Background

Quentin James Reynolds was born on April 11, 1902 in Bronx, New York, the son of James J. Reynolds, a public school principal, and Katherine Mahoney. The Reynoldses soon moved to Brooklyn, where Quentin grew up in comfortable middle-class surroundings. His mother introduced him to the theater, his father took him to sporting events, and he discovered the delights of vaudeville on his own.

Education

Following graduation from Manual Training High School in 1919 and a brief stint as a merchant seaman, he enrolled at Brown University. He was an outstanding athlete at Brown, participating in football, boxing, and swimming. After receiving his Ph. B. in 1924, he drifted from job to job, including a season of professional football and a short tenure as a night school instructor. Largely at his father's urging, Reynolds began attending evening classes at Brooklyn Law School in 1928. But by the time he received his LL. B. in 1931, he had already decided upon a journalism career.

Career

He was a reporter, rewrite man, and eventually a sports columnist for the New York Evening World. When that paper merged with the Telegram, he was hired in early 1931 as a sportswriter for the newly formed New York World-Telegram, but within a few months he was again looking for work, the victim of an economy drive. With assistance from Heywood Broun and Damon Runyon, he then obtained a job with the International News Service (INS).

By early 1933 Reynolds was the INS feature writer in Berlin, where he developed a strong dislike for the Third Reich. When his article on German youth under international socialism resulted in a job offer from Collier's, Reynolds returned to New York. Reynolds settled easily into a routine at Collier's. A remarkably prolific writer who admitted that he knew the agonies of advanced literary creativity "only by hearsay, " he contributed 384 articles and short stories to the magazine in fifteen years.

He wrote about everything from race horses to rhumba dances, and about everyone from Joe Louis to Fulgencio Batista. Much of what he produced during the 1930's, he later recalled, was "easy to read - easy to forget. " But he consoled himself with the fact that he was well paid and thus able to have "an awfully good time. " A burly redhead, who stood over six feet and weighed about 250 pounds, Reynolds was hearty, hard-drinking, gregarious, and a big spender who became a conspicuous man-about-tables at such New York night spots as the Stork Club, Club 21, and El Morocco.

In March 1940 Collier's sent Reynolds to cover the war in Europe. Denied accreditation to the German army because of his writings of 1933, he went to France just in time to report on the French collapse and surrender. Retreating to England, Reynolds quickly came to admire the spirit of the British people under fire.

His eyewitness accounts of the Battle of Britain were filled with stories of people unconquered and undiscouraged. The Wounded Don't Cry (1941) - the first of seven books he wrote during the war - was based on his articles for Collier's. It became a best seller.

Reynolds' radio broadcasts for the British Broadcasting Company, his narrations for two famous British film documentaries - London Can Take It (1940), and Christmas Under Fire (1941) - and several successful lecture tours in the United States, also helped establish his reputation as one of America's leading war correspondents.

World War II was the big story of Reynolds' career, and he told it in vivid and dramatic language. Whether aboard a destroyer supporting the raid on Dieppe, or on fighting fronts in North Africa, Italy, or the southwest Pacific, he repeatedly risked his life to cover the combat.

His bravery under fire won him the admiration of leaders such as Dwight D. Eisenhower and Winston Churchill. Although Reynolds continued to write at his usual prolific pace after the war - producing on the average a book a year for the next two decades - he got more publicity for his involvements in a major literary hoax and a celebrated libel trial.

DeWitt Wallace, publisher of Reader's Digest, asked Reynolds in 1952 to prepare a work on George DuPre, a Canadian who claimed to have served as a British secret agent in France and Germany during the war. Working with what his detractors charged was a typical disdain for in-depth research, Reynolds hurriedly produced a book based largely on interviews with DuPre. The Man Who Wouldn't Talk (1953) appeared in condensed form in the November 1953 Reader's Digest. Within weeks, however, DuPre was exposed as an impostor and an embarrassed Reynolds had to concede that he had been duped.

In 1949, Hearst columnist Westbrook Pegler lambasted Reynolds' war record, calling the writer "yellow" and describing him as "an absentee war correspondent" lacking in "guts. " Reynolds responded by hiring the noted lawyer Louis Nizer and suing Pegler and the Hearst papers for libel. Nearly five years later, a Federal jury in New York awarded Reynolds $175, 001, reportedly the largest libel judgment ever made to date in this country. Nizer's description of the suit in his My Life in Court (1961) was the basis for Henry Denker's Broadway play, A Case of Libel (1963). After being striken by abdominal cancer in Manila, where he had gone to prepare a biography of Philippine President Diosdado Macapagal, Reynolds died at Travis Air Force Base in California.

Achievements

• Quentin Reynolds has been listed as a notable editor, author by Marquis Who's Who.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Winston Churchill (World landmark books)

    (Biography of this great man's "finest hour" during the tr...)

  • The Amazing Mr. Doolittle: A Biography of Lieutenant General James H. Doolittle (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from The Amazing Mr. Doolittle: A Biography of Li...)

  • Minister of death: the Adolf Eichmann story

    (Biography/Nazism. A very nice vintage collector's item. N...)

  • The F.B.I
  • Courtroom

Connections

On March 30, 1942, he married Virginia Peine, an actress. They had no children and were divorced in 1960.

Father:

James J. Reynolds

Mother:

Katherine Mahoney

Spouse:

Virginia Peine