Archy and mehitabel

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The correct title of this article is archy and mehitabel. The initial letter is shown capitalized due to technical restrictions.

archy and mehitabel is the title of a series of newspaper columns written by Don Marquis beginning in 1916. Written as fictional social commentary and intended as a space-filler to allow Marquis to meet the challenge of writing a daily newspaper column six days a week, archy and mehitabel is Marquis' most famous work. Collections of these stories are still sold in print today.

In 1916, Marquis introduced a fictional cockroach named "Archy" into his daily newspaper column at the New York Tribune. Archy (whose name was always written in lower case in the book titles, but was upper case when Marquis would write about him in narrative form) was a cockroach who had been a free-verse poet in a previous life, and he took to writing stories and poems on an old typewriter at the newspaper office when everyone in the building had left. Archy would climb up onto the typewriter and hurl himself at the keys, laboriously typing out stories of the daily challenges and travails of a cockroach. Archy's best friend was an alley cat named "Mehitabel," and the two of them shared a series of day-to-day adventures that made satiric commentary on daily life in the city during the 1910's and 20's.

Because he was a cockroach, Archy was unable to operate the shift key on the typewriter (he jumped on each key to type; since using shift requires two keys to be pressed simultaneously, he physically could not use capitals), and so all of his verse was written without capitalization or punctuation. (Writing in his own persona, though, Marquis always used correct capitalization and punctuation. As E. B. White wrote in his introduction to "The Lives and Times of Archy and Mehitabel," it would be incorrect to conclude that, "because Don Marquis's cockroach was incapable of operating the shift key of a typewriter, nobody else could operate it.")

Collections of the "archy" stories have been published and re-printed numerous times over the years. The published editions of these stories were originally illustrated by George Herriman, the creator and illustrator of Krazy Kat. Titles in the series include:

archy and mehitabel (1927)
archys life of mehitabel (1933)
archy does his part (1935)
the lives and times of archy and mehitabel (1940)
archyology (1996)
archyology ii (1998)
The Annotated Archy and Mehitabel (2006)

"Archyology" and "archyology ii" were compiled and published for the first time in the late 1990s. "The Annotated Archy and Mehitabel" was released in July of 2006 with critical editing provided by Michael Sims.

[edit] Play and Film

A short-lived 1957 Broadway musical based on the columns was titled Shinbone Alley and starred Eddie Bracken as archy and Eartha Kitt as mehitabel.

In 1971 an animated film based on the stage adaptation, also called Shinbone Alley [1], was released. Directed by John Wilson, it was not a commercial success.