Dorothy Quick

Born in Brooklyn in 1896, Dorothy Quick was an American novelist and poet. As a child she met Mark Twain aboard the SS Minnetonka in 1907, and that encounter became one of the defining stories of her life; later accounts say he encouraged her writing and stayed in touch with her.

Quick went on to publish across several genres, including science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, and poetry. She is often remembered both for her own fiction and for the unusual place she holds in literary history: a writer whose career connected early 20th-century popular magazines with an intimate, first-hand memory of Twain.

She died in 1962. Readers still return to her work for its mix of imagination, period charm, and literary curiosity, and for the autobiographical writing that preserved her memories of Twain for later generations.