Editing Archy and Mehitabel (section)

==History==
Marquis introduced Archy into his daily newspaper column at New York's [[The Sun (New York)|''Evening Sun'']].  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 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 jump on one key at a time, laboriously typing out stories of the daily challenges and travails of a cockroach.  Archy's best friend was Mehitabel, an [[feral cat|alley cat]], who thought of herself as a reincarnated [[Cleopatra]] and one of [[Tutankhamun|"King Tut-ankh-amen's]] favorite queens." The two of them shared a series of day-to-day adventures that made [[satire|satiric]] commentary on daily life in the city during the 1910s and 1920s.

Due to his small size, Archy was unable to operate the [[shift key]] on the typewriter and thus wrote his stories entirely in lowercase, with no punctuation. When Marquis wrote in his own persona, though, he 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."

There was at least one point in which Archy happened to jump onto the [[shift lock]] key—a chapter titled "CAPITALS AT LAST".

Pete the Pup is another of Marquis' characters.<ref>{{cite news |last1=Fowler |first1=Christopher |title=Invisible Ink: No 142—Don Marquis |url=https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/invisible-ink-no-142-don-marquis-8165767.html |accessdate=10 December 2019 |work=The Independent |date=23 September 2012 |archive-date=10 December 2019 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20191210155110/https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/invisible-ink-no-142-don-marquis-8165767.html |url-status=live }}</ref> Pete is a [[Boston Terrier]] with a passion for life and devotion to his "master". Like Marquis' other animal characters, Pete types his poetry at night on the author's typewriter (seldom capitalizing or using punctuation). Unlike many of the other characters' contributions, Pete writes about his uncomplicated life without strong political or social references.