Mehitabel
Book 1916 · Archy and Mehitabel (Don Marquis)
Streetwise alley cat with grand opinions about her past lives, narrated by a typewriter-using cockroach who can only press one key at a time.
Mehitabel debuted on 29 March 1916 in Don Marquis's daily column "The Sun Dial" in the New York Evening Sun — the conceit being that a cockroach named Archy, formerly a free-verse poet in human form, types nightly entries by hurling himself onto the typewriter keys (no shift, no caps). Mehitabel is his alley-cat friend who insists she was Cleopatra in a former life and signs everything "toujours gai." The columns were collected in archy and mehitabel (1927) and three sequels through 1935. The 1957 musical Shinbone Alley adapted the material, with Eddie Bracken as Archy and Carol Channing as Mehitabel — the route by which most modern readers encounter her.
0 words. Sources: see /methodology.
Tags
alley-cat
fictional
don-marquis
newspaper-column
free-verse
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