A New York Sun columnist, Don Marquis, invented the character of Archy, a poetry-writing cockroach, in 1916.
Don Marquis (1878–1937) was the “Sun Dial” columnist for the evening edition of The New York Sun when he invented the characters Archy and Mehitabel in 1916. It was as peculiar and wonderful a conceit as an American newspaper writer ever attempted, since Archy is a poetry-writing cockroach, while Mehitabel is an alley cat who claims she was Cleopatra in a previous life. And for two decades, Marquis’s columns would regularly feature communications from the cockroach.
The problem Archy faced was that he could write only by throwing himself at the keys of Marquis’s typewriter at night, when the office was empty. That made it impossible for the poor cockroach to use capitalization (until, in a later poem called “CAPITALS AT LAST,” Archy discovered the shift-lock key). The limited punctuation in the notes and poems came from the exhaustion of throwing himself at the keys, as Archy tried to limit his battering.
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