at Play, were honored at the Governor's Writers Day Awards (now the Washington State Book Awards), and the latter was a national bestseller. He was also a contributing writer for The New Yorker and other publications. Death Espy died aged 88 at New York Hospital in Manhattan on February 20, 1999. He is interred in a family plot in Oysterville Cemetery. His second wife Louise, a native of New York, died in November 2011, and was interred beside him. Legacy The Espy Foundation was established in 1998; the non-profit foundation, based out of Espy's home in Oysterville, Washington, served as a retreat space for artists and writers in the Pacific Northwest. In December 2010, the foundation officially closed. Espy's light verse has been compared to that of Lewis Carroll, W. S. Gilbert, Ogden Nash and Cole Porter. Bibliography The Game of Words (1971) Oysterville: Roads to Grandpa's Village (1976) The Game of Words (1972) Omak Me Yours Tonight, or, Ilwaco million miles for one of your smiles: A Ballard of Washington State (1973) An Almanac of Words at Play (1975) The Life and Works of Mr. Anonymous (1977) O Thou Improper, Thou Uncommon Noun (1978) Say it My Way: How to avoid certain pitfalls of spoken English together with a decidedly informal history of how our language rose (or fell) (1980) Another Almanac of Words at Play (1981) The Wars of the Words (1980) A Children's Almanac of Words at Play (1982) Have A Word on Me: A Celebration of Language (1984) Espygrams: Anagram Verse (1982) Word Puzzles: Anagrams from America's Favorite Logophile (1983) The Garden of Eloquence: A Rhetorical Bestiary (1983) Espygrams II: 80 New Anagram Verses (1984) Words to Rhyme With (1986) The Word's Gotten Out (1989) Skullduggery on Shoalwater Bay (1998) The Best of An Almanac of Words at Play (1999) References Works cited External links Willard Richardson Espy at WorldCat American book editors American humorists American male novelists American people of Scotch-Irish descent American philologists American male poets 1910 births 1999 deaths Reader's Digest The Atlantic (magazine) people Punch (magazine) people The Nation (U.S. magazine) people Writers from Olympia, Washington University of Redlands alumni 20th-century American poets People from Pacific County, Washington 20th-century American novelists 20th-century American male writers 20th-century philologists