Donald Robert Perry Marquis (1878-1937) was a celebrated newspaper columnist in New York from 1912 to 1926. He also wrote 27 books, five plays and hundreds of poems and short stories during a life of public acclaim and personal tragedies, including the untimely deaths of his two children and two wives. Today he is remembered for his stories of Archy and Mehitabel -- an indomitable cockroach and a toujors-gai alley cat -- but in his lifetime he was perhaps best know for the Old Soak, an unrepentent souse during the dry days of Prohibition. The Old Soak was the title character of two books, a top Broadway play in 1922-23, and a silent movie in 1926 and a "talkie" in 1937. Marquis' newspaper columns also gave life to Hermione, a Greenwich Village dilletante, and more than a dozen other characters who chronicled the tumultuous events and fashions of their time.

Marquis was one of the most quoted writers in Manhattan in the 1920s, when New York's literary scene was approaching its zenith. His newspaper contemporaries were Christopher Morley, Heywood Broun and the legendary F.P.A., Franklin Pierce Adams, but only Adams challenged Marquis for the heart and soul of New Yorkers of that era. The great writers who came soon afterward -- Robert Benchly, Dorothy Parker, James Thurber -- considered Marquis a New York icon.

But Don Marquis, the consummate New Yorker, was from the Midwest. He was born July 29, 1878, in Walnut, a small town in rural northwest Illinois, and he worked at odd jobs -- drug-store clerk, chicken plucker, sewing machine salesman, railroad section hand and schoolteacher -- before trying his hand at writing and editing (and printing!) small-town newspapers. When the local Republican Party became alarmed at his Democrat-leaning editorials, Marquis accepted a patronage job far, far away -- at the Census Bureau in Washington, D.C., where he later landed part-time work at the Washington Times.

From Washington, Marquis moved to newspapers in Philadelphia and then to Atlanta, Georgia, where he worked at the Atlanta News and then the Journal. There, Marquis found a friend, drinking buddy and soulmate in the sportswriter Grantland Rice, also destined for greatness. In 1907 Marquis took a job as associate editor on Joel Chandler Harris' Uncle Remus's Magazine, where he further developed his story-telling skills. It was while working for Harris that Marquis fell in love with a frequent contributor to the magazine, Reina Melcher. They married in 1909 and soon afterward moved to New York, as Don tried to break into the big leagues of newspapers. After a few false starts he landed a job writing editorials for The Evening Sun, and by 1912 he parlayed his gift for sharp analysis, clever sketches and light poetry into a daily column, The Sun Dial. He was 34 and just coming into his own.