Quentin Reynolds

Who was Quentin Reynolds?

Quentin James Reynolds was a journalist and World War II war correspondent. He was a member of Delta Tau Delta International Fraternity.

As associate editor at Collier's Weekly from 1933 to 1945, Reynolds averaged twenty articles a year. He also published twenty-five books, including The Wounded Don’t Cry, London Diary, Dress Rehearsal, and Courtroom, a biography of lawyer Samuel Leibowitz. He also published an autobiography, By Quentin Reynolds.

After World War II, Reynolds was best known for his libel suit against right-wing Hearst columnist Westbrook Pegler, who called him "yellow" and an "absentee war correspondent". Reynolds, represented by noted attorney Louis Nizer, won $175,001, at the time the largest libel judgment ever. The trial was later made into a Broadway play, A Case of Libel, which was twice adapted as TV movies.

In 1953, Reynolds was the victim of a major literary hoax when he published The Man Who Wouldn’t Talk, the supposedly true story of a Canadian war hero, George Dupre, who claimed to have been captured and tortured by German soldiers. When the hoax was exposed, Bennett Cerf, of Random House, Reynolds's publisher, reclassified the book as fiction.