters when writing about Archy in the third person (third cockroach?).

“archy and mehitabel” has never gone out of print since the book first appeared in 1927. Doubleday printed hardback editions through the early 1980s, and paperbacks since 1960 — in all, more that 70 printings in the United States, plus two dozen more in England. “archy and mehitabel” has also been translated into Italian and German.

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“GOD’S GRANDFATHER”: This is a friendly, engaging farce that Don never quite finished writing. His alma mater, Knox College, has a half-dozen manuscript versions of this story, which suggest that Don started it as a short story for one of the popular magazines of that era. Instead, he reworked it several times, intending it as the opening chapter of an autobiography that he never completed. This version incorporates Don’s handwritten changes to several copies of the manuscript. Its online publication here — on July 29, 2003, to celebrate the 125th anniversary of Don’s birth — marks its first published appearance.

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DON’S BAKED BEANS: A comic theme running through Don’s 1927 book “The Almost Perfect State” is his avowed distaste for beans. “The ancient Egyptians lived largely on lentils; and where are the Pharaohs now?” he asks at the start of the book, and he proceeds to blame all the world’s ills on the deleterious effects of the “accursed” bean. “There will be no beans in the Almost Perfect State,” he flatly declares, but at the end of the book he finally reveals the joke: “If you will eat beans, here is the way to prepare them.” He then delivers, in narrative form, a glorious, laborious recipe for country-style baked beans made with generous helpings of salt pork, molasses, onions and mustard. Jim Ennes reports that at a 1978 party in Port Townsend, Wash., marking the 100th anniverary of Don’s birth, several dozen fans were treated to a dinner featuring baked beans prepared just as Don instructed. (The party also marked the publication of “Everything’s Jake,” an almost-forgotten play written by Don that ran briefly on Broadway in 1930. Joining Jim at that dinner were Robert Lyon, the party’s host and publisher of “Everything’s Jake”; William McCollum Jr., editor of “Selected Letters of Don Marquis”; and Frank Herbert, author of the “Dune” trilogy.)

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CHECKLIST OF BOOKS: Here is the only current and complete checklist of books by Don Marquis — 46 titles ecompassing 100 years, from 1911 to 2011.

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FURTHER READING, a select bibliography:

O Rare Don Marquis by Edward Anthony (Doubleday and Co., 1962): The definitive biography, written by a Marquis contemporary whose efforts preserved hundreds of anecdotes and reminiscencs by Marquis friends and coworkers. It’s an affectionate and enjoyable read.

Selected Letters of Don Marquis by William McCollum Jr. (Northwoods Press, 1982 ): Hundreds of letters to dozens of friends and acquaintances — Christopher Morley, George Middleton, Fola LaFollette, Hugh Walpole, Franklin Pierce Adams and more. Some of Don’s most inspired writing was in the letters he dashed off to complete strangers.

Don Marquis by Lynn Lee (Twayne Publishers, a division of G.K. Hall and Co., 1981, part of the Twayne’s United States Authors Series): A critical analysis of Marquis’ books and his place in American literature.

The Dictionary of Literary Biography delivers concise but masterful profiles of Marquis in two separate but complementary entries — volumes 11 (humorists) and 25 (journalists), written by Dan Jaffe and Sam G. Riley, respectively. The exhaustive DLB reference series is available at most public and academic libraries.

Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, another reference work available at larger libraries, has excerpts from dozens of contemporary reviews of Marquis’ books in volume 7.

The American Humorist: Conscience of the Twentieth Century by Norris W. Yates (Citadel Press, 1965): A chapter on Marquis summarizes his life and work and confirms his places among major American humorists. Note his closing comment on Don: “He could be skeptic as well as dreamer, philosopher as well as vagabond, rebel as well as Rotarian — and above all, a somber humorist with a crooked smile.”

H.L. Mencken and the Debunkers by Edward A. Martin (University of Georgia Press, 1984): A chapter on Marquis examines his work as a “debunker” of the “inflated rhetoric and postures by which twntieth-century culture valued itself.”

“Archy and Uncle Remus: Don Marquis’s Debt to Joel Chandler Harris” by Hamlin L. Hill (article in the Georgia Review, Spring 1961).

“Day In and Day Out: Adams, Morley, Marquis, and Broun: Manhattan Wits” by Carl Van Doren, (article in the Century magazine, December 1923).

“A Successor to Mark Twain” by Christopher Morley (article in Michigan Alumnus: Quarterly Review, July 24, 1937).

“Confessions of a Reformed Columnist” by Don Marquis (two-part article in the Saturday Evening Post, Dec. 22 and Dec. 29, 1928).

“Archy From Abdera” by Christopher Morley (Bowling Green column in the Saturday Review, May 15, 1937, pp. 10-11).

“O Rare Don Marquis” by Christopher Morley (Bowling Green column in the Saturday Review, January 8, 1938, pp. 13-4).

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LOOKING FOR MORE on Don Marquis, his works and his contemporaries? Here are some Web sites worth exploring:

JIM ENNES’ DON MARQUIS PAGE: This companion site to DonMarquis.com holds Jim’s many pages of Marquisiana, including his Don Marquis Bookstore for readers interested in buying and selling books one-on-one.

RANDOM HOUSE: Doubleday, Don Marquis’ longtime publisher, is now a part of the Random House publishing group, Its Web site has a page with ordering information for the current paperback version of “archy and mehitabel” — still in print after 83 years!

U. PRESS OF NEW ENGLAND (i): Here’s a page at the University Press of New England’s Web site with publication data and ordering information for “archyology,” the 1996 collection of Archy and Mehitabel sketches rescued and selected by Jeff Adams.

U. PRESS OF NEW ENGLAND (ii): This second link to the University Press of New England has publication data and ordering information for “archyology ii (the final dig),” Jeff Adams’ second collection of Archy and Mehitabel sketches (1998).

“ARCHY & MEHITABEL,” THE MUSICAL: A version of the 1957 Broadway musical “Shinbone Alley” is available for local theater productions. This link has performance information from Music Theater International, a licensing agency.

ONLINE BOOKS PAGE: This University of Pennsylvania site links to thousands of books that are free and readable over the Internet. Type marquis, don in the author search line for links to four of Don’s books.

PROJECT GUTENBERG: Project Gutenberg is the Internet’s oldest producer of free electronic books. Jim Ennes has been working with the Gutenberg Project for several years to publish online copies of several of Don’s full-length books that are in the public domain. (Volunteer typists are needed to keep this project alive!)

WILLIAM MCCOLLUM COLLECTION: Here’s a complete inventory of William McCollum’s collection of Marquis letters and ephemera at Lehigh University. McCollum published the monthly Don Marquis Newsletter in 1980-82 and then took on the daunting task of gathering, editing and publishing an invaluable resource, “Selected Letters of Don Marquis,” shortly before his death in a plane crash.

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DONMARQUIS.COM combines the online efforts of Jim Ennes and John Batteiger. Jim created the Internet’s first Don Marquis page in early 1995, and John posted an Archy and Mehitabel page a few months later, in October. DonMarquis.com went online May 10, 2002, with a major expansion (including a new blog) on October 24, 2011. And we’re still not finished tinkering with it.

Jim Ennes is a Marquis namesake. His full name is James Marquis Ennes Jr., and he traces it back to Walnut, Illinois, where his grandparents were neighbors of Don Marquis’ parents in the late 1800s. Don’s father was Dr. James Marquis, the town’s doctor, and Jim Ennes’ father was given that name out of friendship and respect. Jim lives near Seattle.

John Batteiger discovered “archy and mehitabel” in high school and never forgot those short stories of lowercase genius. He read other books by Marquis as he pursued his own career as a newspaper reporter and editor, and he chose a handful of Archy sketches to fill out his first, rudimentary Web page. John lives in San Francisco.

Permission to reproduce information from this site is granted for noncommercial purposes, but a reference or link to the site would be appreciated. This is a private, not-for-profit endeavor, and this Web site is made available in the spirit of the early Internet, when sharing information was more important than charging an access fee.

(Curious about the logo at the top of this page? It’s a modified version of a Marquis column logo that appeared in Collier’s magazine in 1926. Marquis wrote a weekly column for Collier’s for a year after he left the New York Herald Tribune in 1925. The illustration used in the Maxims and Light Verse logo on this Web site, by the way, was taken from Marquis’ 1919 book “Prefaces.”)

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THIS WEB SITE IS DEDICATED TO CURT ROCHA , 1961-2004

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