Author Marquis Don

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 (IX-215), 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.