Donald Robert Perry Marquis was born at Walnut, Bureau County, Illinois, July 29, 1878. Since his boyhood he has been actively connected with various newspapers, his chief metropolitan success being due to his pungent column, “The Sun Dial” in the New York Evening Sun.

Many of Marquis’s most penetrating and satiric skits have been collected in his prose volumes, Hermione (1916) and Prefaces (1919). Besides his burlesque verse, Marquis has written a quantity of serious poetry, the best of which he published in Dreams and Dust (1915).