Gotta love Archy and Mehitabel. My dad introduced me to them when I was a kid.
This off a website:
Archy on Don Marquis: In Marquis' third collection of stories, "archy does his part," Archy describes his boss' worktable -- an untidy desk littered with scraps of food and poetry. Marquis, after all, valued his poetry far above his more-mundane output. His publisher, Doubleday & Doran, printed several editions of Marquis' serious poetry, but they never sold nearly as well as his stories about Archy and Mehitabel or about the Old Soak, another comic character who gained wide acclaim. Read the author s desk.
Shakespeare revisited: Several years ago I received a blunt e-mail nessage from a reader who asked incredulously why "pete the parrot and shakespeare" was not among the Archy poems on my Web site. It clearly was Marquis' greatest poem, he wrote, and my site was pitiable without it. He was right, of course; Marquis' tongue-in-cheek tale of a sad, workaday playwright is funny -- and revealing. Marquis was writing about Shakespeare but talking about himself.
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