She is a dame who has seen better days, indeed better centuries, since she is a reincarnation of Cleopatra, she says. Now she consorts with roaches. Thus Don Marquis (July 29, 1878 to December 29, 1937) critiqued the pretensions of American popular culture.
Don Marquis in his early career:
After brief stints as a reporter in Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia,...moved to Atlanta in 1902 and worked at the Atlanta News and the Atlanta Journal before taking a job with Joel Chandler Harris in 1907 as associate editor of the new Uncle Remus’s Magazine. The magazine gave him nationwide exposure and also introduced him to his first wife, Reina Melcher, a freelance writer and budding novelist.
In New York, in his "Sun Dial" column for The Evening Sun, he created memorable characters, and some not so, such as "Aunt Prudence Hecklebury, an unrelenting prude". Marquis, like Mencken, thought that their problems were due to a prevalent attitude of Puritanism.
Don Marquis wrote "five Broadway plays, dozens of books, and hundreds of poems and short stories....[Although] he was bitterly disappointed with earlier movies based on two of his most successful books, “The Old Soak” and “The Cruise of the Jasper B.”
But we will never forget Mehitabel. Her sidekick, Archy, too had a hacking wit. From John Batteiger's website for Marquis from which we got most of our material, we are reminded of Archy's words:
If cremation became universal, some of us would lose our one chance of owning real estate.
No comments:
Post a Comment