he died, used a column to advertise his interest in adopting a baby boy ("must be between three and twelve months of age"), and built himself a faux Greek temple as a work space—which he never used. Facile with words, Quillen took inconsistent political, economic, and racial positions; but he was "not afraid to bare his soul, express personal views, and even vent scorn and anger." For instance, he hated patent medicine, people who put on airs, late night noises (both human and natural), and the cats and jays that killed his beloved song birds. Although a shy man who refused to speak in public, he became something of a "one-man welfare and relief agency for the poor and needy of Fountain Inn." Meanwhile, Quillen engaged in a "never ending struggle" to make the Fountain Inn Tribune pay its own way. With fewer than a thousand subscribers, the newspaper itself was probably never profitable, but Quillen used the ideas generated in Fountain Inn as the basis for pieces that appeared in scores of leading national magazines and newspapers. Twice, frustrated with the time it took to run the weekly, he sold the paper (notoriously in 1926 for one dollar) and twice bought it back. In 1929, Quillen called the Tribune "my hobby—my substitute for golf." Syndicated journalist By 1932 his work, which included editorials, paragraphs, cartoons, and one-liners, was regularly appearing in four hundred newspapers in the United States, Canada, England, and the Far East. Quillen wrote for such major periodicals such as the Baltimore Sun, the Saturday Evening Post, and The American Magazine, and he "took the greatest pride" in one-liners picked up by Literary Digest. According to a biographer, he was known as the best "paragrapher" of his day. With the assistance of Chicago newspaper executive Eugene P. Conley (co-founder of the Publishers Syndicate), Quillen also syndicated two single-panel cartoons (drawn by John H. Striebel), Aunt Het and Willie Willis — the latter of which was translated into Dutch as Pimmie Pimmel. As early as 1924, Quillen's income from syndicated material alone was probably more than $25,000 — easily ten times that amount in early 21st-century dollars. Well into his forties, Quillen hoped to become a great novelist. Macmillan published his two novels, One Man's Religion (1923) and The Path Wharton Found (1924). The first was "little more than a loose collection of pieces first published in the