Youth and Early Career
Quillen was born in Syracuse, Kansas, near the Colorado border, and was reared in Overbrook, Kansas, a hamlet south of Topeka, where his father, J. D. Quillen, published the local newspaper. Robert early learned to set type and as a teenager sold pen-and-ink drawings and published a monthly magazine. In 1904, shortly before his seventeenth birthday, Quillen joined the U.S. Army under an assumed name (swearing he was 21), but by mid-1905, he had been released from military service. He then spent a few months working for newspapers in the northeastern United States where he had been discharged.
In 1906, he answered an ad seeking an editor for a weekly that a publisher hoped to establish in Fountain Inn, South Carolina. Although after his first encounter he remained in Fountain Inn only three months, Quillen there met and married Donnie Cox, a milliner, five years his senior. He moved on to Americus, Georgia and then took his new bride to Washington State, where Quillen joined forces with his father and worked at publishing newspapers and magazines in Winlock, Anacortes, and Port Orchard. Quillen later wrote that he had gone "busted" in the West.
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