Talk:Richard Armour

So sad he seldom got his due!

What a drag, to publish brilliant doggerel like those catsup and mustard poems, only to have Ogden Nash so often be credited by posterity!

By the way, as the final journalist to interview the ailing [from Parkinson's Disease] Armour--for the Los Angeles Times, at his condo in Claremont, California on Thursday, January 21, 1988--I can report first-hand that he didn't sound the least bit bitter regarding his work being so often misattributed to Nash, whom he not surprisingly personally knew.

What struck me most about Armour, aside from his remarkable career, of course, was that even at that advanced age, how much effort he still devoted to revising his work; while his living room, where we conducted our chat, displayed only minimal evidence of his work, his and his wife's bedroom was filled to the gills with stacks of books and papers, many of which he explained, he was still working on, revising and improving bits of verse published decades ago. What an inspiration for a hack writer such as myself!

And here's one of my favorite Armour pieces, the one in fact with which I concluded my L.A. Times piece, regarding President Zachary Taylor, the second sitting American president to die of natural causes:

After sixteen months in office/A short while indeed/His term hadn't expired/But he'd.

BRYAN STYBLE/Florida - — Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.99.21.110 (talk • contribs) 23:07, 3 July 2013‎

Notability

I'll leave fleshing out the article to those whose field this is, but addressing notability-- Given that Armour was a household name and best-selling author in the mid-20th-century, I think he is as notable in his way as his more recent British equivalent Terry Deary in the field of parody history, and the best-known American practitioner of the genre. Or, to put it a little differently, he is at least as notable as the now-forgotten mid-20th-century talk-show host, quiz-show writer, and professional skeptic Bergen Evans, who has a nice little Wikipedia article. My local public library carries a few dozen of Armour's titles. Of the three major local universities, each carries a half dozen. Wintermaiden (talk) 23:05, 3 March 2018 (UTC)

Bibliography

I have commenced a tidy-up of the Bibliography section using cite templates for books and articles, as well as tables for organising short stories, poems and/or book reviews. Capitalization and punctuation follow standard cataloguing rules in AACR2 and RDA, as much as Wikipedia templates allow it. ISBNs and other persistent identifiers, where available, are commented out, but still available for reference. This is a work in progress; feel free to continue. Sunwin1960 (talk) 06:25, 9 January 2022 (UTC)