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(More customer reviews)We are indebted to John Hammond Moore for compiling and editing this fine collection of reportage, editorials, and one-liners written by the now obscure Robert Quillen (1887-1948), who, beginning in the 1920s, was for more than twenty years "one of the leading purveyors of village nostalgia" (xi) from his home in Fountain Inn, South Carolina.
Quillen was born in Kansas, and briefly worked in both the Northeast and the Pacific Northwest before creating the Fountain Inn Tribune in 1911. By 1932 his work was being syndicated in more than four hundred newspapers.
Quillen the adoptive southerner was a facile writer. But he was not especially profound or consistent in his political, economic, and racial views. (Moore advises that some of Quillen's words "may shock or dismay the modern reader.") Not surprisingly as well, some of Quillen's humor--especially pieces using colloquialisms of the early twentieth century--seem dated seventy-five years later.
Nevertheless, there are many fine paragraphs in this anthology, well-constructed pieces that can take their place with the best American journalistic writing. I was especially moved by Quillen's obituaries.
Those interested in the history of the early twentieth-century South would also do well to peruse this book. Without even considering the gaping racial divide, Quillen's work emphasizes how different was the Fountain Inn of his era from exurb of today. Quillen constantly alludes to passages in the King James Version. He suggests that landowners provide vegetables to their tenants so that they won't get pellagra. He urges that prisoners not be tortured but taught to read. He warns that driving unlighted wagons or "flivvers" at night is against the law and might be fatal. He prefers tax cuts to paved streets and public education. In all, a book well worth reading by historians, journalists, and local history buffs.
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