I know, America has made just two entirely original
contributions to the world's types of literary and dramatic art. These
are the humorous colyum and the burlesque show. The saline and robust
repartee of the burlicue is ancient enough in essence, but it is
compounded into a new and uniquely American mode, joyously flavoured
with Broadway garlic. The newspaper colyum, too, is a native product.
Whether Ben Franklin or Eugene Field invented it, it bears the image and
superscription of America.

And using the word ephemeral in its strict sense, Don Marquis is
unquestionably the cleverest of our ephemeral philosophers. This nation
suffers a good deal from lack of humour in high places: our Great
Pachyderms have all Won their Way to the Top by a Resolute Struggle. But
Don has just chuckled and gone on refusing to answer letters or fill out
Mr. Purinton's blasphemous efficiency charts or join the Poetry Society
or attend community masques. And somehow all these things seem to melt
away, and you look round the map and see Don Marquis taking up all the
scenery.... He has such an oecumenical kind of humour. It's just as true
in Brooklyn as it is in the Bronx.

He is at his best when he takes up some philosophic dilemma, or some
quaint abstraction (viz., Certainty, Predestination, Idleness,
Uxoricide, Prohibition, Compromise, or Cornutation) and sets the idea
spinning. Beginning slowly, carelessly, in a deceptive, offhand manner,
he lets the toy revolve as it will. Gradually the rotation accelerates;
faster and faster he twirls the thought (sometimes losing a few
spectators whose centripetal powers are not starch enough) until,
chuckling, he holds up the flashing, shimmering conceit, whirling at top
speed and ejaculating sparks. What is so beautiful as a rapidly
revolving idea? Marquis's mind is like a gyroscope: the faster it spins,
the steadier it is. There are laws of dynamics in colyums just as
anywhere else.

What is there in the nipping air of Galesburg, Illinois, that turns the
young sciolists of Knox College toward the rarefied ethers of
literature? S.S. McClure, John Phillips, Ralph Waldo Trine, Don
Marquis--are there other Knox men in the game, too? Marquis was studying
at Galesburg about the time of the Spanish War. He has worked on half a
dozen newspapers, and assisted Joel Chandler Harris in editing "Uncle
Remus's Magazine." But let him tell his biography in his own words:

Born July 29, 1878, at Walnut, Bure