AMERICAN LITERARY ANECDOTES <i> by Robert Hendrickson (Penguin: $12.99).</i>

Hendrickson has compiled 1,200 stories, quotes and bon mots about American authors, many of them humorous. Don Marquis, the creator of Archie and Mehitabel, compared publishing a book of poetry in America to “dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.” However, it’s interesting to note that the greatest authors don’t necessarily generate the most copy--Hendrickson devotes more space to Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott than to Theodore Driesser, John Steinbeck or Upton Sinclair, although Parker once said, “There’s a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit: Wit has truth to it, wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.”