With his unconventional rhyming schemes, he was declared by The New York Times to be the country's best-known producer of humorous poetry.

[10] His family lived briefly in Savannah, Georgia, in a carriage house owned by Juliette Gordon Low, the founder of the Girl Scouts of the USA.

After graduating from St. George's School in Newport County, Rhode Island, Nash entered Harvard University in 1920, only to drop out a year later.

For example, one verse, titled "Common Sense", asks: Why did the Lord give us agility, If not to evade responsibility?

Nash was the lyricist for the 1943 Broadway musical One Touch of Venus and collaborated with the librettist S. J. Perelman and the composer Kurt Weill.

Nash and his love of the Baltimore Colts were featured in the December 13, 1968, issue of Life magazine,[15] with several poems about the American football team matched to full-page pictures.

Featured on the magazine cover is the defensive player Dennis Gaubatz, number 53, in midair pursuit with this description: "That is he, looming 10 feet tall or taller above the Steelers' signal caller ...

Nash was best known for surprising, pun-like rhymes, sometimes with words deliberately misspelled for comic effect, as in his retort to Dorothy Parker's humorous dictum, "Men seldom make passes / At girls who wear glasses": A girl who's bespectacled May not get her nectacled In this example, the word "nectacled" sounds like the phrase "neck tickled" when rhymed with the previous line.

Sometimes the words rhyme by mispronunciation rather than misspelling, as in: Farewell, farewell, you old rhinoceros, I'll stare at something less prepoceros Another typical example of rhyming by combining words occurs in "The Adventures of Isabel", when Isabel confronts a witch who threatens to turn her into a toad: She showed no rage and she showed no rancor, But she turned the witch into milk, and drank her.

Nash often wrote in an exaggerated verse form, with pairs of lines that rhyme, but are of dissimilar length and irregular meter: Once there was a man named Mr. Palliser and he asked his wife, May I be a gourmet?

[18] Published in Sport magazine in January 1949, the poem pays tribute to highly respected baseball players and to his own fandom, in alphabetical order.

Nash wrote humorous poems for each movement of the Camille Saint-Saëns orchestral suite The Carnival of the Animals, which are sometimes recited when the work is performed.

[29][30] Nash died at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins Hospital on May 19, 1971, of Crohn's Disease,[31][32] aggravated by a lactobacillus infection transmitted by improperly prepared coleslaw.

Directed by Martin Charnin, the show featured Steve Elmore, Bill Gerber, E. G. Marshall, Richie Schechtman, and Virginia Vestoff.

[35] The US Postal Service released a postage stamp featuring Ogden Nash and text from six of his poems on the centennial of his birth on August 19, 2002.

[36][37] The first issue ceremony took place in Baltimore on August 19 at the home that he and his wife Frances shared with his parents on 4300 Rugby Road, where he did most of his writing.

A biography, Ogden Nash: the Life and Work of America's Laureate of Light Verse, was written by Douglas M. Parker and published in 2005. with a paperback edition issued in 2007.