Robert Quillen
Robert Quillen, newspaper editor, syndicated columnist, and creator of “Aunt Het” and “Willie Willis” single-panel cartoons, was born in Syracuse, Kansas in 1887. In 1906, he answered an ad for editor of a weekly newspaper in Fountain Inn, SC; he didn’t stay but three months that first time, but married a Fountain Inn girl. He returned in 1910 when his brother-in-law offered him the editorship of a weekly advertising sheet that eventually became The Fountain Inn Tribune.
Quillen published two novels, One Man’s Religion (1923), largely a collection of pieces he’d written for The Saturday Evening Post, and The Path Wharton Found (1924). Both, he once said, were “fortunately out of print.”
His editorials, paragraphs, cartoons, and one-liners were syndicated in more than four hundred newspapers in the US, Canada, and the Far East. He wrote pieces for The Baltimore Sun, The Saturday Evening Post, Literary Digest, and Colliers and often published peoples’ obituaries before they died. He was the prototype for the role Will Rogers created in Life Begins at Forty. In a piece written after he’d visited with Quillen, Alexander Woollcott called him “The Sage of Fountain Inn.” His friends in town knew him by his tall-crown Stetson hat, his bathrobe, the memorial he erected to Eve, and the writing pad he was never without. Quillen died on December 9, 1948 in Asheville, North Carolina.
In 2008, USC Press published a volume of Quillen’s writings edited by John Hammond Moore. Titled The Voice of Small-Town America: The Selected Writings of Robert Quillen, 1920-1948, the book is still print. In 2009, Quillen was named to the South Carolina Press Association Hall of Fame.
Quillen published two novels, One Man’s Religion (1923), largely a collection of pieces he’d written for The Saturday Evening Post, and The Path Wharton Found (1924). Both, he once said, were “fortunately out of print.”
His editorials, paragraphs, cartoons, and one-liners were syndicated in more than four hundred newspapers in the US, Canada, and the Far East. He wrote pieces for The Baltimore Sun, The Saturday Evening Post, Literary Digest, and Colliers and often published peoples’ obituaries before they died. He was the prototype for the role Will Rogers created in Life Begins at Forty. In a piece written after he’d visited with Quillen, Alexander Woollcott called him “The Sage of Fountain Inn.” His friends in town knew him by his tall-crown Stetson hat, his bathrobe, the memorial he erected to Eve, and the writing pad he was never without. Quillen died on December 9, 1948 in Asheville, North Carolina.
In 2008, USC Press published a volume of Quillen’s writings edited by John Hammond Moore. Titled The Voice of Small-Town America: The Selected Writings of Robert Quillen, 1920-1948, the book is still print. In 2009, Quillen was named to the South Carolina Press Association Hall of Fame.
