in more familiar terms, no one can adequately know how dreadful the World War was who does not at the same time adequately know how absurd it was, how ridiculous, what an inexhaustible subject for the laughter of gods and men. In Don Marquis the tragi-comic spirit is very strong. He respects gods because he knows fools so well, so intimately; indeed, he knows them so affectionately that, as he suggests somewhere, he will be found fighting on their side "against the millennium" till the Judgment Day.
But it is time we had a little more definite information about the author of this notable religious drama.
Don Marquis is a typical New Yorker—that is to say, he was born in Walnut, Bureau County, Ill.—some sixty miles southwest of F. P. A., and three years earlier. Where and when he was educated I do not know. The book with which he seems to be most familiar is the Bible. Next to that, I should say the most obvious influences traceable in his prose and poetical styles and in the form of his humor are Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer," the various yarns of Frank Stockton, O. Henry, perhaps H. C. Bunner, the poems of Swinburne, Kipling and Arnold, and an extensive study of prosody.
His first published book, "Danny's Own Story," 1912, is a picturesque narrative with an earthy Mid-Western flavor, Illinoisian, and much in the vein of Huck Finn, whose domain lies in the same rich humor belt, to the south. This is the soft drawling tune of it:
