misrepresent him, and hang some albatross round his neck that will be
offensive to him forever. You may say that he hails from Brooklyn
Heights when the fact is that he left there two years ago and now lives
in Port Washington. You may even (for instance) call him stout....

Don Marquis was born in 1878; reckoning by tens, '88, '98, '08--well,
call it forty. He is burly, ruddy, gray-haired, and fond of corncob
pipes, dark beer, and sausages. He looks a careful blend of Falstaff and
Napoleon III. He has conducted the Sun Dial in the New York _Evening
Sun_ since 1912. He stands out as one of the most penetrating satirists
and resonant scoffers at folderol that this continent nourishes. He is
far more than a colyumist: he is a poet--a kind of Meredithian
Prometheus chained to the roar and clank of a Hoe press. He is a
novelist of Stocktonian gifts, although unfortunately for us he writes
the first half of a novel easier than the second. And I think that in
his secret heart and at the bottom of the old haircloth round-top trunk
he is a dramatist.

He good-naturedly deprecates that people praise "Archy the Vers Libre
Cockroach" and clamour for more; while "Hermione," a careful and cutting
satire on the follies of pseudokultur near the Dewey Arch, elicits only
"a mild, mild smile." As he puts it:

A chair broke down in the midst of a Bernard Shaw comedy the other
evening. Everybody laughed. They had been laughing before from time
to time. That was because it was a Shaw comedy. But when the chair
broke they roared. We don't blame them for roaring, but it makes us
sad.

The purveyor of intellectual highbrow wit and humour pours his soul