The Lives and Times of Archy and Mehitabel

Don Marquis (1878–1937) was a journalist and columnist in New York City and the author of several novels, short-story collections, and plays. 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. 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.